Author: Peter M. Juul

Taylor Swift makes her own sunshine on “The Life of a Showgirl”

Over the course of her nearly two-decade career, Taylor Swift’s sly sense of humor and puckish nature has often gone overlooked or unnoticed by far too many critics and listeners alike. She’s turned a satirical eye toward her media portrayal as a “psycho serial dater girl” on the hit “Blank Space,” for instance, and poked fun at herself and her literary pretensions on the title track of last year’s The Tortured Poets Department.

That sense of humor is on full display on her latest album, the fun and brilliant The Life of a Showgirl. Light-hearted and sunny but neither lightweight nor pollyannaish, the album sees Swift shed her insecurities and anxieties to embrace the mischievous side of her personality amidst a catchy, upbeat mélange of 1970s vintage pop sounds that ranges from disco to folk to Fleetwood Mac-style rock over its taut, straight-to-the-point 42-minute runtime. All the while, she sacrifices very little if any of the emotional depth we’ve come to expect from her music; indeed, she maintains a laser-like focus on her lasting artistic preoccupations: resilience in the face of adversity, a love of fate, and the basic human desire for intimacy and connection. In that, she once again manifests her singular ability to transmute the intensely personal and idiosyncratic into the shared and universal.

Or as she herself puts it, her music serves as a mirror for her listeners that can reflect their own experiences at a given moment in their lives.

On The Life of a Showgirl, Swift is less interested in self-doubt and searching introspection—though it still quietly lingers on deep in the background—than in distilling and dispensing hard-earned wisdom. Life can be tough and often takes more than it gives, she reminds us, but it’s how we deal with the hardships and heartbreaks that inevitably come our way that really matters. No matter what happens, it’s up to us to make our own happiness and live life to its fullest regardless of our own circumstances or shared predicaments—and despite the physical and emotional pain that may be involved. It’s a sentiment that resists the rampant cynicism and nihilism of our time in the best possible way, shooting a piercing ray of light through the doom and gloom of an ever-darkening age.

But more on that later.

Album opener “The Fate of Ophelia” kicks off The Life of a Showgirl with a bang, an obviously self-conscious riff on Shakespeare in the vein of “Love Story.” Here, Swift once again inverts the tragic death of a lovelorn character driven to extremes by heartbreak. She finds herself saved from this fate by her new significant other (as well as the massive crowds that turned out for her monumental Eras Tour, if her written prologue is any indication), who “dug me out of my grave” and stopped love from driving her mad. “No longer drowning and deceived,” she intones quietly, “All because you came for me.” This sense of release comes across strong in the chorus, as she sheds the fears and worries that previously held her back.

The next track, “Elizabeth Taylor,” catches Swift in an anxious frame of mind as she reflects on her history of failed relationships and wonders hopefully if her present romance will actually last.¹ “All the right guys promised they’d stay,” she laments, “Under bright lights, they withered away/But you bloom.” There’s something different about her current lover, though, and she warns him not to “ever end up anything but mine.” Thundering keyboard strikes and beats accompany Swift’s winding vocals and reflect her moody, ruminative lyrics. And she’s equally apprehensive about her staying power as an artist and performer: “You’re only as hot as your next hit, baby,” she reminds herself.

But it’s “Opalite” that’s both the standout song on The Life of a Showgirl and the album’s thematic crux. The track opens with a first verse that expresses Swift’s former anxiety: she persistently ruminated about past lovers, believed her house to be haunted by her past relationships, and worried that new ones were never going to last. Swift reaches back and reprises imagery and motifs from earlier songs like “Bejeweled” and “Daylight” as well as albums like folklore² and Midnights; she and her significant other were once “Sleepless in an onyx night/But now the sky is opalite.” What’s more, they ought to appreciate the experiences that led them to where they are now. “It’s all right/You were dancing through the lightning strikes,” she reassures us.

An infectiously happy bridge lays out Swift’s overall philosophy of life quite nicely:

This is just

A storm inside a teacup

But shelter here with me, my love

Thunder like a drum

This life will beat you up, up, up, up

This is just

A temporary speed bump

But failure brings you freedom

And I can bring you love, love, love, love, love

Airy, dreamy guitar work and upbeat melodies complement Swift’s lyrics beautifully as she turns setbacks, hardships, and heartbreak into the path forward—not something to be avoided, but in fact embraced or, at least, accepted as a way to “make your own sunshine.”

The ancient Greek and Roman philosophical notion that the perfectly wise sage is content even under torture and other extreme, painful situations because he or she chooses to focus on what really matters suggests itself here: no matter our particular circumstances or experiences, we have the power to create our own contentment. Or as Swift herself explains, “life isn’t going to always give you what you want, you’re not always going to get your way, you’re going to get your heart broken, things are going to happen to you, chaos will ensue, but you have to pick your own happiness… You have to sometimes make your own happiness, just like man-made opal.”

If “Opalite” stands out as The Life of a Showgirl’s exuberant statement of purpose, “Eldest Daughter” and “Ruin The Friendship” together serve as its beating, bleeding heart. On the former track, Swift fires a broadside against online culture and ironic detachment before launching into an encomium to sincerity and vulnerability. Fashionable poses of apathy ring hollow, and Swift no longer feels the need to practice “cautious discretion” in an effort to seem unbothered—she’ll stick with her own innate earnestness instead. A delicate piano and acoustic guitars set a confessional mood as Swift reclaims the innocence and idealism of her childhood over a killer bridge: “I thought that I’d never find that/Beautiful, beautiful life that/Shimmers that innocent light back/Like when we were young.” With her vow to never leave or let down herself, her significant other, and everyone else who matters in her life, she exposes her own personal vulnerabilities and gives us license to to the same—even at the risk of appearing uncool and out of step with the pervasive cynicism of our times.

In “Ruin The Friendship,” Swift paints a striking and heartfelt portrait of a youthful romantic risk not taken. Set to a bouncy 1970s-style bass line, it’s a classic Swift story that’s shot through with evocative detail through the two first verses: “Glistening grass from September rain” as she and her friend speed down Tennessee roads, for instance, while a “Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist” at prom. A quietly devastating emotional blow follows the bridge: “Abigail called me with the bad news/Goodbye/And we’ll never know why.” “My advice is to always ruin the friendship/ Better that than regret it for all time,” Swift counsels as the song climaxes, “And my advice is to always answer the question/Better that than to ask it all your life.” Take advantage of the present moment, she urges, live life to the fullest in the here and now—and don’t dissuade yourself from taking risks out of an irrational fear that the worst might happen.

Swift goes fully tongue-in-cheek with several irreverent and playful tracks on the back half of The Life of a Showgirl. Over an edgy guitar riff on “Actually Romantic,” she springboards off specific incidents to craft a wider critique of her detractors—but more importantly, Swift artfully reframes the vitriol she receives as a strange form of endearment rather than believing it should leave her upset. “It’s honestly wild/All the effort you’ve put in,” she says, marveling at the time and energy others devote to disparaging her. (The dictum of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that it’s not things themselves that disturb us but our opinions about them comes to mind.) The song also lays a clever trap for its supposed targets and Swift’s other would-be backbiters and denigrators: if they respond in any real way, they simply prove her underlying point.

Then there’s “Wood,” a cheeky disco-inflected number that starts innocently enough as Swift declares she’s done with superstition when it comes to romance; she and her partner now make their own luck. The song then dramatically swerves into sexual innuendo about as subtle as Prince’s on the likes of “Head” and “Erotic City.” Swift proclaims (among other things) that she doesn’t need to catch a wedding bouquet to “know a hard rock is on the way.” It’s a legitimately hilarious song, and deliberately so—as on all her songs, she knows exactly what she’s doing here.³

For its part, “CANCELLED!” weaves satire and serious reflection together as Swift laughs at and learns from her own experience of unwarranted social death, gently teasing her reputation era persona while offering counsel to anyone who might confront similar predicaments. She enumerates the petty pretexts often put forward for cancellation and notes just how quickly a mob mentality takes hold; aspiring cancelers have “already picked out your grave and hearse,” and there’s nothing much to be done about it. As the song proceeds, however, Swift stresses the need for resilience in the face of unjustified opprobrium and ostracism: “Now they’ve broken you like they’ve broken me/But a shattered glass is a lot more sharp/And now you know exactly who your friends are/We’re the ones with matching scars.”

It’s an arch lyric: Swift wasn’t broken by her attempted cancellation but, as she makes clear, emerged stronger for all its torment.³ The seemingly worst experiences can, in fact, leave us better off—the most difficult obstacles we face can become the way forward if make proper use of them.

After the sweet and endearing palate-cleanser “Honey,” The Life of a Showgirl concludes with a stirring, valedictory title track that reminds us of the pain and hardship that’s typically involved in doing anything worthwhile—especially in light of the grueling nature of Swift’s own Eras Tour. She and pop starlet Sabrina Carpenter trade verses about an encounter with an experienced entertainer who tries to discourage their dreams of a career in show business. The song steadily escalates to a cathartic bridge, where Swift proudly declares she “took her pearls of wisdom, hung them from my neck/I paid my dues with every bruise, I knew what to expect.” She’s now “married to the hustle” and will “never know another” life outside of the one she’s got—and she “wouldn’t have it any other way.” An outro featuring audio from the end of the Eras Tour puts an exclamation point on the album: pain in life and show business is real, but damn if it isn’t all worth it.

As an album, The Life of a Showgirl has many more layers to peel back, from Swift’s never-ending dialogue with her earlier work and her addictive, purposeful wordplay to the album’s literary conceits and its commentary on the destructive power of social media. Indeed, Swift’s ability to layer meanings and motifs one on top another—all without contradiction—is part and parcel of her particular genius as an artist and songwriter.

Beyond all that, though, The Life of a Showgirl runs directly against the dark and dismal temper of our times—and in the best possible way. Swift has never shied away from vulnerability and emotional sincerity in her music, and this album in particular marks perhaps her most sustained assault yet on the ironic detachment and cynicism that have pervaded and corroded our public lives and personal relationships over the past decade. We live in an era steeped in nihilism, after all, one that gives free rein to our basest instincts and dissolves the bonds that join us together as fellow citizens and, indeed, human beings.

Given this sordid state of affairs, it’s all too easy to assume that we ought to remain moody and angry and joyless lest we fail to take our situation seriously enough—as if drowning ourselves in that cocktail of misery, rage, and despair known as doomerism somehow keeps us vigilant against the encroaching darkness. That’s not a knock against music and other forms of art that express whatever angst and fury we may feel about our ongoing slouch toward fascism, but simply to observe that we already have a surfeit of such material available at the moment. More to the point, though, it’s essential for our own sanity in present circumstances to refuse the temptation to confine ourselves to one single suite of emotions.

With The Life of a Showgirl, Swift tells us to take and feel whatever joy and happiness we can make for ourselves and others—especially those closest to us—even as the world falls apart around us. It’s a bright and shiny antidote to the nihilism and doomerism so prevalent today, a stark contrast to the supermassive moral black hole that is the current presidential administration and the pessimistic, nothing-matters zeitgeist it engenders among too many of its erstwhile opponents. That contrast makes the album and indeed Swift herself strangely countercultural by default, despite her own status as the one mainstream pop culture icon whose albums still sell in the millions.

If nothing else, The Life of a Showgirl provides the sort of re-energizing jolt that many of us need right now—a reminder that we retain the ability to make our own sunshine, no matter how dark things may get in the world. And that’s no small feat these days.

1. Elizabeth Taylor, it should be noted, became known for her multiple failed relationships as much as her career as an actor—making her a source of advice for Swift as she ponders her own serial romantic failures and strikes out for a new relationship she hopes will last. ↩︎
2. The contrast with folklore’s “peace” is striking and noteworthy: on that track, Swift plaintively asks her then-significant other if it’d be “enough if I could never give you peace?” Now, however, Swift confidently offers her new partner shelter as the storms rage around her—it’s no longer a question, but an assertion. ↩︎
3. It’s made all the funnier by the attempts by Swift and fiancé Travis Kelce to insist with barely straight faces that the song is not at all about what we all know it’s obviously about, at least in part. ↩︎
4. It’s also an intriguing echo of a lyric from folklore’s “mirrorball,” where masked partygoers “watch as my shattered edges glisten” after she breaks into “a million pieces.” And Swift’s own proclaimed artistic ambition for her work “to be a mirror for people” reflects the song’s conceit of Swift herself as a mirrorball who will “show you every version of yourself tonight.” ↩︎

Will Artemis I be the start of our Next Giant Leap – or our One Last Shot?

It’s an image that immediately brings to mind the golden era of human spaceflight: an enormous rocket at rest in the purple-pink light of dawn at Kennedy Space Center, ready to blast off to destinations once thought beyond humanity’s grasp. But this rocket isn’t the mighty Saturn V standing vigil in the twilight or under the watchful gaze of searchlight beams on hot July nights in 1969 as it waits to send the three Apollo 11 astronauts on their way to the Moon. Instead, it’s the uninspiringly named Space Launch System, a brawny orange rocket carrying the new Orion crew vehicle and a series of instruments (including a plush astronaut Snoopy as a zero-gravity indicator) on a crucial test flight to lunar orbit and back again to Earth.

If all goes well on this first mission of the Artemis Program, it’ll be the first step toward what NASA officials and others occasionally call our Next Giant Leap: sending astronauts back to the Moon by 2025 at the earliest, and then on to Mars and points beyond. It’s entirely possible that Artemis I will help rekindle our exhausted imaginations, raise our shared horizons, and spark a modest renaissance in space exploration that’ll eventually lead to astronauts hiking on the surface of Mars. I personally hope that’s the case, and about two-thirds of the time that’s what I think will happen – at least to some small and uncertain degree.

At the same time, though, it’s hard not to sense an aura of unease and foreboding that occasionally lingers over Artemis I. It’s almost as if the mission represents one last shot at a better future, not humanity’s next giant leap into the cosmos – an attempt to prove to the world and, most of all, to ourselves that we can keep the light of our shared hopes and common ambitions burning. Every now and again, the mission feels more like an elegy for our nation’s once-soaring aspirations and determination to achieve the seemingly impossible than a powerful measure of our talents and energies. This launch takes place in a time of palpable national and even global pessimism, when far too many of us seem to have lost our grip on reality altogether and many more harbor serious, corrosive doubts about the future of the country, the planet, and indeed humanity at large.

It’s a far cry from the nervous anticipation that accompanied the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, an electric mood eloquently captured early on in Todd Douglas Miller’s stark but euphoric 2019 documentary Apollo 11. If anything, the times were even more grim then than they are now: a raging war in Vietnam, riots in major cities across the country, and the ever-present specter of nuclear war with the Soviet Union only begin to scratch the surface. Nor did matters improve much over the next several years, with energy crises, inflation, and Watergate all hitting in the five years that followed Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Even if it just offered most Americans a breather from the seemingly constant upheaval and frequent bad news of the late 1960s, Apollo embodied a sense of national optimism and faith in the future that’s diminished and faded in the intervening decades.

Artemis doesn’t carry with it the same colossal burdens and hopes as Apollo, at least not in as obvious or conscious a way. Amidst our present national miasma, however, Artemis has been burdened with an unappreciated significance that few realize but most of us intuitively understand at some level: do we still have the sort of ambition that drove Apollo, and the confidence in ourselves necessary to carry it out? It’s hard to give a positive or even minimally certain answer to that question right now, especially with everything that could possibly (or even probably) go wrong for America and the world over the next several years. At times it feels like we’ve entered our national twilight, a long, drawn-out decline into collective senescence – or worse, a dramatic collapse into national senility and madness.

It’s up to Artemis to help prove this widely-held defeatism wrong. That’s the heavy burden that rests on the shoulders Apollo’s twin sister today, one largely unencumbered by the hopes we invested in its predecessor. Instead, Artemis bears an outsized share of the responsibility of keeping our heads above water as we make our way through the rest of this decade. Of course, it won’t have to carry that particular weight alone: the Mars rover Perseverance and the James Webb Space Telescope have already given us steady drips of optimism in recent months and years. If successful, though, Artemis has the potential to do that on a much grander scale in sending astronauts further than anyone has ever gone before and, in time, returning them to the lunar surface.

Again, most of the time I’m personally hopeful that Artemis can help inoculate us against despair and revive our atrophied sense of national possibility. There’s no denying the considerable enthusiasm for and interest in Artemis I that exists among ordinary people around the world, much as it does for the Webb Space Telescope and the stunning images of the heavens it’s beamed down since July. More robotic missions are on the way as well, including one later this decade that will pick up samples collected by Perseverance on Mars and return them back to Earth. Even the legacy of Apollo remains strong, as evidenced by the crowds that showed up in the sweltering summer heat in July 2019 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first Moon landing. It’s not as if there aren’t good, solid grounds for optimism, at least when it comes to America’s space exploration program.

Still, it’s hard to shake the disquieting sense that Artemis offers us a reminder of passed ambitions more than anything else. Like the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome or the Great Sphinx of Giza or the carcasses of aqueducts and amphitheaters that litter the Mediterranean world, Artemis recalls of the grandeur and passions of an age still remembered but long since passed. And like those ancient wonders of art and architecture, it invites us to contemplate the impermanence of even the most spectacular and epochal of our achievements – ones that pushed ourselves to the limits of our intellect, endurance, and skills.

Will Artemis be our next giant leap into the heavens or our one last attempt to reach for the stars before we fall off a precipice of our own making? Does it mark the beginning of a new era or the end of an old one, a new dawn or a darkening national twilight? For my own part, I remain fundamentally optimistic about both Artemis and America. But I also know that it’s far too soon to know the answers to these questions, and there’s only one thing we can really do to find out: turn the page and see what happens next.

A retrospective meditation

It’s hard to believe it’s been ten years.

I’d taken the day off to attend an all-day marathon of the five films that then constituted to the Marvel Cinematic Universe ahead of the main event: a midnight screening of The Avengers on May 4, 2012. It had been a long day for those of us assembled at the theater, but the excitement was palpable as the clock ticked toward midnight. To pass nearly of a nice early summer day indoors with fellow fans watching Iron Man, Captain America, Black Widow, and company on the big screen and then see The Avengers was something of an exceptional experience, one that’s fairly easy to put into words yet hard to fully capture in substance.

Other moviegoers soon started to show up at the multiplex for their own midnight screenings, some of them decked out in superhero costumes for the occasion. I’m ever so slightly embarrassed by this style of enthusiasm for, well, anything, both in this particular case and in general. There’s no doubt that I share something of the same passion put on display by these cosplayers – after all, I spent an entire day and a decent chunk of change for the privilege of occupying a dark theater to see these movies one after another. I won’t be able to put my finger on it until years later, when I read the writer Oliver Burkeman describes this sheepish feeling as a trustworthy sign that an activity or interest is “a source of true fulfillment,” one that’s enjoyed for its own sake rather than social approval.

Today, however, it’d be impossible to replicate the electric atmosphere of that early May night a decade ago. Though it was successful enough in its own right at the time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn’t yet the juggernaut we know today – a perhaps too-well-known quantity with an enormous base of devoted fans spanning the entire spectrum of American life. Indeed, it’s become easy to forget just what a risky and uncertain bet Iron Man and star Robert Downey, Jr. in particular were in 2008, and many people have. Characters that average, normal people couldn’t have picked out of a lineup if they tried back when Iron Man debuted are now household names, and it’d now take the better part of two days to watch the more than twenty films that now make up the MCU uninterrupted.

What’s more, midnight screenings of highly anticipated blockbusters like The Avengershave long since faded into oblivion. The frission and excitement of being amongst the first to see a movie, or even the sort of dedication and interest required to make a midnight showing of a particular film, no longer exists – not when theaters desperate to fill seats make it easy to see them in on late Thursday afternoons, as I’ll be doing with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That’s not to downplay the social aspect of certain movies – indeed, the best way to watch Marvel films like Avengers: Endgame or Spider-Man: No Way Home is in a packed, cheering theater – but it’s still clear that the feeling of exhilaration that coursed through the air that night in 2012 has gone forever and will prove impossible to resurrect.

It was around 2:30 in the morning when The Avengers finally finished, but we’re all energized and invigorated by what we’ve just seen.  I drove away from the multiplex in a car I’d rented for the day from a carsharing service, but I felt so amped up and alive that I found it hard to get to sleep when I got home – or even sleep at all. I’m exhausted the next day at work but still fired up by the previous day’s marathon, akin to the sort of high a person achieves after a tiring but vigorous workout.

That night showed us all something magical up on the silver screen, a vivid and inimitable cinematic experience that came together by serendipity and good fortune – if not plain sheer luck. A whole new universe had opened up right before our eyes, pulling us in and leaving us rubbing our eyes in wonder at the new possibilities we glimpsed. That’s hard to imagine now given the colossus the Marvel Cinematic Universe since became and the fashionable flak it now takes, but our shared and individual responses to that first showing of The Avengers spoke to the power of cinema as a medium and the awe it can inspire in audiences.

Above all else, though, The Avengers gave us flawed but deeply human characters who strive to do the right thing and live up to their own potential. We want to spend time with this unlikely, fractious band of heroes and watch them struggle to overcome their fears, mistakes, and self-doubts. We’re with these characters every step of the way as they proceed on their difficult and costly moral journeys, seeking to become better people in spite of it all.

The spirit and appeal of The Avengers – and the Avengers themselves – can be witnessed in two very different scenes: the team’s initial assembly at the climax of the film and a short, silent post-credits shot of the exhausted Avengers enjoying shawarma at a local storefront diner. The first scene sees the camera circle around the Avengers as they come together for the first time as a unit and fight off an alien invasion of New York City, all with composer Alan Silvestri’s rousing orchestral theme thundering in the background. It’s a scene that works only because audiences have seen these characters butt heads with each other and wrestle with themselves over the previous hour and fifty minutes. Without these conflicts – Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man duking it out in their first encounter, the entire team bickering amongst themselves as the villainous Loki sets his scheme in motion – and the emotional ties they forge, this stirring shot would have had nowhere near the same dramatic effect on audiences it did.

But it’s the post-credits shawarma scene that truly captures the heart and soul of The Avengers and, indeed, the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. Clearly worn out by their battle with Loki and his army, our six heroes sit around a table the shawarma joint Tony Stark spotted during the course of the fighting. It’s a brief moment based on what at first glance seems like a throwaway line Stark utters at the very end of the battle, but it’s one that producer Kevin Feige and director Joss Whedon ran with and eventually shot on the very night of the film’s world premiere in Los Angeles. The unlikely camaraderie on display gets directly to the heart of the matter: audiences enjoy seeing these characters and seeing them together, even if they’re just munching on shawarma at the end of a long and grueling day.

There’s also a distinct and elemental faith in humanity beating at the heart of The Avengers, one that’s all the more noteworthy given the often-checkered pasts and transparent shortcomings of its protagonists. Indeed, the faith the movie places in its characters reflects and embodies its weathered, world-weary faith in humanity. Both as individuals and a team, the Avengers themselves stand as avatars of humanity as well as its defenders and, ultimately, vindicators. It’s a notion that’s encapsulated by the arcs of individual characters like Tony Stark and Natasha Romanoff across the MCU’s larger narrative; they’re as messy, imperfect, and full of self-doubt as humanity itself can be. But they do their best to transcend these shortcomings and become better people, genuinely and sincerely seeking to rise to the occasion and do the right thing in spite of the physical pains and emotional losses they inevitably encounter along the way.

It’s an underlying streak of humanism that’s also neatly revealed by a pair of sequences that bookend the film. The first occurs at the very beginning of the movie, where a voiceover brings audiences up to speed on the premise of The Avengers: Loki has been deputized by an as-yet unnamed and unseen antagonist – later shown to be the arch-villain Thanos – to retrieve an artifact known as the Tesseract from “little world” called Earth. “And the humans?” this chief henchman known as the Other sneers, “What can they do but burn?” After the Avengers prevail against Loki and his army, however, in a mid-credits scene the Other is forced to concede, “Humans… They are not the cowering wretches we were promised. They stand. They are unruly, and therefore cannot be ruled. To challenge them is to court… death.” 

Does humanity in fact deserve to be saved? That’s an open and rather large question, but one The Avengers resolutely answers in the affirmative. Over the course of the film, the Avengers themselves show that humanity is at the very least worth fighting for and believing in, no matter our failings and imperfections. This is the sort of faith in humanity The Avengers offers us: bruised and bloodied, perhaps, but heartfelt and ultimately unbowed – even in the face of impossible odds.

None of this should be surprising given how these stories and characters flow from the same emotional and thematic streams as myths and legends have drawn from for millennia. But to see The Avengers up on the big screen for the first time that night ten years ago was to partake in a unique experience, to inhabit a fleeting moment in time when a universe of endless possibilities opened up right before our eyes. That sense of infinite potential was inevitably lost with the onward march of time and the progress of the MCU’s overarching narrative. It’s a loss that naturally stings, no matter how well we think the subsequent entries in this sprawling cinematic enterprise are done or how much we may enjoy them. This onward march foreclosed possibilities as it took certain paths and not others – as in life, so in cinema.

In the end, The Avengers left us with a set of six remarkable, flawed, larger-than-life, indelible, and above all human characters. It’s a profoundly humanistic experience to spend more than a decade with this particular group of fictional characters, one the likes of which will not come again any time soon. This sort of alchemy is virtually impossible to create on purpose; it emerges organically rather than by design. The chemistry and camaraderie between the original six cast members (matching tattoos involved, naturally), for instance, isn’t something that could have been planned out or calculated ahead of time. Looking back ten years later, it’s clear The Avengers and the wider, character-driven cinematic odyssey it anchors represent a very real storytelling achievement – one that reminds us in equal measure that there’s no substitute for serendipity and that humanity is worth believing in, all its faults and foibles included.

That’s the true status of The Avengers in contemporary popular culture – and it’s more than earned it.

A review of “Hawkeye”

What does it take to be a hero?

That’s the question at the heart of Hawkeye, the latest television series produced by Marvel Studios for the Disney Plus streaming service. There’s a double meaning inherent in the way the show poses this question as well: Hawkeye is concerned just as much with the personal sacrifices and losses heroes endure along the way as it is with the personal attributes and attitudes that make someone a hero. It’s a series very much in keeping with the best of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, telling a story driven by flawed, human characters who struggle with the meaning of their roles as heroes.

Hawkeye draws much of its emotional depth and power from its place in a narrative tapestry that stretches back nearly a decade and a half. Audiences may not have spent as much time with Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton as we did with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark or Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff, but we’ve nonetheless been around the block with his master archer and original Avenger. It’s this history that makes Hawkeye and its preoccupation with the nature and cost of heroism work so well, building on the experiences audiences have shared with the show’s eponymous protagonist and showing the full range of their consequences. In that respect, it makes the series a strong companion piece to previous entries in the overall mythos – especially Avengers: Endgame and Black Widow.

This background also allows the series to show events and characters we already know from different perspectives within the MCU’s mythos. That’s clear from the very first episode, when in we witness the battle of New York depicted in The Avengers through the eyes of a young and terrified Kate Bishop, who goes on to idolize Hawkeye after he unknowingly saves her with an ace arrow shot during the fighting. Hoping to emulate her own personal hero, Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate goes on to become a skilled archer and martial artist in her own right before stumbling into Clint under less-than-ideal circumstances.

Then there’s Rogers: The Musical, a Broadway show depicting the events of The Avengers that Clint and his three children attend during a holiday season visit to New York City. Written to be deliberately cheesy and, more importantly, irritate Clint, the production includes Ant-Man for reasons unclear. When his daughter Lila chides him for turning off his hearing aid, a visibly irked Clint replies, “I know what happens… Since I was there.” That the musical apparently receives rave reviews within the MCU itself gives us as viewers another perspective on how the world at large sees the Avengers.

More than anything else, though, this history imbues Hawkeye with a streak of melancholy that elevates its animating themes of sacrifice and loss. It’s perhaps most pronounced in the spectral presence of the late Avenger and Clint’s best friend Natasha Romanoff throughout the show. From the start, Natasha’s memory – and her ultimate sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame in particular – haunts Clint. He leaves his seat during Rogers: The Musical after the production reminds him of his lost friend, for instance, and appears fairly ill at ease when Kate’s mother (portrayed by Vera Farmiga) asserts that he must be familiar with personal loss in his line of work.

Clint most directly expresses his intense and abiding sense of loss when he goes to a memorial plaque erected to commemorate the events of The Avengers, one inscribed with the names of the team’s six original members. He takes out his hearing aid to talk to Natasha, noting she “was the bravest of us all” and that she always had to win – even to the point of sacrificing herself “for a stupid orange rock.” Renner delivers an impressive performance in this emotional soliloquy, dredging up powerful yet reserved emotions over Clint’s intimate friendship with Natasha and her self-sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame. As he later admits to Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova – Natasha’s adopted sister and fellow assassin introduced in Black Widow – Natasha “made her choice. We’re going to have to find a way to live with that.”

Likewise, Natasha’s memory weighs heavily on Clint as he reluctantly takes Kate Bishop under his wing. When Kate asks him about the best shot he ever took, Clint replies that it’s “the shot I didn’t take” against Natasha. He waves off further discussion, but Kate presses him – only for Clint to forcefully shut her down by vehemently insisting, “It’s not a good story.” Later, he sees Kate dangle on a rope from the edge of a rooftop in a scene clearly meant to parallel Natasha’s final scene in Endgame, a parallel reinforced by the effective use of musical cues from that film’s score by series composers Christophe Beck and Michael Paraskevas. (The composers make similarly worthwhile use of certain cues from the Black Widow score as well.)  

Kate’s also essential to perhaps the most poignant moment of the series, one that showcases the excellent chemistry between Renner and Steinfeld and speaks to the broader questions about heroism at its heart. With Clint’s hearing aid broken, Kate helps him keep up a phone conversation with his youngest son Nathaniel, writing down the son’s end of the conversation so Clint can reply. As a result, she’s privy to the fact that Clint’s son says it’s OK if he can’t be home for Christmas – a sacrifice Clint’s making to help her out of a predicament of her own making. 

For Clint, heroism is something takes more than it gives and requires enormous personal sacrifice. What’s more, he’s clearly uncomfortable with his own status as a hero – like other original members of the Avengers, he’s not sure he deserves it. When we meet up with him again at the start of Hawkeye, Clint plainly harbors doubts as to whether all the sacrifice and loss we’ve seen him endure was actually worth it. Bathroom graffiti and coffee mugs asserting that “Thanos was right” certainly don’t encourage him to think otherwise. It also explains why he tries to warn Kate off the path of heroism, telling her it “comes with a lot of sacrifices… And some things you’ll lose forever.” He goes even further, claiming he’s “not a role model. I’m sorry, Kate. I’m not a role model to anyone. Never have been.”

But Kate passionately believes otherwise, and slowly but surely convinces Clint that he is indeed a hero – all while shedding her own hero worship of him. Whenever Clint tries to disavow his own hero status, Kate immediately offers a rejoinder to the contrary. As a hero, she tells him, he’s selling inspiration whether he realizes it or not. Similarly, when Clint claims he’s not a role model, she retorts, “you left your family at Christmas because you thought some stranger was going to get hurt” and “stuck around even though I screwed up.”

This repartee culminates in a heart-to-heart between the two before the series’ big finale. Wanting to make sure she’s ready for what’s ahead, Clint reminds Kate that sacrifice and loss are inherent in heroism. She replies that when she saw him “fighting aliens with a stick and a string” in The Avengers, he showed her that heroism is “for anyone who’s brave enough to do what’s right no matter the cost” – a conviction she’s brought Clint himself back around to over the course of the show. It’s put to an acid test at the end of the final episode, when Kate turns her mother over to the police (it’s complicated). Asked by her mother if arresting their parents on Christmas is what heroes do, Kate doesn’t respond directly but it’s clear she’d answer in the affirmative.

As somber and serious as Hawkeye can get, it’s not a dreary or dour series – far from it. Indeed, the show strikes an impressively effortless tonal balance between dark themes of sacrifice and loss on the one hand and light-hearted moments of fun and levity on the other. It rarely if ever strikes a discordant note, drawing its both its humor and humanity organically from its characters and the events of previous films. “Don’t mention it,” Clint replies with bemusement when thanked for saving the world; when Kate demands Yelena stop making Kate like her, Yelena disarmingly admits that she can’t help it. 

The simple fact that there’s a canine companion lovingly known as Pizza Dog(eventually named Lucky after much trial and error on Kate’s part) and a contingent of good-natured live-action role players play a critical role in the narrative shows that the series can’t be tarred as a mirthless exercise. Indeed, Hawkeye manages to maintain this equipoise throughout from start to finish, smoothly sliding from one emotional register to another without ever feeling abrupt or even standing out.

The lion’s share of the credit for Hawkeye’s success must go to the actors who bring these characters to life, especially leads Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld. Without them, it’s hard to imagine Hawkeye – or the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for that matter – working at all. Renner quietly brings a soulful, intense melancholy to Clint, almost single-handedly maintaining the show’s emotional equilibrium as it shifts in tone. Steinfeld likewise plays Kate with an infectious enthusiasm that’s easy to see, and she shares obvious chemistry with Renner and Florence Pugh. As elsewhere in the MCU, plot largely serves as a narrative scaffolding that allows Hawkeye’s characters to meet and interact with one another in various ways. It’s hard not to want to see them ricochet off one another all day.

Hawkeye ends with Clint Barton in a much better place, having laid down his emotional burdens and accepting that he is, indeed, a hero – all while picking up a new protégé in Kate Bishop and a new family pet in Pizza Dog. It’s an example of the MCU at its best, driven by its characters and drawing on its own mythos to explore fundamental questions surrounding heroism. What’s more, the show moves from these serious questions to wry humor with remarkable ease. We can only hope there are more adventures in store for Clint, Kate, and Lucky in the years to come.

How Taylor Swift transformed heartbreak into art

(Part six in my apparently ongoing series on the music of Taylor Swift – see parts one, two, three, four, and five)

“How can a person know everything at 18 but nothing at 22?”

That’s the question Taylor Swift asks herself on “Nothing New,” a previously unreleased track included on her recent re-recording of her landmark 2012 album Red. It’s a song full of intense personal and artistic self-doubt, with Swift expressing severe reservations about her ability to stay creatively relevant and tacitly acknowledging that adolescent over-confidence fosters the illusion of wisdom. But it’s also the thematic question that drives Red as a whole, as the youthful romantic fantasies portrayed so vividly on her previous albums shatter and give way to more mature meditations on love, intimacy, and heartbreak – all elemental experiences that help define the human condition at its core.

On Red , Swift takes us through the intense emotional odyssey of a heartbroken person looking back on and convalescing from a fatally flawed and ultimately doomed romantic relationship. It’s hard to put it much better than she herself does in her introductory note to the re-recorded album: thematically and emotionally, Red “was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end.” Swift assembles an elaborate, heartfelt kaleidoscope of the feelings we experience in our lifelong pursuit of intimacy and human connection, a quest in which we’ll inevitably stumble and fall short of our deepest desires more often than we’ll fulfill them.

As wrenching as Red can be, though, it’s hardly a lament about the cruelties of modern romance and human existence. Throughout the album, Swift leaves us with the sense that all the trepidation, vulnerability, and heartache intrinsic to our attempts at intimacy are worth it, no matter how it all turns out in the end. The hurt and anxiety are a necessary part of life and, indeed, being human; heartbreak is a risk we take every time we reach out and try to forge a close connection with another human being. As she puts it “State of Grace,” over the course of our lives we all “learn to live with the pain” and piece together “mosaic broken hearts.” But as she reminds us on “Begin Again,” the romantic scars we accumulate can’t and shouldn’t cause us to close ourselves off in a futile search for invulnerability. Or as she counsels on “Treacherous,” “Nothing safe is worth the drive.”

Swift’s undeniable brilliance as a songwriter comes across exceptionally clear on both the original and expanded versions of her now-classic opus “All Too Well.” The original five-and-a-half-minute rendition is raw and passionate, a direct and emotionally piercing blow. Swift painstakingly paints a lyrical picture of a doomed relationship (complete with exquisite imagery like “autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place”) amidst constantly escalating musical tension provided by the steady crunch of her backing band’s electric guitars and bass. This built-up pressure finally detonates at the song’s bridge:

And maybe we got lost in translation 

Maybe I asked for too much 

But maybe this thing was a masterpiece 

‘Til you tore it all up 

Running scared, I was there 

I remember it all too well 

And you call me up again 

Just to break me like a promise 

So casually cruel in the name of being honest 

I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here

‘Cause I remember it all, all, all 

Too well 

It’s an intense and incendiary song, to be sure, but it’s not necessarily a vitriolic or vituperative one. (She was in this relationship for a reason, after all.) Swift seems to possess – and convey – an underlying understanding that these deep romantic wounds are a necessary part of life and the pursuit of intimacy. Though she’d “like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it,” Swift still possesses her self-confidence and lets the former object of her affection know that he’s “lost the one real thing you’ve ever known.”

In contrast, the ten-minute extended version of “All Too Well” that serves as the grand finale of Red (Taylor’s Version) is a sprawling epic that in many ways resembles the “mosaic broken heart” of the album as a whole. It relies much more on Swift’s vocals and lyrics than anything else, both of which superbly carry the extended rendition’s moody and subdued sonic palette. The song becomes much more pensive and reflective as a result, but it’s still as sharp and emotionally compelling as ever.

For all its additional lyrics and verses – the extended version contains roughly twice as many words as the original, and there are two additional verses plus the expansion of a third – the extended version of “All Too Well” remains remarkably lean and focused for a track that’s more than ten minutes long. There’s nothing unnecessary added here, only a natural expansion of the original’s lyrics and a journey deeper into the song’s emotional recesses. In one particularly pointed new lyric, for instance, Swift reminds her ex, “You kept me like a secret, but I kept you like an oath.”

The song begins quietly and slowly, like a needle picking up the opening track on an old vinyl record. It lends this extended version a dreamy, ethereal atmosphere, as if Swift’s starting to recall a memory that’s grown hazy over time. As the song picks up, it proceeds more slowly but more steadily than the original; it’s a persistent, smoldering burn rather than an explosive release. The peaks and valleys of the extended version may be smoother and shallower as a result, but it’s a shift needed to sustain the song’s simmering emotional intensity for over ten minutes. Swift lets us steep in the feelings she conjures up, leaving us to soak them up as we listen her recount memories that grow increasingly detailed and evocative as the song progresses.

In this extended version, then, Swift takes us on a grueling ten-minute voyage through the shattered emotional landscape heartbreak leaves in its wake. Swift uses stark physical imagery to describe how she felt at the end of the relationship; it’s an ordeal that “broke my skin and bones,” leaving her “a soldier who’s returning half her weight.” She asks the former object of her affection if he suffered the same emotional injuries: “And did the twin flame bruise paint you blue?/Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?” As painful as the experience may have been, though, it’s hard to sense much if any regret or bitterness at the song’s end – only a flickering awareness that Swift and her listeners have acquired some hard-earned wisdom about life and the human condition.

That’s in keeping with the spirit of Red (Taylor’s Version) as a whole, both in the re-recorded original album and the new tracks taken from Swift’s musical vault. After all, it’s the record where Swift breaks hard from the romantic fantasies of her youth and takes listeners on a sojourn through the emotional torments of heartbreak. But Red also marks the moment where Swift evolved from a songwriting prodigy to a fully-fledged artist in every sense of the word. None of that discounts her earlier work, of course, but it does reflect her own acknowledgement that she’d already been “learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the façade of the fairytale ending she’d been shown in the movies.”

On Red, Swift picks up the pieces of that now-shattered façade and begins to assemble the mosaic broken heart we all have to put together at some point. By the end of the journey, though, it’s clear that our reconstructed hearts serve us just as well as the originals that were smashed to pieces in the past. That doesn’t mean we stop learning about ourselves and our shared humanity, though; as Swift reminisces on “Daylight,” the final track on 2019’s Lover, “I used to believe love was burning red/But it’s golden.” It’s an education that never really ends, and never really can – not least when we think we’ve got it all figured out.

Heartbreak may be miserable and emotionally brutal, Swift tells us on Red, but it’s a universal, necessary experience we’ve all got to endure – and one that’s ultimately worth it in the end. It we recognize this fundamental emotional truth, we can always pick ourselves up and begin again.