Taylor-made show
Pop superstar never stops performing in the documentary Miss Americana
LOS ANGELES Fly-on-the-wall portraits of pop-music stars used to be dominated by, you know, pop music. The life and personality and woe-is-me-i’mcaught-in-the-media-fishbowl spectacle of the star herself was part of the equation, yet all that stuff had a way of dancing around the edges. Now, though, it’s front and centre.
In Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, we catch glimpses of the 30-year-old pop supernova as she struts onstage in fire-enginered lipstick and outfits that seem to have been carved out of glitter.
Yet in Miss Americana, it’s the verité psychodrama of the personal and private Taylor Swift, cuddling up to the piano with her cat, that dominates. The way to make a movie like this one started to shift around the time of Madonna’s Truth or Dare, which was, in fact, a splendid concert film, yet the most memorable aspect of it was the backstage soap opera of Madonna taking off her public mask only to indulge in a different kind of performance.
Thirty years of reality TV later the instinct for self-dramatization, even in the most seemingly unfiltered and intimate moments, is now second nature in pop stars, and maybe in all of us.
Watching the movie, you know you’re getting a controlled and sanded-off confection of pop-diva image management, yet what matters is the things we do see ring true. Directed by Lana Wilson (After Tiller), the movie was made for Netflix, and like the 2017 Netflix documentary Gaga: Five Foot Two it’s a lively and revealing once-over-lightly portrait, in this case, of the 15-year journey that Swift has made.
Early on, Swift talks about how she grew up wanting to be the good girl, and how that translated, in her country-music days, into craving the adoration of fans, always wanting that pat on the head. Then we cut to 2018, when she’s lolling on her couch, waiting for her manager to call the morning the Grammy nominations are announced. She has already won (twice) for album of the year, but on this particular day, her 2017 album Reputation mostly gets snubbed. And though she tries to play it down, she’s visibly distraught. No star as big as Swift should care this much about the Grammys, yet she’s still an addict for approval. Will she ever get over it? That, in its way, is the drama of the movie.
What makes it work is that Swift, off camera, is a paradox herself: a humane and crunchy diva who knows how to take her conflicts and project them. That’s what makes her a star. We see the famous incident from 2009, when Kanye West bounded onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, after Swift had won best female video for You Belong With Me, and interrupted her acceptance speech by declaring: “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” As loopy and indefensible as West’s action was, it was expressing the anger of a larger culture war, and Swift, who was 19 at the time, felt bulldozed.
Miss Americana reveals other fights, like the battle with cancer that Swift’s mother is now in the middle of, or Swift’s own eating disorder (now conquered), or her decision to go public, in the Trump era, with her political beliefs, coming out against the right-wing senatorial candidate from her home state of Tennessee.
In the movie’s last act, she’s liberated by the declaration of her political sympathies. The world of politics is merely mortal. Taylor Swift occupies the stratosphere of pop, a mountaintop of the timeless.