“I LOVE YOU, TAYLOR!!!”
It was the kind of shout you hear at concerts, emanating from a fan looking for a brief moment of acknowledgement from the artist on stage. But Taylor Swift, in her corporeal form at least, was not actually there to receive it on Friday night. The fan lobbed their love at a movie screen at a sold-out showing of Swift’s new concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, in downtown Manhattan.
Such is the nature of being a Swiftie in 2023: We feel like she’s talking directly to us through our screens, and we feel like we can talk to her right back. And we feel like she’s actually listening.
For the large swath of Swift’s vast fandom that didn’t win the Ticketmaster lottery, or wasn’t interested in remortgaging their house to pay for a seat on the secondary market, the very existence of this movie is a small miracle or a consolation prize, depending on whom you ask. (Swift has made concert films chronicling almost all of her previous tours, but none of them were widely released in theaters.) It offers a reasonable facsimile of the live experience—that is, two hours and 45 minutes of Taylor Swift immersion therapy—at the affordable price of $19.89 (lol) per ticket.
The Eras Tour is a straightforward concert doc, filmed over the course of multiple nights at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles in August. It follows the setlist of the live show with a few songs from the three-and-a-half-hour runtime removed, possibly because adding another 45 minutes felt like a bit much (or there’s plans for a “Director’s Cut” in the future). “The Archer,” “Long Live,” the Haim collaboration “No Body, No Crime,” the “Seven” interlude, “Cardigan,” and “Wildest Dreams” didn’t make it into the film. Nor did two of my favorite moments from the live show: Swift’s moving words following “Marjorie” about her late grandmother, the song’s titular character, and her preamble to “Betty” about how much she loves it when men apologize.
I saw the Eras tour live twice—once in the nosebleeds after waiting five-and-a-half hours in the Ticketmaster online queue, and once close to the stage thanks to a friend who had an extra seat. They were among the best concerts I’ve ever seen: an artist at the absolute peak of her powers, surveying a 17-year ascent from country girlhood to world-conquering superstardom via jaw-dropping stage design and visual effects, boundless amounts of energy, and banger after banger after banger. The crowd’s enthusiasm was at a level that quite literally could be measured on the Richter scale. I left those stadiums in a lavender haze of warm fuzzies, my throat sore from screaming, my feet blistered from jumping, my arms festooned with friendship bracelets gifted by strangers.
Seeing The Eras Tour film in a theater was an attempt to recreate that bliss. Its release comes at a time when the yearning for Taylor Swift-induced escapism is at an all-time high. In the two months since the first leg of the tour finished, Swift has often commandeered the news cycle by, among other things, detailing the imminent 1989 (Taylor’s Version), stepping out with a football player, getting Beyoncé to show up to her premiere, and selling a record-breaking amount of movie tickets. All of which served as excellent distractions from the dumpster fire that is life on Earth in 2023.
Outside the movie theater on Friday, Manhattan was on edge, reeling from a week of unspeakable violence in Israel and Gaza, bracing for the potential fallout from protests planned across the city. Inside, gaggles of mostly white, mostly female Swifties dressed in folklore cardigans and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” tees posed for selfies with their Eras-branded popcorn buckets. It was unlikely that any of us in that theater had ever felt threatened by close-range rocket fire. Switching my phone off after hours of obsessively monitoring the news to envelop myself in the pillowy synths of the opening “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” was a level of cognitive dissonance up there with when my college boyfriend and I inexplicably decided to watch Pootie Tang on 9/11.
But we all do what we can to cope. Over the past few years of pandemic, social unrest, climate catastrophe, and general societal collapse, there have been countless times when the brightest part of my day was spent mindlessly scrolling SwiftTok. Taylor is my Roman Empire, as the kids these days would say. But the mighty can stumble, or at least make us tired, and I can understand why. The Taylor News Cycle can be endlessly frustrating: The Matty Healy association, the private jet emissions, the allegations of performative allyship, the revisionist history. The fact that no institution—the FBI, the NFL, the Fed, Congress, Dunkin’—is immune to her charms. That there has been so much written about her, including in this publication, with most media outlets having very little opportunity to actually talk to her at all.
And yet. I also completely understand what would compel someone to scream “I LOVE YOU, TAYLOR!” at a flickering image upon a screen.
That scream came during the standing ovation after “Cruel Summer,” the setlist’s second song. Up until that point, the vibe in the theater had been fairly subdued. But when Swift paused to survey her queendom, hamming it up in the lead-up to “The Man,” something shifted. By the time the chorus of that song kicked in, a small group of dancers had gathered in the space between the screen and the front row. The crowd steadily grew as the movie progressed; roughly half of the theater was on their feet when Red rolled around. I tried my best to stay focused on the task at hand (taking notes for this piece), but halfway through “All Too Well,” I couldn’t take it anymore: I, too, was up and dancing.
There are of course many advantages that a concert has over a movie: the allure of the unexpected (will she suffer a wardrobe malfunction or swallow a bug?!), the privilege of breathing the same air as Taylor Swift, the luxury of not having your experience mediated by a screen. But movie magic shouldn’t be discounted, either. The cameras offer angles no spectator could ever experience from a seat, zeroing in on movements and facial expressions even the most eagle-eyed would miss. I was mesmerized by Swift’s left arm, how it never stopped moving, containing entire worlds, like a one-handed puppet show. (The right arm remained mostly static, imprisoned by its subservience to the microphone.) I was struck by moments of goofiness I had never noticed before, like the way she rolls her eyes while singing “I’ll be the princess” during “Love Story,” or how comically large and pastry-like the Speak Now dress is. The quick cuts during the showstopping Reputation segment brought the drama of “Look What You Made Me Do” and “…Ready for It?” to dizzying heights. (Yes: The Reputation era is, in fact, the best era of the Eras tour.) And the mind-boggling stage, which transforms during almost every song, proved itself worthy of its own behind-the-scenes documentary. (Seriously: How do they make those trees sprout out of the ground during “Willow”? What is Swift landing on when she swan-dives into a hole after the acoustic set?)
Is The Eras Tour a great film? If you’re a huge Taylor Swift fan, it’s a masterpiece. If you aren’t, it’s unlikely to convert you. (I attended my screening with five other Pitchfork staffers of varying ages and levels of Swift fandom. Their reactions ranged from delight and amusement to exasperation at the quick-cut editing to straight-up leaving the theater after an hour and a half.) The entire Eras phenomenon is the crown jewel of an already diamond-encrusted career, the kind of achievement one can only wonder how she could ever follow up, short of retirement or a retreat into the kind of full-bore cabin-in-the-woods singer/songwriter material hinted at by folklore and evermore. We know that the tour will continue at least through 2024. We know that she has two more re-recorded albums to release after 1989 (Taylor’s Version) comes out in two weeks. But staring deep into those close-up blue eyes as she basked in the crowd’s adoration before “Champagne Problems,” I couldn’t stop thinking about a Swift quote from the 2020 documentary Miss Americana: “You get to the mountaintop and you look around and you’re like, ‘Oh god, what now?’”
