Taylor’s Eras Tour is a transcendent feast for the senses, a spiritual experience that can only be beheld in the way it was intended, with others, cagily wondering if you’re singing too loudly with a bunch of senior citizens who didn’t quite know what they were signing up for when they bought tickets.
Much has been written already about the set list, the costumes, the economic boom, the cutthroat business negotiations with AMC, the $1 billion market cap, the bangs, the seismographically significant audience, all of which is to say that I’m not going to have very much to add that’s novel. If you didn’t have the good fortune and time to buy Taylor Swift concert tickets or the $20,000 to buy Taylor Swift tickets on the secondary market, then it likely came as a nice surprise to you a couple months ago when, in the midst of the longest actors’ strike in history, Taylor announced that she had produced a Scorsese-length film of her Eras tour, which eventually broke records as the highest grossing concert film of all time and the biggest opening for a movie in October ever, I think, and that you could see said concert movie for the relatively high ticket price of $19.89 (non-refundable).
Upon hearing this, I immediately bought two tickets for the first weekend (Friday the 13th was kinda sorta the opening date), and then promptly realized as explaining to Wife what was happening that I was not, in fact, going to see this movie, because she was, so I wisely shifted to explaining to how I had bought them for her and a friend, which she loved. As the weeks drew on, it became increasingly clear that there was not going to be an easy way for me to see this movie without being the creepy millennial man sitting in the back, quietly mouthing the lyrics to the Reputation album while swarms of young women danced and traded friendship bracelets, which is when Mom called and offered to take some time as the jailer to our two prisoners so we could go out.
It’s at this moment that I’m supposed to tell you my favorite songs, performances, which album was done best or worst, what sparkly outfit she wore when, and the advantages and disadvantages of the chair dance, but I’m going to avoid all of that to say the following very simply: for someone who is neutral to warm about Taylor, watching her work for three hours straight without a break was impressive. Listening to the setlist after the fact, something I’ve done more than once before and after going, really changed how I think about her music, gave it more clarity and emotional buoyancy. Some people–albeit, during the SAG-AFTRA strike–wrote about how this concert movie is forging a new way for movie theaters to attract big audiences again for Events, and far be it from me to gainsay Sam Adams, but I think in some ways the last few months of going to movies during the strike have been so pleasantly weird. Barbenheimer’s once-in-a-decade chaos energy and the staying power of this weird little concert movie have shown just how strange people can get when the definition of what counts as a “movie” diminishes with a lack of content.
I really like going to opening night showings of Marvel movies because of the neurotic energy associated with everyone seeing something for the first time (we can talk more about this in my next review of The Marvels, when Wife went to see it on opening night). It’s the reason why I really resent taking people who like going to opening night movies to their second viewing of a film when it’s my first, because it somehow feels a little bit like a practical joke we’re all taking part in for their entertainment, which is probably only half true. But ultimately, I don’t see a lot of staying power in that theory of the case, that suddenly AMC will become a major music venue or something. Saying that, however, I really did like the weekly meetups at a theater that Cinemark used to do for me and my fifty gamer friends who wanted to play League in an amateur circuit on a big screen. I guess the logistics and economics of that league didn’t ultimately pan out, but it seemed like a really clever idea with legs.
If you’re reading this, you probably didn’t go or you had better things to do, or maybe you’re like Wife and you went multiple times and you’re just checking in to confirm that I didn’t leave during All Too Well or something like that (I did not, I went to get popcorn right before 1989 started). Looking back on this year without movies, this year of tarnished hopes, when Marvel pulled back on production so much that next year the only Marvel movies to look forward to are Deadpool 3 and MADAME WEBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB instead of the five that were slated, the Eras Tour has to rank in the top five.
