Article

Culture

Music

Taylor Swift

14 September 2023

6 min read

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.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

11 October 2024

5 min read

Cartoon villains: who's the real baddie?

What kind of villain do we want?

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A cartoon chase sees a car driven by a cow escaping from a car of baddies under a giant poster of their villainous boss.

Jazz Cow vs. Dr Popp.

“Nobody thinks they’re the bad guy”. That’s a phrase I often use when helping people write situation comedies. It’s always useful to have a strong antagonist who gets in the way of our hero. But the villains tend not to consider themselves to be evil. In fact, they are offended at the suggestion.

The Batman universe has turned the interesting villain to new levels. The Penguin is Gotham’s latest production, a brand-new TV series on HBO. Colin Farrell plays a highly nuanced anti-hero, exploring The Penguin’s “awkwardness, and his strength, and his villainy, yes, his propensity for violence”. Farrell told Comicbook.com he was attracted to the role because “there's also a heartbroken man inside there you know, which just makes it really tasty.” Audiences are often invited to have sympathy for the devil. Should we be worried about the blurring of the lines between good and evil?

I’ve been asking myself this question as I’ve been writing a new animation which involves a villain called Dr Popp who is trying to take over a city. But what kind of villain do we want in 2024?

Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of The Joker back in 1989 feels like pop-culture ancient history. His Joker was an embittered agent of chaos without many redeeming qualities but mercifully lacked the nihilism of later versions. It was an old-fashioned story of cops and robbers which has its own simplistic charm. But have those days gone forever, having been shot in the head and dropped off a bridge into a river?

The problem is it is so easy to humanise evil. You just give it a human face. The arch-villains of the twentieth century – the Nazi members of the SS – are rather sweet when portrayed by comedians Mitchell and Webb. A nervous member of the SS Unit (Mitchell) waiting for an attack from the Russians looks at the skull on his cap and asks his fellow comrade-in-arms (Webb): “Hans, are we the baddies?”

Any student of World War Two will know that it’s never as simple as good versus evil. Many terrible things were done by people who felt justified in their behaviour. Moreover, ‘the goodies’ also felt compelled to do morally dubious things – like the bombing of civilians in cities – in order to defeat ‘the baddies. After all, they started it.’ The truth is always far more complicated than the war films suggest.

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission.

Ten years ago, I was researching real life baddies for my sitcom Bluestone 42 about a bomb disposal team set in Afghanistan. At times, I had to think like the Taliban who, in their own minds, were entirely justified in leaving bombs by the side of the road, to be triggered by British soldiers or Afghan children. They were pretty relaxed about the outcome. It’s hard to sympathise with this way of thinking, but it made sense to them.

My internet search history from that time probably put me on some sort of Home Office watchlist. Maybe a small dossier was started on me. More recently, that dossier would have become thicker as I’ve moved sideways from sitcom into murder mysteries, having recently worked on Death in Paradise and Shakespeare and Hathaway. To work on shows like these, you need to be thinking of good reasons for good people to commit murder. Someone would need a very strong motive to commit a murder on an idyllic Caribbean island where the local detective has a 100 per cent resolution rate. You also need to research ingenuous methods for murdering people in a way that escapes detection. I’m surprised I’ve not yet had a knock on my door, or enquiries made to the neighbours to call a number if they see anything suspicious.

But what about cartoon villains where nothing is real? The bold colours and the larger-than-life characters might suggest that there is more clarity about goodies and baddies. But there isn’t. Evil villains – that is, villains who realise they are evil – are extremely rare. Skeletor from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comes to mind. This kind of demonic baddie can be entertaining with wit and charm, like Hades in the Disney movie, Hercules. This character had some brilliant one-liners and was superbly brought to life by the voice of James Woods. Overall, however, purely evil characters are hard to write.

Cartoon villains need proper motivation. This is either a character flaw or a backstory. In The Lion King, Scar is consumed with envy that his brother is king – and a good one at that. In The Incredibles, Syndrome is playing out his sense of injustice that he was not allowed to be Mr Incredible’s sidekick, Incrediboy. In The Simpsons, Mr Burns is essentially Mr Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s a Scrooge-type figure who doesn’t care about love and respect. He just wants to own the town.

The cartoon villain I’ve been thinking about is for a new animation project I’ve been working on called Jazz Cow. The eponymous hero is a saxophone-playing cow and a reluctant Bogart-style leader of a bohemian band of misfits. They are trying resist the advance of the all-consuming algorithm created by Dr Popp, the villain. But what’s his motivation?

Dr Popp is the very worst kind of villain: he has great power and he wants to help. In his own mind, he’s completely clear about his mission. He’s trying to make the world better, easier, safer, cheaper, more efficient and convenient. Why would anyone want to refuse his technology, reject his software and keep away from his algorithm?

This is why Dr Popp has to silence Jazz Cow, literally, by stealing his saxophone. He simply cannot allow Jazz Cow to delight audiences at Connie Snott’s with live improvised music. There’s no need for this music! Dr Popp has all the music you could possibly need, want or imagine. Why improvise when we have artificial intelligence?

Dr Popp is a cartoon villain for today when relativism is still alive and well. ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ are still concepts or points of view rather than absolutes. However, there is good and evil in Jazz Cow. But the evil doesn’t come from Doctor Popp. It comes from the user or consumer. That would be us.

‘The Algorithm’ is always learning and always trying to give us our hearts’ desire. And that’s the problem: our hearts frequently desire that which they cannot – and should not – have. Dr Popp’s algorithm is like a mirror held up to our faces. In it, we see the real baddie: ourselves. Not even Jazz Cow can save us from that. But what this horn-playing cow can do is to make the world a more humane place.

For more information about Jazz Cow, and information on how you can make the show happen, take a look at our Kickstarter – and don’t worry. Jazz Cow would approve, as it’s the creative’s way of sticking IT to the man.