Miss Americana
By: Lana Wilson
A Taylor Swift documentary? Of course I’m going to break my film slump for that one! Thank you Netflix 🙂
As a long-term fan of Taylor I got to admit…
I’ve seen a lot of it. The footage, the news clips good and bad, etc.
Her cats are adorable. Her mom’s dog is absolutely precious and her kitchen is total goals.
But what I was most interested in was the politics and the fact that after near to a decade of silence in that arena she broke and very much waded into the political fray for the first time last year.
And I wasn’t disappointed.
Taylor basically says she was raised to be a polite girl and make people happy and that she needed their applause in return. Hence she wasn’t about to antagonize people politically. She swallowed what is often said that people just wanted to hear her sing.
There’s a particularly cringy bit with a young Taylor telling David Letterman exactly that to a go, girl fist bump from him and applause from the audience. Also cringy to look back on is clips of the shit storm that rained down on the Dixie Chicks.
Those clips are also pretty shocking to think it really wasn’t that long ago. There’s one of Bill O’Reilly, incredibly popular at the time saying they ought to be slapped around. (It would take time but he got his in the end although his sexual harassment history coming out only makes it worse to look back and to think people were applauding that sort of thing.)
I appreciate her hang-up with reconciling these things in her head and also the desire to actually educate herself on the issues. I thought the clips of her talking about Tennessee politics in particular were very moving.
Especially as on the one hand they celebrated her possibly effecting youth voter registration for the better but in the end suffering the crushing blow of so much politics these days… that it didn’t matter in the end.
But I have listened to the new song Only the Young plenty over the past couple of days. So bright side I guess???
All that being said and my enjoyment/interest in this aside… it’s still pretty Taylor Swift in that its completely shiny, very packaged and controlled. I thought I saw a clip or read an article that we’d see a different side to her
(besides politics) with a picture of her swigging back some Aviation booze. I remember that cause I thought hey Ryan’s getting some product placement here. But I didn’t see it in the documentary.
At times it felt like an ad for Lover as much as anything else.
It’s pure Taylor for better and worse.
Recommend: Yes.