The Taylor Swift enterprise amplifies transparency and also prizes privacy — you know everything about her, and yet you don’t know her at all. For more than a decade, this has been the tug-of-war central to the singer and songwriter’s art and her public image, but recently, her self-protection instincts have been thawing a bit.
In the “Reputation” era, Swift lashed out with a force befitting someone who had been severely wounded. Then she spoke up — in court — about being groped by a radio D.J. Special editions of her next album, “Lover,” a return to her old strengths, were packaged with a collection of her teenage diaries. And now comes the documentary “Miss Americana,” directed by Lana Wilson, the most extended look behind the scenes of what makes Swift tick day to day.
The New York Times’s two resident Swifties — the pop music critic Jon Caramanica and the pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli — closely watched “Miss Americana,” which arrived on Netflix Friday, and shared their feelings.
JON CARAMANICA The only place to start is with the inadequacy of men.
Time and again in “Miss Americana,” you see Taylor Swift in conversation with men, or working with them, and you’re left to wonder, what exactly are these guys doing? When she arrives at the studio to work on a song, she already has the bulk of it done. You see flickers of the contributions of Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, her two most accomplished collaborators, but Joel Little, who wrote and produced on four songs on “Lover,” is mostly shown, well, agreeing. The singer Brendon Urie, in the studio to contribute vocals to “Me!,” basically just giggles and follows orders, thrilled to be there.
The other notable moment of male obstruction/lack of verve comes when Swift is going public with her political views, supporting Phil Bredesen, who was running for one of Tennessee’s seats in the U.S. Senate in 2018. (He lost to Marsha Blackburn.) The men in the room — her manager and her father among them — try to stop her. One of them invokes Bob Hope as an example of cross-aisle comity. It’s clear they’re failing, in many senses.
One of the goals of “Miss Americana” is to render Swift as human-scaled, which makes the imbalance of these encounters even more disorienting. And the editing in these scenes is brutal — when the shot switches from Swift to one of these men, it’s like the sun disappearing behind a cloud.
JOE COSCARELLI Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, who died in 1977! These are literally the (dead, white, male) celebrities that the suits in Swift’s camp are seen comparing her to, complete with the warning that she could halve ticket sales by alienating Republicans. For everyone who griped online for years about Swift’s steadfast political silence, here, on full display, is the why. (In this scene, we watch her cry and push back simultaneously.)
But of course, this being Taylor Swift, one of the savviest chess-playing pop stars who’s ever lived, we’re left to parse not how much of what we’re watching is real — I never got the sense that anything in this film was staged more than any other documentary about a camera-trained performer — but what aspects of it are selective spin. Is this a film full of vérité explanations or carefully edited excuses?
So much of the Swift conversation for more than a decade now, from your earliest reviews, Jon, to the 2011 profile in The New Yorker and so on, has been about how in control she was — of her music, her narrative, her business empire. “Miss Americana” does present her in relation to the men in her life as the idea factory and the chief executive.
The fact that her team, outside of her mother and publicist, remain just a smattering of mostly middle-age faces — even her father is hardly shown and barely identified, while her boyfriend, the actor Joe Alwyn, is obscured behind the camera or a black cap — leaves the onus for her decisions pretty firmly on her. But the antagonist of the film is a formidable opponent, even for someone as world-beating as Swift: the patriarchy.
CARAMANICA There are a few reasons for a pop star to make a vanity documentary about themselves (and trust, this is one of many that the streaming content wars will birth in the coming years) — to advertise oneself, to correct a public (mis)perception, to squeeze cash out of all available corporate partners while the getting is still good. (Swift herself describes this time period, in a different context, as “while society is still tolerating me being successful.”)
“Miss Americana” isn’t exactly any of those things, which makes it both more interesting and more confusing. Notionally, it follows Swift over the past two years as she comes into her own politically, and begins to pivot away from the vindictiveness of the “Reputation” era back toward the more familiar modes she deployed on “Lover.” But it also flashes back to earlier traumas — it’s not sure whether it’s trying to be an origin story, or a ride-along. Or maybe it’s an origin story of Taylor 2.0.
COSCARELLI 3.0? 4.1!?
CARAMANICA I do like that Wilson also has a light sense of humor about her subject. From an adult’s perspective, an overly precocious child is always funny, and there are plenty of early Swift videos sprinkled throughout. It’s Wilson who lets the camera linger on those inadequate men. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she’s unsympathetic to Swift, but I like that she’s clearly viewing from the outside.
COSCARELLI The question of who had final cut on the film was rattling around in my brain the whole time I was watching, and after. I’ve ultimately decided “Miss Americana” is more than pop propaganda, but as with many things Swift, there’s a lot of surface-level symbolism you can read into here, such as the decision to go with Wilson, whose previous film, “After Tiller,” is about the endangered doctors who perform third-trimester abortions. That’s a hell of a choice for a movie that turns on a feminist awakening of sorts.
CARAMANICA And another indication of Swift’s newfound self-confidence, and self-awareness. “Miss Americana” repeatedly shows Swift coming to realize things about herself that others have known for quite some time. Her self-described need to be the “good girl,” and the ways that has hindered her personal development, emerges as the real antagonist. (Shaped in part by patriarchy, of course.) It underpins everything, from how she responded to the Kanye West quarrels to how she struggled with an eating disorder. Even the pacing of her stage walk, which Wilson slightly cuttingly shows in multiple contexts, seems like the work of someone hoping not to offend.
As for the spin, we know that nothing in the Swift universe is fully unscripted, but by being transparent about her various awakenings, the film displays her newfound willingness to bring her private sentiment, popular perception and public-facing presentation all into alignment. Or more specifically, to accept that even though you can’t control what’s said about you, you might actually be able to learn something from it.
COSCARELLI The other thing the film drove home for me was the extent of Swift’s isolation. It was surprising that the movie completely elided the Squad era, when Swift surrounded herself with other famous women and publicized those relationships hard, only to be told she was doing feminism wrong. There were a lot of ways to tie that period to the journey we see in this film, whether as a reaction to the earlier “she’s boy crazy” backlash or linking her relationships with supermodels to the eating disorder that she reveals here (but also, in typical Swift fashion, teased in the “Lover” diary entries).
Instead, we see Swift as basically friendless, leaning only on her mother, her cats, her invisible boyfriend and a throwback dinner with the “redhead named Abigail,” her high school bestie, where they do the (highly relatable) “did you hear so-and-so had a baby” bit.
You see this fame bubble in a lot of films of this nature — the Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber documentaries come to mind — but I think there’s an underexplored link between the loneliness that comes with uber-stardom and the subsequent decisions of an artistic, personal and public relations nature that these celebrities make, sometimes to the bafflement of their audiences. Whether intentional or not, I thought “Miss Americana” was effective, often between the lines, for people who have frequently wondered “What was Taylor Swift thinking?” at various junctures in recent years, from her choice of radio singles to her public statements on certain controversies.
CARAMANICA But it’s not as if Swift has no link to the outside world — as you’ve reported, she has an intense connection with her superfans, especially on Tumblr. It’s a fun house take on reality, but it indicates that she still feeds on the texture of real people. The Squad era? That was some kind of public performance piece. I’m glad it’s not touched on too deeply here.
I was surprised that the film alludes to her mother’s cancer diagnosis, but then disappointed that it wasn’t explored more deeply. And it all but ignores Swift’s romantic life — no surprise there — apart from a few glimpses of her longtime boyfriend (who is never even named!). Mostly, “Miss Americana” shows her as someone who, when she gets disoriented, simply gets back to work.
COSCARELLI Is it possible that Alwyn is leading a double-life as the pop producer Joel Little, and that’s why we’re not allowed to take a closer look at either? That would explain some of those production choices.
For me, outside of what will forever be known (to us) as The Bob Hope Scene, the most effective moment in “Miss Americana” was the lo-fi (cellphone?) video of Swift finding out in 2018 that “Reputation” was not nominated in the top categories at the Grammy Awards.
CARAMANICA That felt like a horror movie.
COSCARELLI A found-footage one! She’s visibly wounded, coming across as not only ruthlessly competitive and invested in public approval, but also fired up by the perceived slight. Swift has always functioned best as an artist when she feels like an underdog, and obviously that’s a feeling she’s been chasing, sometimes to her detriment, since at least “1989.”
But our editor Caryn Ganz raised a great point after we saw the film: Was this scene supposed to be a setup for a redemptive arc? “Miss Americana” was released right after the 2020 Grammys, when Swift could have conceivably won album of the year for “Lover.” And yet she was snubbed again in the nominations, perhaps forcing the film’s final act in a different direction.
Still, if continued disrespect from the Grammys is what it takes to keep Swift motivated, that’s not a horrible outcome. It feels almost inevitable that she’ll be back on that stage accepting her third album of the year trophy at some point, whether that’s in two years or 20. And probably, if I had to guess (fingers crossed), with a female producer.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
