‘Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’ is a great concert film- and helps me understand the Swiftie thing

The film, assembled from the pop superstar’s megahit summer tour, is an expertly mounted rampage through Swift’s catalog of hits- and very much showcases her appeal.

The movie that’s almost certainly going to make the most at the box office this fall season is one that no one even existed until just a few weeks ago. 

At the end of August, Taylor Swift announced that a concert film adaptation of her record-breaking, career-spanning Eras Tour from this summer was headed to theaters in October. Not only that, but it was forgoing the involvement of the Hollywood studios and using AMC, the theater chain, as the distributor instead. 

The film promised to deliver a massive amount of money into the pockets of everyone involved, while also likely leading other corners of the entertainment industry to brainstorm ways to create more nontraditional box office attractions. Indeed, by the end of the first weekend, The Eras Tour had already become the highest-grossing concert film of all time. 

It’s also, on its own merits, a first-rate concert film, featuring amazing camera work, beautiful production design, and a fairly good approximation of what it must be like to attend one of the actual Eras Tour concerts. Directed by concert film specialist Sam Wrench, The Eras Tour was filmed at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, using parts of six different shows from August. So it was all turned around rather quickly.

Between Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Taylor Mac's 24-Hour History Of Popular Music, this year’s best concert films are both fronted by people named Taylor. However, neither quite touches the recent re-release of Stop Making Sense. 

I’m nobody’s idea of a Swiftie. I’ve never seen her live or spent much time with her records. Not because I have anything against Taylor Swift- far from it, in fact. It’s more that, at some point, I stopped paying close attention to popular music, and therefore I’ve missed most of the major beats of her career, at least the ones that didn’t make huge news. (Attention, Friends of Taylor: If I get any of the Swiftie lore wrong in this essay, I apologize in advance.)

And after seeing the movie, I get it. She’s a dynamic performer, one able to spend a summer filling NFL stadiums with fans paying higher-than-NFL ticket prices (more on that later), even as other fans sat outside and (enthusiastically) listened to the entire concert. She’s got a pretty impressive repertoire, including more than 40 songs that were played as part of the tour (plus a rotating series of “secret” songs). Most of the other acts who play stadiums these days have that sort of song list, but those folks – Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel — are in their 70s and 80s and have been at it for five or six decades. Swift is 33, and her first album came out in 2005.

A three-hour tour

The movie works a lot like the tour: It’s split into ten sections, each representing an album or “era” in her career, and featuring 3-to-5 songs from each one, along with iconography and costumes from that specific time in her career. 

My favorite part of the show was the “Reputation” section, from a time when the singer reacted to a run of bad press with her angriest, most rock-oriented work. The “Red” section is also a highlight, as is the finale involving her most recent album, “Midnights.” Throughout, her dancers and background singers are a memorable and very present part of the show.

The film runs for about three hours, a bit shorter than the actual concerts, thanks to the excising of a few songs. And one of the better decisions is that it’s the concert and only that. There’s no behind-the-scenes stuff or scenes of Taylor talking about the tour, nor is there that thing Kevin Hart always puts in his concert films where it starts with a commercial for the thing you’re already watching. 

Taylor at the movies

Taylor Swift’s previous brushes with the movies have been uneven. She was in the forgettable ensemble romcom Valentine’s Day, while also being one of the better parts of disasters like the Cats movie and David O. Russell’s Amsterdam (in which she appeared and got hit by a car almost immediately.) The 2020 Netflix documentary about her, Miss Americana, was much better than the typical celebrity fluffery that’s typical to that genre. 

She directed a video for the 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” and even introduced it at TIFF last year, but the expected Oscar buzz never materialized. The singer has also announced plans to direct a feature film, although details on that remain scarce.

The Eras Tour movie, however, is an unmitigated triumph. 

Stop being weird

There is something I’ve noticed over the years: Why do people have to be so weird about Taylor Swift? 

Something I like to implore from time to time to my middle-school-aged sons is that just because something is considered girly, it doesn’t mean they have to hate it. But it’s clear that a lot of middle-aged men haven’t exactly grasped that lesson. 

As you may have heard, in recent weeks, Swift has been dating NFL star Travis Kelce. Considering the nonstop scrutiny of Swift’s love life, and that she and the NFL are probably the two biggest things in American entertainment, it was certain to be a big story. And some men, it’s clear, see the presence of an A-list female pop star as an imposition, or something worse.

Since then, we’ve heard everything from complaints from football fans about the Swift/Kelce story being “shoved down our throats,” to conspiracy theories that the relationship is a hoax, to the usual nonsense about athletes having famous girlfriends being a “distraction,” to whatever this nonsense was from the dickish right-wing sports pundit Clay Travis. And yes, some Eagles fans are upset that the Pennsylvania native, who declared herself an Eagles fan at the tour’s Philly stop, is now dating a Chiefs player and wearing Chiefs stuff. 

It’s of a piece with the odd, years-long tendency for people of all ideologies to project imaginary politics onto Taylor Swift. Neo-Nazis, at one point, became convinced she was one of them. She was ripped for failing to endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016 and then again, from the other side, when she became more vocally liberal and anti-Trump in the years afterward and recently encouraged her fans to register to vote. (By the way, I would rather hear, a thousand times out of a thousand, about the Swift/Kelce thing than about Aaron Rodgers’ challenge to Kelce to debate him on vaccines.) 

The nadir, probably, was when she feuded with Kanye West, and that got uneasily forced into the “white women accusing other white women of ‘weaponing tears’” craze that was all the rage shortly after Trump’s election. Knowing what we do now about Kanye, I think maybe he was the bad guy in that all along. And besides, I always thought Taylor was too nice about it when Kanye interrupted her awards speech that time. Barack Obama was right. 

Even worse, there’s a George Soros angle. And it should go without saying that there are reasons — not that they’re good ones — for people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be mad at Taylor.

There was also some anger, during the tour when Swift was reported to be dating English rock star Matty Healy, who had a history of on-stage Nazi salutes and of appearing on questionable comedy podcasts. But that controversy appeared to make no significant dent in Swift’s popularity whatsoever. The stadiums remained full, all summer long.

Just be normal, that’s all I ask.

How to behave at the Taylor movie

Since the Eras Tour movie opened, there have been some viral videos of Swift fans dancing, standing up, or otherwise having a wild time in movie theaters showing the movie. AMC even put out guidelines, stating that “we encourage dancing and singing throughout this concert film event, but please do not dance on our seats or block other guests from viewing, safely walking or exiting the auditorium.”

This has angered some movie purists, with one weirdo declaring that those going to see Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon next week should avoid the theater next to the Eras Tour, in order to “not share a wall with a room full of 200 sobbing white women singing along to look what you made me do.” 

Last Thursday, I saw an early screening of Killers, in the auditorium next to the one showing the opening night of the Eras Tour, and I’m pretty sure no one in either theater could hear the other. When I saw the Eras Tour movie a couple of days later, there was no dancing, but there was some singing along. I say, do what you want. At a concert film, the rules are clearly different- and it wasn’t like there weren’t middle-aged men dancing in the aisles when I saw Stop Making Sense. 

Am I a Swiftie now? I wouldn’t go that far; I still have years of lore left to memorize. But I do know that the Eras Tour movie is very good.