Just as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, fans of Taylor Swift will heed the call for new content. Long before the economy-lifting, paradigm-shifting global domination of her Eras Tour, Swift had cultivated a uniquely intense and personal relationship with her fans, even within the reverential world of pop music. That relationship, sustained through Easter eggs, years long parasocial narratives and arguably her own metaverse, can be real and special and nutritive, a steady raft through life’s storms – I’ve been there. But years into her imperial era, Swift’s cyclical feeding of the fan base has started to seem less like an act of mutual devotion and more nakedly exploitative, the many one-off re-releases and special vinyls and limited-edition Target drops like a billionaire’s tax on her most loyal.
The latest of these is the Life of a Showgirl movie – or, more accurately, a “launch event” film for her new album The Life of a Showgirl, out this Friday. Officially billed as the Official Release Party of a Showgirl, it’s a collection of song explainers, behind-the-scenes snippets and one music video (played twice!), unceremoniously packaged into one 90-minute sitting. It’s the type of stuff any other artist would put on YouTube, but which Swift, having already asserted box office domination with her Eras Tour concert movie, has decided to put into theaters from 3-5 October. With a projected $30m opening in the US, it will almost certainly be the highest-grossing film of the weekend – which is a shame, given that it barely qualifies as a visual aid to the album, let alone one worthy of note in her vast universe of content.
As a cinema experience, The Official Release Party of a Showgirl at least mirrors the album it celebrates – rote, tinnily light, with the lazy execution and first-draft quality of someone up against a deadline. Further evidence of what critic Spencer Kornhaber has termed Swift’s burnout era. In a low-fi intro filmed direct to camera, Swift, humbly awkward and self-deprecating as ever, bills the cinematic event as “sort of a journey of what inspired these songs” representing an “electrifying, exhilarating time”.
But save for a behind-the-scenes featurette on the Fate of Ophelia music video spliced into 5-minute sections, the event is predominantly videos that spell out the lyrics for each track over a snippet from said music video shoot on loop. That’s fine for background viewing at a party, but an issue as the main event for an album that is best absorbed from a distance, its tepid soft-rock and hall-of-fame cringe lyrics allowed to wash over you in one unread flush. Perhaps one needs to be drunk; aside from one holler for the astoundingly un-self-aware Cancelled!, it was crickets at my sober, child-friendly 3pm screening.
Swift accompanies each track with a short explanation of her thought process – always welcome, not even a hater can claim it’s uninteresting – though they basically amount to generalizations, professed enthusiasm and covering her bases (yes, she got permission from the George Michael estate to interpolate Father Figure). Swift has always played coy about songs whose targets are glaringly obvious, but the vagueness here feels especially disingenuous. There is no mention of the album’s muse, her fiance Travis Kelce, though she has been uncharacteristically forthcoming about their domestic bliss in promotional interviews this week. The much-discussed and wildly miscalculated Charli xcx diss in Actually Romantic gets described as “a love letter to someone who hates you”. (Somehow, a biting “attention is affection and you’ve given me a whole lot of it”, makes it worse.) The lusty, pun-heavy Wood, starring [redacted]’s “redwood tree”, is billed as “a song about superstitions” with one child-proof, suggestive look to the camera.
Swift somehow remains adept at suggesting relatability from the highest perch in pop music; she’s a chatty and compelling narrator, if an unreliable one on her own music. (This is not the album of bangers so advertised on New Heights.) That especially shines in work mode; the film’s best moments, by far, are when she cedes space to her many collaborators – Mandy Moore, the choreographer, and Rodrigo Prieto, the cinematographer, among others – and to the taut metronome of a music video shoot. These peeks behind the curtain – a clip of Swift on a Zoom call, jokes with her dancers, refining a take – are as fascinating as they are brief and tantalizing. They glimpse both the community and the machinery behind Taylor Swift industries, the real grist behind showgirl life.
Perhaps assembling more, in a way both strategic and revealing, was an order too tall for Swift’s punishing schedule of diminishing returns. And perhaps diehard fans of the album – I know there are some – will find something in this bare minimum collection of Target treats worthwhile. But topping the box office with so little doesn’t make for a pop victory. It makes for another lucrative product in her empire.
Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl is out in cinemas now
