It’s here, Swifties! January 31st, 2020 was the day that Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated documentary, Miss Americana, has been released on Netflix and select movie theaters. The documentary is good, tackling Swift’s career, mainly from the middle-end of her Reputation stadium tour to the present day, though it doesn’t shy away from her early stardom days, and even catches a glimpse of Taylor as a child. It also focuses heavily on her coming into herself in this next chapter of life and trying to reject everything that the music industry has taught her. from feelings of fake happiness to feeling muzzled on what she can or cannot say.
The documentary shows a much rarer side of emotion from Taylor Swift that fans haven’t seen even from the songs that she has written. The first time I heard her say the F word, my mouth dropped open. There is an image of Taylor Swift that is conjured in all of her heads and that woman doesn’t cruse typically, but this documentary pushes forward an idea that sometimes we often forget with celebrities. That Taylor Swift is first and foremost Taylor the person, with a personality, flaws, dreams, wishes and yes, the ability to curse and second comes Taylor Swift Grammy award-winning artist and artist of the decade.
The highlights of the documentary include a glimpse of her relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, whom Swift has been dating since 2016. Their relationship has been notoriously private which isn’t something that fans were expecting when the pair first started dating, only being photographed together a handful of times. While the documentary doesn’t go into their relationship it does show that Taylor does have someone who does support her and her music and is excited to see what she comes up with next.
She also opens up about the eating disorder she had during different points in her career. Admitting she wasn’t proud of it, but it was something that had happened to her and she wanted her fans to know. She mentions how she can’t look at photos of herself in fear that she will revert back to her habits of not eating and exercising too much. She elaborates on how damaging the beauty standards are stating that if your too skinny then you don’t have an ass and if you have an ass then you aren’t skinny enough. This one of the other few times that Taylor drops the F bomb and it’s necessary for the conversation and how frustrated she feels and how she’s able to come into how she wants to be and present herself.
Possibly the most emotionally charged segment is Taylor’s somewhat controversial move to reveal her political standings for the midterm election in 2019. She talks about how frustrated she is with the politics of her home state of Tennessee and how the things their female senator stands for isn’t for the rights of women or LGBTQ+ rights. Both issues that are close to Taylor’s heart. Originally, she says she didn’t speak out in politics because she wasn’t educated or she wasn’t in a good enough headspace to effectively speak out, in regard to the presidential election of 2016. Or in the most heartbreaking version, that she thought that she shouldn’t push her opinion on people because nice girls don’t do that. However, her fight to speak out is pushed back by multiple members of her team (ironically all old white men) about how they think that it could hurt her career. She pushes back just as hard and in one of the more memorable lines she talks of senator Marsha Blackburn’s policies being called Tennessee Christian values. Between tears she says, “Those aren’t Tennessee Christian values. I live in Tennessee. I’m a Christian. That’s not what we stand for.” With her mother and publicist, she speaks about the consequences of what could happen with the post including if the president comes after her and she says she wants to be on the right side of history, and she doesn’t care what trump says. While she didn’t fully change the tide of the midterm election, she got 65,000 more voters to register the day after she publicly spoke out.
Maybe one of the most surprising things she revealed in the documentary is how she talks about her fear of fading into oblivion as an artist once she hits 35 as she hasn’t seen as many artists be successful past that point. Which seems strange considering that Taylor Swift has consistently made a hit album since she was 16 up till now at 30. In five years, it seems like a strange thing to not have Taylor Swift still be constantly dominating the music industry. Also, after seeing this documentary it seems that Taylor is also not ready to slow down and stop making music.
Overall the documentary showed an in-depth of how Taylor Swift lives and has dealt with her overwhelming fame to become her own person who can speak freely without any fear of what anyone will say about her. And it is fantastic.
