Concert movie weekend concluded on Monday

I was ticking off all my remaining February viewing commitments this past weekend, perhaps overreacting to the short month, which is not quite as short this year as it usually is.

Having watched my Blaxploitaudient movie on Friday (and written about it yesterday), yesterday I finished watching David Byrne's American Utopia, which was my monthly assignment for Flickchart Friends Favorites Fiesta. I started it Sunday night, expecting to watch it by myself as a thematic rejoinder to having watched the Taylor Swift concert movie on Saturday night.

But then my wife walked into the room near the beginning, and my ideal condition for watching it -- with her -- suddenly came to fruition. She is more of a Talking Heads fan than I am (I really like them but never bought their albums), but usually when I approach my wife with an idea to watch a movie, she suddenly feels the pressure of needing to adhere to my schedule. She knows I don't usually ask her until I have a need to watch the movie in question one of the next few nights -- either to review it, or because I have to watch it during this particular month for commitments on my blog or in the aforementioned series whose acronym I will use on second reference (FFFF). Lately, I've just been avoiding the discussion altogether.

Now, Sunday night might not have been her ideal night to watch it. But since I'd already pressed play, the 48-hour rental clock had already started ticking. As a compromise for what worked best for both of us, we agreed to watch half of it on Sunday night and the other half on Monday -- which was her birthday. (We ended up watching slightly less than half on the first night, since Byrne and company's performance of "Once in a Lifetime," which concluded at the 45-minute mark, seemed about the perfect place to close the curtain after Act 1, if you will.)

I might have been slightly less engaged on Monday night than I was on Sunday night, and that was just enough to knock the whole experience down from a possible 4.5 stars on Letterboxd to 4 stars. I don't want to just hand out 4.5 stars like candy, something I've been guilty of in the past. This at least gave it an additional half-star over Taylor Swift, which felt important to me. I definitely feel like I liked American Utopia at least a star more than The Eras Tour, whose 3.5 rating was probably generous since I was already conscious of coming off as a Swift hater. What can I say, star ratings are fickle creatures.

(And I think the main reason I felt slightly less engaged was the two drinks we had at Mexican dinner, as well as a number of blunders committed by me at dinner, including ordering her the wrong item through the app, and miscalculating the dessert options that would work as a birthday cake. These left me feeling like I'd fumbled her birthday. I don't think she felt this but I can be hard on myself.)

Having emerged from an actual three days of celebrating her birthday in small ways, I'm a bit too burnt out this morning to go into the detail American Utopia deserves. I'll say generally that it was very cleverly conceived and executed and stood out in stark contrast to the performance histrionics of a typical rock concert like the one I'd seen the night before. Byrne always has been a lot more of a dada performance artist type, and both his sense of humor and social compassion came shining through in the Spike Lee-directed film. I did think it would have a slightly more definitive conceptual shape than it did, but I greatly appreciated all the little thematic tangents, which were either delightful or thought-provoking in isolation. 

Plus, it was clear the additional thought that went into staging this with someone like Lee at the helm. I've never been entirely clear the role a director plays in a concert movie, but it's a "final product" sort of thing. I know Jonathan Demme directed Byrne the first time, in Stop Making Sense, in a way that wouldn't have been what it was if more of a hack had been making the decisions. Again, I'm not sure how much of this is Lee's doing, but I was particularly impressed by the number of cameras and camera angles, and how I could never seen any of the cameras in any of the shots.

And now that I haven't watched a movie with a narrative since Friday night, I think I'll take a break from concert movies for a little bit. 

Supporting Taylor Swift

So what, exactly, does one of the most popular musical artists who has ever lived need with my support?

It's not that kind of support, exactly. I'll explain.

I must have been feeling a little annoyed by all the hype surrounding Taylor Swift's arrival in Australia, which occurred a few days ago, because on Thursday I made my third post on Facebook about it in the space of a couple weeks. Two were about advertised impacts on train travel within the city due to the concert, and one wondered whether she timed the trip to avoid the Super Bowl on the off chance she'd be dating someone who'd be playing in it. (Little did I know that the trip was not timed so fortuitously, as she had already been in Japan and had to fly back to be at the game.)

Here's the one I posted on Thursday, just to get a sense of the tone that was neither nasty toward Swift nor, you will agree, supportive:

"So today riding home there were actual announcements on the train about the big concerts (Taylor Swift) this weekend and about the resulting effects on train service. However, the Melbourne Cricket Grounds, where she is playing, are frequently at capacity for sporting events and other concerts, without such announcements. Just because she's TAYLOR SWIFT, does that mean that the logistics of getting to and from the venue are any different than for other capacity events at the MCG? Does it being TAYLOR SWIFT cause a single person to become more than one person? In actual fact, many of these people will be smaller than your average cricket fan."

First of all, the premise of the post was actually wrong. I later learned that in addition to all the ticket-holding fans -- a record 96,000 and change -- there was expected to be crowds congregating outside who didn't hold tickets but who just wanted to bask in the proximal glow. Hey, you never know when you might catch a glimpse of her. 

But the thing that gave me pause was a long response from one of my female Facebook friends, which I will not include in total but rather excerpts. It didn't call me out per se, like I was the root of the problem, but it wouldn't have run on for several hundred words if I were not meant to take something away from it. Which I did.

Anyway, here are some choice parts of the response:

"I feel like there’s this negativity towards how much girls and women are excited about and enjoying going to see her in concert and my take is that it comes from how - under patriarchy - we are told to not take up space or require men to make accommodations for us the way we accommodate and give space to men."

"To me, if a man really wants equality and for women to be able to take up space and express who they are then they should be flexible and not complain because it not so subtly sends a message to the women in their lives to be less and be smaller."

"How many women in the world don’t care at all about sports but every weekend get their homes ready, plan, shop, buy, cook food for “the game,” don the jersey, etc. all in service of their husband and his friends and their sons interest in a sports team?"

Amen to all that.

I immediately credited her with the excellence of her points and tried to explain that the post was intended as humor about infrastructure more than any judgment against Taylor Swift, which I do think is true, though I understand how it may have come off differently.

I proceeded to tell this woman that I regularly try to convince my wife that Swift has good songs and her music is valuable. I know, I know, it's like being called a racist and then naming all the Black friends you have. But it is true that in our house, it's the man who feels a bit sheepish about this inclination to give Taylor Swift space and the woman who dislikes her and other "divas" who came before her (such as Madonna) on principle. (Hey, she was raised on punk rock, what do you want from her.)

I also told this respondent that I had considered watching Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour this weekend but was worried my wife would frown on it.

Well, Saturday night I made good on my word, so that any little bean counter who happened to see my $19.89 rental fee would know that I, too, want to give Taylor and her fans space.

In truth, I had considered watching this in time for my 2023 rankings, but I couldn't quite stomach the premium rental fee, adjusted cleverly to mirror the year of Swift's birth as well as the name of one of her albums. As you can see from the previous paragraph, that price has not yet come down. However, I also thought, "If not now, when Taylor Swift is actually in Melbourne, and actually physically in the process of giving this performance within 15 kilometers of my house, then when?" 

And, as I said, it's a mea culpa for contributing some small amount to marginalizing this nearly unprecedented worldwide phenomenon. (The precedents my friend listed were Elvis and the Beatles. That tells you something. But in those cases, heterosexual hormones were a big factor as well. Here, not so much, making this display of undying affection potentially unprecedented, full stop.)

I'll tell you something, though: It's sort of hard to watch a concert when you are only familiar with about a third of the songs, and two-thirds of those don't come until hour three of the movie. (I think it was about 2:40 when released to theaters, but there were four extra song performances added here at the end, kicking it up to an even three hours in total.)

While finding myself extremely impressed with the feats of staging and costume changing that The Eras Tour required, I think you need the ability to sing along with and love the songs to really be transported by a concert experience -- and perhaps that is even more true on film. In the arena, the absolute intensity of the vibe can take you places you won't go at home, but on your couch, you are inevitably distracted by your phone and by the fact that there isn't a plot to sink you teeth into. 

On this particular Saturday night, when I'd been out for most of the day on a day trip, I viewed the lack of a plot to be a bonus, especially with the three-hour running time. But I also wasn't in a position to fully disengage, because then I'd fall asleep and miss five songs and not really know if there was something in one of those songs that would unlock the experience for me on the whole.

It's kind of hard to rate this sort of experience. I ended up going with 3.5 stars on Letterboxd, a recognition mostly of the difficulty of the feat they were trying to pull off, Swift's inexhaustible energy and devotion to her fans, and the fact that I do, indeed, quite like about eight songs I ended up hearing. Incidentally, this usually prominent rating for any movie represents a comically small percentage of the star ratings on Letterboxd for The Eras Tour. Just four percent of us (5,621) gave it 3.5 stars. You might not be surprised to learn that 68% (108,018) gave it five stars, with the next two healthiest percentages being 4.5 and 4 stars. I guess Swifties use Letterboxd too. 

As a movie itself, of course there isn't usually anything all that special to an experience structured as just filming songs that occurred consecutively on one night (or a small number of nights). I'd say something like Stop Making Sense is the exception to this rule, but most concert movies exist in service of just giving the songs their best showcase. (I remember people also had good things to say about that other Jonathan Demme concert movie involving Justin Timberlake, so maybe I should watch that at some point.)

The movie was filmed over a number of nights on the final stop of the tour, at LA's Sofi Stadium, and it does have a bit more structure than some concert movies might, as the songs she performed were grouped according to albums. Those album titles would flash up on the screen, so fans got a sense of the era of Swift music they were about to hear before they began hearing it. At first I thought these were actual song names, because both of the first two albums also feature a song by the same name as the album -- or at least a song that says the album name among the lyrics. As it went I got what they were doing, though.

Look, I've always found Swift's songs catchy, but few of the ones I'd never heard did anything for me. This is not something unique to Taylor Swift, of course. For one, big radio hits are big radio hits precisely because they have something propulsive and toe-tapping about them that distinguishes them from the album's filler tracks. But big radio hits have also been played to us so many times that we know them back to front, and that is one of the things you are looking for in a concert. Do I enjoy tapping my toe to "Shake It Off" because it is an inherently good song or because I've probably heard it a hundred times? I reckon a little of both.

I couldn't help, though, thinking that there isn't anything so uniquely charismatic about Swift as a personality or exceptional about her as a songwriter that would elevate her above others in her position who have topped out at a half or less of the fan support that Swift enjoys. It seems to me that reaching her height in a period of maximum social media saturation has something to do with it, as does the fact that she seems more accessible to your average fan than forbears who have been more intentionally confrontational with their choices, such as Madonna and Lady Gaga. I'm not sure there is ever a perfect formula for determining why two artists who offer about the same thing can have wildly different career trajectories.

Oh, and as for my wife's feelings on all this? She just teased me a bit. My younger son brought his device back into the room to put it on charge while I was watching, and my wife joked to him "Don't worry, he's still Daddy, even if he is watching Taylor Swift."

I wouldn't have given Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour 3.5 stars if I weren't glad I watched it. And a lot of the songs were in my head last night as I slept, as the concert definitely infiltrated my dreams in a way that feels scrambled and difficult to remember in the morning.

More than my experience of the film itself, though, I'm glad I contributed some small amount to proving I'm not an obstacle to the amount of space women and girls deserve to take up in the world. 

Eroticizing T-Swift

This movie has just opened this week, having gathered a staggering $100 million in advanced ticket sales, making it already the most successful concert movie of all time. But I've been seeing the posters for a while now.

There was a time when I would prioritize seeing the biggest concert film of the year. Today, I can't remember the last time I've seen a concert film in the year in which it was released (and pretty rarely go back to watch one, either). 

I don't think something like Summer of Soul counts, because that's old footage and therefore fits clearly into the category of documentary. I guess with new concert films, I think of them more as arms of the artist's promotional apparatus than "real" films with something to say beyond selling the music.

(I just thought of the last concert film I watched at the time it was released, which was Beyonce's Homecoming. I liked it.)

Taylor Swift presents sort of a different case than the typical concert movie made for PR reasons. She is almost indisputably the biggest music star working today, though I should be careful how I throw that word "indisputably" around. On a podcast I was listening to this week, one of the podcasters said that Swift was "indisputably" more famous than Madonna ever was. I dispute that.

But because she's such a big star, she crosses over into "general interest topic about which I should know more," not just "musical artist." Not unlike Beyonce. Or Madonna. (Madonna's Truth or Dare may have been one of the first concert films I ever saw, if you want to call it that.)

I don't think I could bring myself to see this 168-minute film in the theater. In fact, I'm sure I couldn't. There would be 'splaining to do with the wife -- why am I going and sitting among teenagers to watch a movie about Taylor Swift? -- and at least at home it clears the lower bar of "movie you watch at home."

Probably part of the reason I think there would be 'splaining to do is that I know I am attracted to Taylor Swift, and I think my wife would suspect that's more the reason I'm watching the movie than being a fan of her music. I actually am a fan of her music, to the extent that a person who would never actually buy any of her music can be a fan of it. But I can't deny that she sort of makes my toes curl too.

And I can't deny that this movie poster is openly trying to titillate me.

To put it bluntly: In this poster, Swift is wearing the same expression that they used to put on the faces of women on billboards for strip clubs around Los Angeles. 

Yes this is a picture of Taylor Swift singing. Yes it is also supposed to look like a picture of Taylor Swift being pleasured.

It's another reminder of a not-very-hot take: Even the artists who cultivate a pure image become sexualized, if they are women and if there is a covert opportunity to do so.

This poster does fall into the category of covert, I'd say. It's a dog whistle for men (and women) who covet her rather than wanting to be her. For everyone else, like the parents of the young children who like her, it's just a woman singing.

And so I don't know at this point if Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour will make it onto my year-end list. My guilty conscience might force me to try to watch the whole two hours and 48 minutes at a time when my wife isn't around, which is a rare window to get. And that's if it's even available on video before the middle of January. The movie has some sort of exclusivity deal and I could see it being a theater-only event. 

However -- and this really could give me the excuse I need to watch it, even if I'm only making that excuse to my own brain -- Wikipedia says that it "received widespread acclaim from critics, most of whom praised the camerawork, editing and sound for capturing the show's spectacle and energy."

It doesn't say "And the rest of whom just liked looking at Taylor Swift."