Don’t get me wrong: None of this is bad. None of it detracts from the dazzle of the performance. It seems like she made a genuine and thorough attempt to give her guests their money’s worth, and for a woman who could retire three million times over, that’s saying something.
We have been talking about the singular earnestness and ambition of Taylor Swift for nearly as long as she’s been on the scene, but the experience that is Eras takes this from a thing you know to something you almost can’t breathe around. Side note: How does she breathe? I sometimes get winded singing Swift’s songs sitting in my car, so the way she literally bounces her way through a three-hour set is shocking on a human level. But even this—her near-supernatural physicality—contributes to the fantasy of productivity, of uninterrupted American progress, that is Eras. Inside the snow globe of the tour, there is no #MeToo or insurrection or war. The only mention of the real-world events of the last 17 years, in fact, comes when Swift casually calls Folklore “the first of my two pandemic albums.” During the pandemic, let me check my notes—yep. I hardly made two dinners.
This and the rest of the film offer sweeping reminders of why we cling to Swift so fervently: because she just keeps going at a time when, for various systemic reasons, more and more people are finding it harder than ever to do the same. Our lives twist in ways we never dreamt they would; we well up at the line “Back when we were still changing for the better.” The news right now is baseline apocalyptic; we find it restorative when, for just a few hours, the internet is nothing more than Taylor and Travis holding hands. Statistics show that Americans feel more disconnected from their communities than ever, but at stadiums all over the country this summer, people who knew not one other thing about each other screamed in time and traded bracelets.
Watching Eras, I feel like I’m witnessing the last bastion of monoculture—but it also makes me wonder if Swift herself will ever really belong to any particular era. She shows no signs of going anywhere, just as we show no signs of being done with her. She feels both of this time and separate from it, too major and lasting and unifying to truly be of these petty years. After all, the term “era” is supposed to mean a time of stability, of things you can count on being true for more than a few minutes. While the rest of us struggle to deal with splintering systems and social upheaval, Swift just keeps doing what she does, making productivity look inevitable and reinvention look effortless. But through all of the costume changes in the Eras film—and all of Swift’s personal eras, too—her red lip and steady gaze remain, a reminder that beyond all the sparkle and special effects, the most impressive thing any of us, famous or not, can do is last.
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