Review
Culture
Music
Resurrection
Romance
Taylor Swift
6 min read

Taylor Swift proves Mr Bennet right

Romanticism: ruining lives since 1800. And we love it.
Hand-written poetry on a page
Memo: to JA from TS.
@taylorswift Instagr

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennet has a conversation with his favourite daughter, Lizzy, about her older sister’s heartbreak. He says,  

‘Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.’ 

It’s one of those lines, genius as it is, that I would hate were it not written by Jane Austen. But it was, so I don’t. I do, however, like to think that his words are outdated. His thoughts, an artefact. That such a notion may have been true when women were unable to have any kind of aspirations that transcended romantic (and not-so-romantic) attachments, but we’re definitely over that now. I sit smugly in the knowledge that Mr Bennet’s words are a jibe that I can affectionately roll my eyes at; witty, yet redundant.  

At least, that’s what I did think. Now, annoyingly, I’m not so sure. What changed my mind? Well, Taylor Swift’s latest album dropped. And now I think that Austen, as usual, was onto something. 

The Tortured Poets Department has broken more records than I can count, many of which were broken before it was even released. Love it or hate it (I happen to be in the love it camp), Taylor is going to make it pretty darn hard for you to ignore it. Housed within this juggernaut of an album are thirty-one songs that seek to remind us that it’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Thirty-one songs that offer a masterclass in melodrama. Thirty-one songs that prove Mr Bennet right.  

Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? 

Here’s the theory, the premise, the pop-culture context you need to understand this album’s intentions: ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was/is a WhatsApp group that Swift’s past-love, Joe Alwyn, was/is a part of. And so, this album is their story; it’s the story of their relationship crumbling, their hearts breaking, their understanding of one another disintegrating. Whether the lyrics are filled with fact or fiction, it doesn’t really matter. We’re soaking it up - every reference, every hint, every clue. These tortured poets have captivated us.  

Agony, tragedy, ecstasy, torment, regret: that’s the currency this album deals in. Heartbreak, I suppose. This record-shattering album is about heartbreak. And it got me thinking, why are we so obsessed with love hurting? Why are Romeo and Juliet something to aspire to? Why is tragedy some kind of signifier of ‘real’ love? Why, as Mr Bennet says, do we like being ‘crossed in love now and then’

The key lyric that holds the first song on Taylor’s album together sums it up pretty well, as Taylor melodramatically declares – ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’.  

Firstly - no it’s not, Taylor. You’re Taylor Swift, a life less ruined no-one could find. But secondly, why is that tumultuous kind of love something to idolise? I’m genuinely wondering. Because, admittedly, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.  

Maybe it’s a way in which we feel as though we’re living a meaningful story, it’s our main-character-syndrome rearing its head. Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? That our relationship is re-arranging the cosmos somehow? That this pain is so powerful, stories will be told of it? Afterall, many of the greatest love stories end in agony, do they not? Would we care about Titanic’s Jack and Rose, La La Land’s Mia and Sebastian, or Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie and Lindsay had they lived happily ever after? Perhaps not. If a beige life is to be avoided at all costs, the torture of heartbreak is, I suppose, a particularly vibrant shade.  

Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious. 

Or perhaps it’s a sensation thing, akin to our obsession with jumping out of airplanes or walking over hot coals. Maybe we just want to feel. And according to most psychologists, heartbreak is one of the most powerful and emotive experiences one could face – a plane could not get high enough, nor coals hot enough, to compete. The science behind it is fascinating. I truly had no idea.  

Which leads me onto my second question – why don’t we care for the science of it?  

Why, when it comes to explaining what we’re feeling, do we declare our ‘heart to be broken’ as opposed to ‘the right side our brain is experiencing a deeply distressing emotional sensation following a shattering of an emotional attachment, triggering feelings of loss and inadequacy’? 

Interesting, isn’t it? How that second definition somehow feels less true. Maybe we have Romanticism to blame for that - the poets, philosophers and writers who shunned reasonable, practical, scientific language in favour of the tragic, the grand, and the sublime. Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious.  

In her song, Guilty as Sin, Taylor writes –  

What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway. What if the way you hold me is holy… I choose you and me, religiously.’ 

Yes, she’s comparing her crush on a man to the crucifixion of the Son of God. If this isn’t over the top, I don’t know what is. In many ways, this album knows it’s being silly, over-dramatic and naïve. But it also knows that to be those things is to be as honest as possible. It is shunning human-sized explanations of heartbreak, and is instead desperately searching for the deepest, highest, grandest language it can find - because that kind of language just feels truer. And I find it pretty fascinating that such language still has Jesus all over it.  

All of it has got me thinking, we don’t really want everything controlled, measured and understood, do we? We don’t really want to be the most powerful thing we know. I think that’s a myth. A convincing one, I grant you. But one that has cracks in it. Romanticism is one such crack. School of Life says this about the Romantics, ‘Romantics don’t believe in God, but they go in search of the emotions one might find around religion’. Awe. Transcendence. Our own small-ness in the face of something great – that kind of thing.  

They don’t believe in God, but they crave him. Interesting.  

I think maybe that’s (at least partly) why we want our love stories, the good and the bad, to engulf us, to be something we must succumb to, to be written in the stars – predating our awareness of it and transcending our control over it. We think, at least to an extent, that love and heartbreak, they happen to us. They’re a sacred hand that we have been dealt and must grapple with. This is Romanticism - and apparently it hasn’t gone anywhere, Taylor Swift and her band of tortured poets have just proved it.  

Perhaps Mr Bennet was right after all; perhaps we do have an odd thing about heartbreak. But hey, don’t blame women. Blame the Romantics and that God-shaped hole within them… and within us too, apparently.  

Review
Art
Culture
Film & TV
War & peace
4 min read

Not for glory or galleries, capturing modern wars through art

Mary Kinmonth documents the battles women artists see.
In a bombed-out tiled room, two art works hang in the shape of a tiled jacket and shape
Second Hand 7, by Zhanna Kadyrova
Foxtrot Films.

 

When it comes to war, what do women see that men don’t? This is the question asked repeatedly throughout British filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s new documentary War Paint: Women at War. The third part of a trilogy, the film focuses on the stories of female artists who have created art in their experience of war and conflict. From British women during the London Blitz to those responding to contemporary conflicts in Iran, Ukraine and Sudan, the film takes a thoughtful look into how war has been experienced by those who have been previously excluded from the story. 

Zhanna Kadyrova is a Ukranian artist working from a progressing front line. One sequence shows a fight against time as her team attempts to remove one of her public sculptures as the front line draws closer. Kadyrova operates in recent conflict zones– one of her series involves transforming tiled walls in bombed-out rubble into clothes that appear to hang from the remaining walls. In the wake of violent destruction, Kadyrova wants you to remember the lives left behind. 

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and artist working from New York. Her work brings together the weapon, the human body, the veil, and the text of the Qu’ran to ask questions of the impacts of the Iranian war on women.  Neshat makes you look right into the eyes of these women– she puts weapons of war into their hands and thus gives them agency that the Iranian government has taken away. 

Marcelle Hanselaar’s work shows the unspoken side of war- depicting the aftermath of violence and sexual assault that many women experience when conflict rips through their homes. 

Women at War brings the audience through one female artist after another, depicting a diversity of styles, voices, and perspectives that range from official war commissions to illegal graffiti. The artists shown don’t even all agree with filmmaker Margy Kinmonth’s premise - that women always see things differently from men. But what they bring together is a view of war far removed from ideas of national glory that often line the halls of national galleries. 

The filmmaker’s own art teacher, the painter Maggi Hambling, says this: 

“For men, victory and defeat marks the end of a war. For the woman, the war doesn’t end.” 

Knowing the consequences and aftermath of war– destroyed communities, post traumatic stress disorder, sexual violence, broken families, that war is more than valiance– isn’t a perspective held by women alone. 

According to a recent YouGov poll, “a third of 18-40 year olds would refuse to serve in the event of a world war – even if the UK were under imminent threat of invasion.” Among reasons listed are an unwillingness “to fight for the rich and powerful – who they see as profiteers or otherwise unfairly able to avoid the consequences of conflict themselves.”

As one respondent put it: "My life is more valuable than being wasted in a war caused by rich people’s greed."

Women have been speaking up for the last 50 years, and the young have heard them. War is not glory, but trauma. Young people see this when they look around. They don’t easily buy into nationalist rhetoric and have no pretenses about the glory of war. They know war is not a place to seek accolades upon accolades, but an evil reality that pays an inordinate toll on human society. 

Today, global tensions are high, and war seems more possible a reality for many in England than previously. Keir Starmer has said the government will increase military defence spending to 2.5 per cent of the national budget by 2027. But Brits aren’t lining up to buy their uniforms. 

If the UK government expects its young citizens to prepare for conflict, they need to be honest about what that involves. They need to be prepared to face a knowing crowd about the realities of war and show a willingness to fight for their lives during peacetime. It’s not that young people are politically disinterested or unwilling to take a stand when it matters. Students at universities rising up in pro-Palestine protests or climate activism reveal that they care greatly about the world they are living in. They want to take an active role in shaping it, and aren’t afraid to face consequences if they find a worthy fight. 

Political commentators used to think we have reached “the end of history” with liberal democracy the last man standing. But War Paint: Women at War shows us that even an end to war doesn’t bring the end of suffering. It complicates the narrative that war is a path to victory. Everyone pays the price of war, yet those in power rarely bear the burden. If leaders want young people to fight for their country, they must first prove they are fighting for them. Otherwise, no one will answer the call.

 

View stills from the film and find screening times.

Watch the trailer

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