Taylor Swift’s invasion of the movie-box-office charts is another step in the banalization of moviegoing. Her three-hour concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is not a cultural advance like Richard Lester’s 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, which gave aesthetic validation to Beatlemania. It’s the opposite: a demonstration of our era’s lost aesthetic standards and submission to mob madness, analogous to what’s occurred with politicized regime media. Fans’ artistic immaturity is being exploited as surely as illegal border-crossers are labeled “asylum seekers.” Swifties seek asylum from their emotional insecurities in her hideously samey, self-absorbed songs.
The Eras Tour is the most calamitous movie event since Barbie. It’s in the mode of post-Madonna, post-Obama mind control. The Taylor Swift industry would like us to believe that the world is not crumbling and that Swift’s prominence comes from her being a great artist. Yet girls who don’t know Jane Austen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, or Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” fall for Swift’s narcissistic display.
It prevents them from realizing their desperation — the loneliness at the scary heart of Kardashian peer pressure and FOMO. I last saw this media peculiarity when middle-aged female journalists latched onto the Spice Girls as feminist trailblazers. What’s maddening about the T-Swizzle fad is how corporate media promote it without question.
Identifying with Swift confirms the flush of media approval, but adult moviegoers cannot accept The Eras Tour, with its unsubtle reference to the Equal Rights Amendment and the singer’s liberal-progressive misandrist agenda. The Swift circus doesn’t replace the thrill of originality and profundity that accompanied the advent of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, which Gen Z knows nothing about. Instead, Swift specializes in degraded girl-pop — teenage solipsism, the silliness that kids will ideally outgrow. Yet her songs corrupt puppy love into jejune sophistication — what Joni Mitchell, in “Hejira,” termed “the petty wars / that shell-shock love away.”
British director Sam Wrench — a rock-video pro, having done concert films for Billie Eilish, Luke Bryan, Lizzo, and The Weeknd — transcribes the 20-city Eras tour. But he’s no Leni Riefenstahl able to turn the event into an impressive aesthetic spectacle (even though he collapses favorite angles from three shows at the Los Angeles SoFi Arena). The Eras Tour is not even as impressive as U2 3D, a superior follow-up to the group’s Rattle and Hum, Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave, or Jonathan Demme’s Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense. Even racist Spike Lee called the latter “the greatest concert movie ever made,” meaning better than Richard Pryor Live in Concert and Prince’s Sign o’ the Times. That’s how easily Millennial hype forces consensus.
There’s an undeniable political aspect to the media’s celebration of The Eras Tour’s nearly $100 million opening-weekend box-office gross. It’s equivalent to Obamamania (Swift being an avowed leftist). The Los Angeles Times headlined its Swift story “A Masterclass in Pop Ambition.” Variety compared The Eras Tour to Citizen Kane, and The Hollywood Reporter turned flack: “One of the most successful musicians of all time”–which beats the heck out of Michael Jackson’s own “King of Pop” self-promotion. Swift has Fake News media doing it for her.
If feminism has indeed had “a nervous breakdown,” as Tammy Bruce, a former NOW president, has said, then Swift represents its infantilization — a symptom of generational naïveté and mental illness and bad taste. In the history of female pop stars, Taylor Swift is the least impressive artistically. All her songs — fast tempo or slow — strike the same petulant, egotistical note. Her fandom aligns with the media manipulation we see in politics, when the press encourages constituents to deny the evidence of their senses — which ought to sensibly resist Swift’s utter physical blandness. She doesn’t wear clothes well despite the show’s many costume changes, and during “Tolerate It,” the Citizen Kane moment, she vamps to drab effect. Plus, she’s not a good actress. Remember: Cats was a resounding flop, and Swift’s performance in Amsterdam only got a rise out of viewers when David O. Russell offed her.
Demagogues are not always easily dismissed. Madonna was also a media favorite during the ’80s and ’90s, but she at least had catchy tunes, as did Lady Gaga with her infernal hits. Swift’s big-screen self-display catches the youth of the Great Reset at their most gullible.
It’s tragic that the media perpetuate Swift’s insensitivity and tastelessness. Parents should be concerned about Swift grooming their kids into cynicism and selfishness. The teens in TikTok clips who pitifully bounce and sing along with the film’s pre-recorded concert are the flip side of those nerds and sociopaths who lined up for The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colo. Boomer parents may want to let them have their fun — same as toying with matches and playing in the traffic. But here’s a frightening fact of the Swifties pheenom: These kids seem ready for a leader, anxious for totalitarianism. It will take a counterrevolution to repair Swift’s moral, aesthetic, and political damage.