Taylor Swift’s Asylum Seekers

Taylor Swift’s invasion of the movie-box-office charts is another step in the banalization of moviegoing. Her three-hour concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is not a cultural advance like Richard Lester’s 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night, which gave aesthetic validation to Beatlemania. It’s the opposite: a demonstration of our era’s lost aesthetic standards and submission to mob madness, analogous to what’s occurred with politicized regime media. Fans’ artistic immaturity is being exploited as surely as illegal border-crossers are labeled “asylum seekers.” Swifties seek asylum from their emotional insecurities in her hideously samey, self-absorbed songs.