Miss Americana is out
From vox.com
Halfway through Miss Americana, the new Netflix documentary about Taylor Swift, Swift tells us a little about why she became a pop star.
“We’re people who got into this line of work because we wanted people to like us,” she explains.
“Because we were intrinsically insecure. Because we liked the sound of people clapping, because it made us forget how much we feel like we’re not good enough.”
She gets audibly teary as she adds, “I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I’m tired of it!”
It’s a candid, revelatory moment, and one that speaks to how much pressure Swift has put on the fact of her fame to prove something to herself about her self-worth.
The rest of Miss Americana takes pains to show us all the ways that fame, in turn, has put pressure on Swift: pressure to starve herself, to reinvent herself, but also to remain forever stuck at the same age she was when she first became famous.
Fame has pressured her to stay silent about all the things she does not wish to stay silent about, lest she give anyone cause to dislike her.
All told, Miss Americana makes a solid argument that fame is not good for Taylor Swift’s mental health, that it has hurt her.
But the movie makes that argument from within the framework of the very celebrity industry that dealt that damage. It is a Netflix documentary that the entire Taylor Swift publicity apparatus participated in, because Miss Americana exists, at least in part, to sell Taylor Swift to us.
