Taylor’s truth: how superstar authenticity appeals

As Taylor Swift fans took over his town, Nathan Betts contemplates the truth at the heart of the superstar’s appeal.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Taylor Swift wears a long yellow dress and signs with an outstretched arm against a backdrop of woods and a close up her singing beside it.

Taylor Swift performing on the Eras Tour.

Paolo V, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have been paying any attention to Taylor Swift’s most recent tour, you will know why the last several months have been termed The Summer of Taylor Swift. The artist has traveled across America, boosting economies en route, and filling stadiums with contagious happiness.

I hadn’t realized the enormous impact Swift had made on entire cities until I was walking downtown Seattle earlier this summer for a Mariners baseball game. While walking from my car to the stadium I encountered an endless sea of Taylor Swift fans waiting outside the stadium in the early afternoon for her show that would begin that evening. I had heard about Taylor Swift before, had listened to her music, but seeing what I saw that day told me something more profound about her and something about us as human beings.

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different.

In recent history, we have seen different artists such as The Rolling Stones and AC/DC elicit strange (and frankly awkward) adulation where people throw their clothes onto the stage. U2 concerts have been hailed as a religious experience in which stadiums become cathedrals. And more recently, Justin Bieber gave many “Bieber Fever.”

But what I saw on the downtown streets of Seattle leading up to Taylor Swift’s concert was different. I’ve been trying to pinpoint what it was exactly that struck me that day. People of all ages packed into surrounding streets in Taylor Swift attire, countless groups lustily singing her songs, cars and vans marked up with Taylor Swift song lyrics. There was a unity, a togetherness and distinct humanity to it all. The feeling was more akin to a spiritual revival than merely a big stadium concert rolling into town.

I remember coming back home that evening and texting friends to see what they made of it. My question was: “What is it about Taylor Swift that has enabled her to connect with so many?” The answers I received all struck the same notes: A Taylor Swift concert was the best they had ever experienced. But more than the concert, it’s the vibe, the pure joy and happiness that you experience with everyone at the concert. There is something about her that makes people feel happy. And although she is a stratospheric star, she has deliberately made a point of seeming like the girl next store. People think and feel that she is their friend. She is relatable.

If you are a Taylor Swift fan, you already know this. But as these thoughts about Taylor Swift rumbled through my brain for weeks after that experience, they took on a greater meaning during a lunch meeting I had with a friend back from college for the summer. Midway through our time together he asked me, “How do you deal with people who are fake?” The pensive look on my face revealed that I wasn’t exactly sure what he was asking, so he sharpened the question: “How do you deal with people who are hypocrites?”

I now understood what he was getting at. He gave a few examples of friends and leaders around him who had acted in hypocritical ways. He saw through it. Although he had moved on from those relationships, the jagged edges of hypocrisy still dug into him. They hurt. My friend was asking me how or if it’s even possible to trust in people who let you down.

The truth is, I’ve lost count of the conversations I’ve had with people who have asked or expressed the same question. And yet, when my friend asked me this question, I wasn’t sure what to say.

I offered just one thought: “What if the antidote to hypocrisy is the real thing? As in, what if the medicine for the disingenuous and fake is seeing a life that is genuine and real—a person who is true, honest, who lives a life of integrity?

And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

This is where my mind came back to Taylor Swift and why it is that millions of us feel a real connection to her. The answer is nuanced, to be sure, but I wonder if part of it has to do with the fact that when we see or hear Taylor Swift, we experience a person who comes across as real. Perhaps more than in recent memory, we as a society have a low tolerance for BS. Yet, despite our abhorrence for the fake, our attraction to the real and authentic has grown just as strongly.

Enter Taylor Swift. Among other qualities, Swift is not a fake. Isobel Jones, a cradle Swiftie, recently explained this to me:

‘Taylor Swift isn’t fake because we’ve known her since she was 14, she gave all of herself to us, in her songs, in her interactions with fans, sending her coat to a fan who loved it (During the RED era; Swift would have been 22ish). She’s one of the first Tumblr gen artists who has consistently connected with fans and grown up with them, proving her consistency.’

We can relate to the words in Swift’s songs. Her lyrics of sadness, anger, hope, and grace connect with us. She touches the human spirit, not necessarily because we’ve been through the exact same kind of struggles, but because we are all human beings trying to figure out how to cope with hard things in life, own up to our shadows and weaknesses and still engage our journey in life. And in Taylor Swift, we’ve found a companion who knows the struggle of life and invites us to join her.

In our age of loneliness and disintegrating relational bonds, I believe the message of Taylor Swift transcends her concerts and songs. She carries a message for us, a reminder of what we need as human beings. Truth, integrity, authenticity. We don’t necessarily expect people to be perfect, but we need an honesty in our relationships about who people really are, whether that is the good or the bad. Just please, whatever you do, don’t be a hypocrite.

Wounds from hypocrisy can be hard to recover from. As a person of faith, I have experienced first-hand and have heard myriad stories of hypocrisy in the church. There is indeed much to be disheartened by in our world, and far-too-often within church walls. But in my more sober-minded moments when I am looking for lasting and healing solutions, I encounter a balm for my pain when I focus on the core and centre of the Christian faith.

At its heart, Christianity goes beyond offering merely propositional prescriptions for the pain that paralyses us. Instead, hope is offered supremely in and through the person of Jesus Christ, God-in-flesh. Within Christ is a truth that rolls throughout the whole of sacred Scripture. It is the beautiful message that there is a God who can be trusted. We can trust him because he is real, he lived in our world of pain and hypocrisy, and he conquered its power. We might carry scars for the rest of our lives, but Christ’s life tells us that there will come a point, before we die or after, when he will heal the deepest of our wounds. He can be trusted, not because he makes everything in life work out the way we want it to, or because we will never experience pain, but because in Christ, we’ve found the one who knows the way through it.

There’s also a challenge here for those who follow Christ and it is simply to reflect his character of truth, love, and beauty in how we live thereby opening up a world into which people actually want to inhabit.

Recovering from being hurt by hypocrisy can be a long and hard road to travel. A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of how difficult that is while my experience of Seattle bubbling with Taylor Swift happiness provided a signpost of hope. And behind all of this I am made to wonder, more than I can ever recall, whether faith in Jesus Christ can help steer us in the right direction, if we are willing to engage who he was and the life into which he invites us.

Review

Books

Culture

Ethics

Film & TV

8 November 2024

4 min read

Small Things Like These: putting the spotlight on backstage goodness

What it means for a film to be good.

Kevin Hargaden

Kevin is a social theologian studying ethics and economics.

The gaunt face of a dishevelled man stares into the distance

A ‘stellar’ Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong.

Lionsgate.

Small Things Like These is a novella by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Published in 2021, it compresses a remarkable story into 128 pages. Acclaimed widely by critics and readers, it follows Bill Furlong, a fuel merchant living in the small County Wexford town of New Ross in 1986, as Christmas approaches. While delivering coal to the local convent, Bill makes an alarming discovery. Memories of his childhood begin to press in on him and he finds himself in an existential crisis.

Like her previous (very short) work, Foster, Small Things Like These is an understated book with a searing moral clarity. And just as Foster was adapted for the screen – in the astonishing Irish-language film The Quiet Girl – a movie version of Small Things Like These is now likely showing at a cinema near you.

The movie is built around a stellar performance from Cillian Murphy. It would be criminal if his name is not featured among the shortlists when awards season comes round. Many of the film’s most arresting scenes feature close-ups of his face as Bill wrestles with the implications of his discovery and the phantoms of his past. The effect is that the film serves as an almost literal portrait of what it means to be a decent person.

The story begins with Bill making a delivery to the convent. He sees a mother drop off her screaming daughter to the back door, where she is met and manhandled inside by a nun. The teenager protests passionately, but to no avail. The viewer understands that this girl has “fallen pregnant”, to use the Hiberno-English idiom that was so common in the twentieth century. She has been dispatched by her family to this institution to serve out the months of pregnancy and to remove any shame or taint from their reputation. Bill watches as the girl shouts out for her father, who is entirely absent.

And, after a tense interaction with an aggressive nun, he goes home to his five girls and his wife, clearly shaken.

A few days later, unable to sleep, haunted by memories of his own childhood being raised by a single mother, with an absent father, relying on the kindness of a wealthy local landowner, he begins his deliveries before dawn. As he deposits peat briquettes in the coal shed of the convent, he discovers a teenaged girl abandoned in the corner of the tiny, filthy room. She is in deep distress and Bill responds instinctively, wrapping his coat around her shoulders and bringing her inside to the convent.

While the existence of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes were not a secret in twentieth century Ireland, the exact details of their operations were not widely understood. With these two encounters, so close together, and his own personal biography as the son of a woman who was subject to exactly the same marginalising dynamics, Bill can no longer be satisfied to turn a blind eye to the oppression and alienation endured by those sent for reformation.

It evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

The film gathers momentum as Bill is forced to confront the way his mother had been treated for “falling pregnant” and the reality experienced by girls the same age as his daughters who were in a similar situation. In the midst of his existential angst, he finds little solace in the no-nonsense pragmatism of his wife who reminds him “there are things you have to ignore” to get on in life. He is taken aside by his local publican, a woman who has similarly scrabbled up from humble origins to establish a thriving business and cautioned to not make trouble for the nuns since “their fingers are in every pie in the town”.

I will refrain from fully revealing every detail of the film’s plot. But this element of the screenplay – where Claire Keegan along with Enda Walsh – draw out the sense in which the oppressive ecclesial institutions were enabled and even sanctioned by the wider population is exceptionally well done. The film does not pull any punches on the evils that were committed in the name of churches in Ireland. Indeed, if anything, the presentation of the nuns veers too far towards caricatures of pure malevolence. But with surgical precision, it evokes the ways in which all such systems of oppression are socially constructed and maintained. Otherwise, good people learn to look the other way.

And that is the lasting significance of this film. Toni Morrison has spoken about how it can seem harder to write about goodness than evil. “Evil has a blockbuster audience; goodness lurks backstage.” In Small Things Like This, Claire Keegan introduces us to a hardworking small business owner who treats his staff well, a loving father who seeks to care for his wife, a man who lives down a back street of a provincial town in an overlooked part of a small island on the periphery of Europe. And in this very definitively backstage context, he is presented as heroic in his pursuit of the Good.

We all fancy ourselves to be the one person who would stand up and oppose systems of oppression if we ever found ourselves enmeshed in them. Cillian Murphy’s depiction of Bill Furlong whispers to us that we likely are enmeshed in just that way and are choosing not to notice. Small Things Like These is a heavy film that somehow liberates. It reminds us that there is, within each of us, this appetite for seeing the Good and bring brave enough to do it. It is worth your time far more than any competing blockbuster.