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#the white dress and garter looking like … transitioning to a Victorian mourning dress
wavesoutbeingtossed · 1 month
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The transition in the Fortnight MV from the white dress in the hospital room to the black dress in the office is 🤌
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I'm still not over Taylor's Fortnight MV... to say it's my favorite visual work she's done would be an understatement. As with all things on this album, she did her research. Her incredible DP - Rodrigo Prieto - who has shot The Man, Cardigan, and Willow MVs. As well as, Brokeback Mountain, The Barbie Movie, Killer of the Flower Moon, etc.
There are so many ways to parse the story of the Fortnight video, but I will mostly focus on Taylor's use of mirroring to make some of the video's larger points.
I am a queer former film student so I wanna note that that's the bias I'll be writing from. If that disinterests you, no worries! This just may not be for you.
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Love that we start with silent film era titles. One is black, one is white, perhaps a ying yang visual or simply representing the original album + the anthology. Could also be the light + dark of her two sides represented by Taylor and Post Malone.
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The vertical alignment shift in the word Fortnight is interesting because the other time i noticed her doing this was in the closing poem for TTP with, "Some stars never align." Would be cute to have it like a nod to screenplay scene heading: INT. FORT - NIGHT
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We start with Taylor, virtually still, but singing. She's handcuffed to an askew bed frame - sans mattress - with bars resembling a prison/cage.
The mirroring she's doing here is reminding us of "real life" Taylor's outfit at the 2024 Grammy's, but with the addition of white gauzy gloves + garter belt (like on tour), it reads more bridal, more bed sheet. That similar clock necklace is set to, best as I can tell, 9pm.
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And she's got enough hairpins to... idk... make me spin out? Her make up evokes a little Clara Bow, Greta Garbo, legends of the silver screen, etc.
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Taylor stops lip-syncing. Breaking the fourth wall, with direct eye contact, she's forced a "Forget Him" pill and unshackled from her bed prison. Unlike the next instance we get this match shot, it feels like she's telling the audience she knows we're watching and her look has a "this is what I'm forced to do" anger charged to it.
Also, the pill itself seems to break Taylor's reality from here on out. She "forgets him," but perhaps also becomes a different him herself.
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She walks over, in her wacky funhouse of a prison room - skewed angles, upside down doors (those who enter from the left walk on the "ceiling" - to an actual mirror. But this mirror looks more like a one-way mirror. Meaning that the subject can see themselves, but so can others they can't see on the other side. Usually so the subject can be observed.
Still appropriate to break the fourth wall as though we are watching her in a way she can't return.
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She wipes her face to reveal Post Malone's tattoos under the veneer of her prerfect facade. Once done, she utters the first "I want to kill her." She wants to "kill" Taylor TM?
I'll basically be going forward assuming that Post Malone is established in this mirror shot as a representation of Taylor, perhaps her True Taylor underneath the engineered perfection. This door/portal splits her in two on entry. From one white-clad figure to two black-clad ones. Kind of like the splitting of a prism.
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Instead of exiting this upside down asylum, she goes deep into a department - perhaps the Tortured Poets kind. We get an awesome match cut/panning transition where Grammy dress referential Taylor morphs into a Victorian mourning dress. One very similar to the dresses on stage during Folklore during Eras (at the bottom of post). Perhaps also a nod to Emily Dickinson herself.
The way they design the set to make it so her asylum and office are connected feels like a not so subtle call out on how she feels about her chosen industry. Not quite a cheery take on the Lover House for ex. Time also becomes a little bendy, irrelevant when she does this portal walk.
When she enters she sits at a mirrored desk, morphing into Post Malone's silhouette. To the side we have faceless writers, also dressed in black older fashions, that seem to go on for infinity like a mirror trick.
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Taylor sits down to start writing, Post Malone is already typing. They're both in black with embellished collars. We see that she has a top sheet with typed words, but under they're blank. Post has a pile next to him, along with his fountain pen, which perhaps are fully done b/c placement on the other side of him. Their desks are also arranged ever so slightly different. So Post-Taylor is a typing machine, Taylor needs to catch up...
But then Post Malone looks up to create this awesome mirrored match cut.
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Taylor and Post-Taylor get to work, singing the chorus, camera cutting on their lines in mirror shots respectively.
We see a typewriter jam the same lines from the song, but specifically "I LOVE YOU." Granted, we can't be 100% sure whose typewriter it is, but we see Taylor type "Love You." Perhaps they're mirroring each other in even this task.
Eventually their stories starts leaking blue and orange/gold ether which prisms out to reveal "The Story of Us."
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Really great shot of the infinity vanishing point effect from the unidentified crowd, how they're positioned makes them look like they're mirroring all of us watching/sharing our opinions.
This is where I'll stop for Part 1 because it's not ok how late this album has been keeping me up.
But a couple of things to start:
Taylor using very strong, very consistent mirroring techniques to create distinctions from narrator, character, and audience. Even the music is mirrored in the chorus with Post Malone's repetition.
By both wearing the face tattoos under a perfect exterior (the face we know her by), and immediately separating into two characters - one with her face/gender expression as we know it and Post-Taylor who now wears the face tattoos we just saw/is also sporting the face and gender expression we are familiar with him. It's Taylor TM the Brand vs Hidden (in plain sight) Identity Taylor.
Her typewriter emits an orange/golden glow from all of her repeated "I LOVE YOU'S," while his emits blue. Together they're creating the next story vignette: "The Story of Us."
One basic read for this is that Taylor could be owning her male POVs that come up in her songs (Folklore we're looking at you). Another read I have is that Taylor TM is writing the love song framework expected from her as an artist while Post-Taylor injects the devastation, anger, emotion, the heavy blues we often unearth from a song we originally thought was upbeat, romantic, unassuming. And considering these mirrored halves, I think that aligns with her own messages about her music, that people will always going looking for paternity tests - the publicized romance pulled from what we think we know about her. But perhaps the assumed truths of a song could be, and often are, driven by your gendered expectations - "Girl loves boy, sings about that." The hidden in plain sight Taylor subverts what the surface level shows.
The True Taylor is an unrecognizable author. And that writer is producing the meat of the work.
Additionally, I love that she's wearing a dress that feels taken off the Era's stage.
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Folklore in particular was a really different writing era for her. She presented the characters and stories as fiction and all the sudden an unknown male collaborator — William Bowery — gets credited on it. I'd love if the message, in part, was hey I'm actually my own male writing partner. Regardless, her other half/POV was able to allow her to write truths so long as they remained unrecognizable.
But she's wearing the mourning dress, looking over at her hidden true half, looking over anxiously. And then begins to write. They're half the story that makes up the whole, one needing the other to tell the story they want to tell. Perhaps it's a call out to Folklore in particular as a solution to being limited by expectations of her signature diaristic-like songs' perspectives. Using it as a way to tell a version of the truth from a POV society or the powers that be in her life would accept it from — not Taylor TM as she is/who she's known to be.
More generally, the "male pov" and the male pronouns, just seem to be called irrelevant smoking guns in the game of knowing the unknowable - what her work, a lot of her work, is referencing specifically. These two writers, as presented, are still both Taylor. Them's the rules here. Ok, see you in PT. 2!
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