Midway upon the journey of my life, I found myself at a Taylor Swift concert. Well, not at a Taylor Swift concert in the most literal of senses. I went to go see Eras Tour film, a nearly three-hour capturing of the still-ongoing global tour headlined by arguably the most famous pop singer in the world. The film is already an enormous success, grossing over $100 million worldwide in its first weekend. That is the kind of phenomenon that anyone invested in culture just cannot ignore. And so, I braved the screaming masses on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn.
What was initially most surprising about the event was how young my fellow moviegoers were. I had expected teenagers, clad in friendship bracelets and other costumery, all worked up in that uniquely adolescent way. Instead, the kids in the audience were mostly around 9 or 10 years old, which is to say over twenty years younger than the object of their obsession. It feels somewhat rare that an adult in their mid 30s has managed to capture the feverish attention of people so far removed from her own generational cohort.
That is testament to the totalizing power of Taylor Swift, whose reach extends from 50-year-olds to people born basically ten minutes ago. With her confessional songwriting and habit of sending codes and teases and clues to her fans, Swift has made parasocial intimacy broadly accessible. She is always speaking directly to any individual fan, be they ahead of Swift’s life experience or years away from it.
It was strange, though, to watch Eras alongside these children, as Swift delivered song after song about failed romance. Some songs are defiant, others sad, others playful. Still, in traveling through her whole catalog, as she does in Eras, Swift presents a fraught and sorry picture of love and dating. I’ve no doubt that it has been a bumpy road for Swift. But one does start to wonder what sort of message her youngest fans are receiving in aggregate, as they process all of these tales of woe and betrayal and callousness. Just what will these kids be expecting when they themselves start dating?
Whatever the impact of Swift’s work, Eras is a grand showcase for her signature musicianship, her insistent and perhaps unique ability to tell stories specific enough to be enticing but general enough to be inspiring. Swift is also canny salesperson, peddling vicarious experience at top dollar. Eras marks a new career apex, a picture of the Swift machine in full and awesome motion.
Crisply filmed and edited, Eras is an effective immersion into a live event that was prohibitively expensive to attend. We don’t feel the exact electricity of what it was to be there in person; the screaming fans seen in the film, which was shot in Los Angeles on the final night of the American leg of the tour, seem to be transcending to some higher plane. Movie audiences will have to settle for something more static but still enveloping—Eras is bright, inviting, sleek.
But it also reveals an artifice that might not have been evident in a stadium. The concert, which journeys through the many different iterations of Swift’s two-decade career, is rehearsed to within an inch of its life. Every gesture, every struck pose, every bit of between-song banter seems precisely calibrated. Eras never suggests the organic, who-knows-what-will happen excitement of live performance. It’s exact and tightly choreographed, as if it was always meant to be preserved in its perfection on film.
Maybe that was only true for this one performance—Swift, aware of the cameras, might have stiffened into practiced routine. But one gets the suspicion that, no, this is what the Eras tour is like most nights, an object devoid of risk and improvisation. (Swift does, at least, change up the set list a bit from night to night. But even those alterations have been branded: they are “secret songs,” word of which is traded like baseball cards.) Swift is not as good an actor as she is a songwriter, and thus much of what we see in the Eras film is stilted, rigid in motion and affect.
To be fair, when a production is as ornately crafted as Eras is—with elaborate sets and hydraulics, a zillion light cues and a fleet of dancers—there probably isn’t much room for ad-libbing. Many of these carefully staged moments do pop, from the stomp and strut of the Reputation era to the wistful throwback of Fearless. (The latter segment begins with Swift asking the audience if they want to take a trip back to high school. Many people at my screening have not even been there for the first time yet.)