She’s the world’s biggest pop star, a master of narrative, and a woman who’s made vulnerability her brand – but who is the real Taylor Swift? That’s the question that Channel 4’s “landmark” two-part series, Taylor, attempts to answer.
Straight away, the documentary signals its intention to seriously interrogate her mythology. It opens with a youthful confession that echoes a long-standing public opinion – that Swift crafts her narrative as both victim and avenger. “For the first time I had the feeling that they could never really hurt me anymore, because I can write about it and I could dream about maybe somebody hearing it someday,” little Taylor is heard saying, over an image of her brandishing her weapon of choice, an acoustic guitar.
Across 100 minutes of carefully edited and contextualised archive footage, combined with talking-heads interviews with journalists and music industry workers, director Guy King (Bombing Brighton, The Fall: Skydive Murder Plot) charts Swift’s rise from ambitious teen to one of the most influential women in the world. Since there is no direct involvement from Swift or her team, or any famous collaborators, it leans hard into the myths of Swift – and looks for whether there is any weight to them.
Is Swift really as effusively lovely and warm as everyone who meets her seems to insist, for example? To a degree, King thinks so. Taylor is an empathetic portrait of an artist in arrested development, who got famous so young that she spent her twenties and early thirties believing in fairytales. But she’s also a shrewd businesswoman with it. Interestingly, she had a formative experience with country pop star LeAnn Rimes of “How Do I Live” and “Can’t Fight the Moonlight” fame, in which Rimes remembered Swift’s name when she was a young fan, having read the letters Swift sent her.
This was the blueprint for how Swift wanted to be as an artist, Taylor explains. It was, in part, the reason she created one of the biggest fan communities of all time. According to one former early member of Swift’s live band, Emily Poe Stumler, she would stay for hours and hours signing every autograph, doggedly building her fanbase. “She wanted people to feel better when she left than before she arrived,” her short-lived manager, Rick Barker, notes of her relationship with fans. “You can’t teach that in business school… You either have it or you don’t have it.”
Given that some of the criticisms of Swift have been misogynistic (she’s a man-eater for dating like a normal woman; she writes about vapid trivialities for girls), it’s a sweet (and smart) move for King to use much-maligned Swifties – aka Swift fangirls aka Swift experts – to help tell the story. They offer never-before-heard anecdotes about the star, while journalist Zing Tsjeng weaves together a sharp analysis of the myths surrounding her, tracing the shifting tides of public opinion across cultural moments.
It’s not a flawlessly constructed docuseries. At one point, there’s an unnecessary use of sinister strings to make Swift’s story seem like a thriller, and more dramatic than it really is. It also ends a little flatly in Swift’s present, with Swift-like aphorisms that are quickly swept through. True feminism can look like a woman wearing a dress. She made a safe space for women. She has found her fairytale ending in her engagement to Travis Kelce: finally, the cheerleader dating the jock. But then, it’s hard to resist neat conclusions when you’re trying to package up a story around a subject so remote and so controlled, ultimately the one who owns the master narrative.
Since childhood, Taylor Swift has been a working entertainer, someone who can perform authentic feelings in a polished display. But something’s missing: even in early, pre-megafame footage, do we ever truly feel what she feels? The docuseries unintentionally raises a deeper question than the ones it pointedly poses: when vulnerability becomes a tool for constructing an emotional fortress, is it vulnerability at all? In Swift’s case, the answer seems to be no, not even close. So despite the intimate one-word title of this documentary, the mystery remains. We’ll never know much about Taylor.
