Taylor Swift performed for a delirious crowd of tens of thousands in the first of two back-to-back concerts at Seattle’s Lumen Field the night of Sat., July 22, 2023.Dave Killen / The Oregonian
Last night I sat in a movie theater and sang along with Taylor Swift as she danced, played guitar, twirled her hair and flashed her unassuming smile on the big screen.
I couldn’t go to The Eras Tour live. It didn’t seem responsible to spend $700 on a ticket for myself when I have a family and a mortgage. But spending $22 to watch the same thing from a movie theater bucket seat with my best friend was reasonable enough.
And I wasn’t alone.
Swift beat out every other movie in theaters this weekend with “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which made an estimated $95 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada.
The theater in Vancouver where I watched the film wasn’t sold out or very raucous, but plenty of other theaters around the country this weekend were.
I am 41 years old, nearly 10 years older than Swift, and while I am not a super fan (see: I didn’t pay $700 to see her in person), I love her music and I find her super charming. I am impressed by what she’s accomplished, somehow becoming the biggest star on planet Earth despite a constant drumbeat of detractors since she started gaining popularity.
Last night, as I listened to her play the song “The Man,” a song about how easy life would be if she were a man, I leaned over to my friend and said, “It’s funny – I can’t think of a single man who is more famous and successful than Taylor Swift.”
What is it about Taylor Swift that has made her the biggest artist of 2023? My theory: She makes us feel comfortable.
Read more: Taylor Swift and a midlife discovery that there’s still something we can all agree on
She’s young but not too young. She’s beautiful and blonde but also just a little gawky, her white teeth the teeniest bit crooked. She’s relatable, with her cats and her difficult dating history. Her songs are personal yet vague enough to apply to almost anyone (or at least any woman). And The Eras Tour is Swift’s retrospective of her 17-year career, so she’s not playing a single song we haven’t heard before.
We have not even begun to comprehend or contend with what the COVID pandemic meant for us individually, let alone as a society. When the words “shutdown” and “unknown virus” took over our lives, every person was traumatized in some way. And so we turned toward the familiar to feel some kind of safety. And we have yet to turn away.
Earlier this week, Jason Farago wrote an article for The New York Times called, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill.”
Art has stopped being about inventing new modes, transformation, moving forward, Farago argues.
“When I was younger, I looked at cultural works as if they were posts on a timeline, moving forward from Manet year by year,” Farago writes. “Now I find myself adrift in an eddy of cultural signs, where everything just floats, and I can only tell time on my phone.”
Farago’s idea is that this century has so far been the least artistically innovative in the past 500 years.
But zoom into the last four years, and we have shifted even more toward art that comforts rather than challenges. Sure, there were Marvel and Star Wars movies, cover songs and rebooted sitcoms before March of 2020, but since then, if anything, those known entities have become the major tenets of American culture.
Is that a bad thing? A good thing? After the last four years, part of me feels unqualified to make almost any kind of value judgment.
Why wouldn’t people seek comfort in art? Why shouldn’t they? While some of us, me for example, live lives of great privilege and prosperity, many, many other people don’t. Today, go to TikTok or listen to the news, and you will find out that millions of people don’t have clean water to drink. Homes have been leveled by bombs and earthquakes. The planet is hotter than we’ve ever known it. Kids are growing up without hope in the midst of violence.
And even for those of us living good lives, we all feel the impending doom, like we’re listening to the band play as the Titanic sinks or drinking wine from lead cups in the final days of the Roman empire.
The pandemic may be basically over, but the world wasn’t changed in the ways we hoped. We didn’t come together globally. We didn’t fix healthcare, education, the food system, the planet. Instead, in this country, we are gearing up for a deja vu election year, apparently about to relive one of the hardest years of our lives.
The think pieces didn’t solve anything. And neither did the novels or the movies or the paintings or the poetry. We still feel like a society on the brink of total destruction.
Art is one of the things that makes us human, and it is powerful. It has marked time, as Farago says, but also been a vehicle for change. It has sold products and ideas, inspired social change and regime change and created our very identities.
Maybe we should be using art to grapple with what the pandemic meant and push forward toward a better, safer world. But right now, that’s not what we are doing. We are using art to numb ourselves because it’s possible we aren’t ready to start talking about what it would take to heal.
Will we ever get there? Who can say? But when Swift dove into the stage, I screamed along with the rest of the theater. She might not be fixing the world, but for three hours and $22 a ticket, she’s making people feel just a little bit happy.
— Lizzy Acker
503-221-8052; [email protected]; @lizzzyacker
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