I’m the only person who did not get to attend the Eras Tour. Factually, this is untrue: I was but one of hundreds of thousands of people who vied for tickets, ultimately crashing Ticketmaster and prompting a Senate hearing on its business policies. But when seemingly all of my friends managed to get tickets (but never take me; I’ve forgiven them), it kind of felt like Taylor Swift was shutting me out personally.
Despite being what I’d call a medium-liker of Miss Swift—I love the songs I love, hate the songs I hate, and don’t care about the rest—I wanted to be both part of the zeitgeist as well as experience the pure joy that is a performer doing her thing. And with Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, a filmed version of her Los Angeles tour dates that’s now in theaters, I got a chance to do both. For the rest of us medium-likers that are nonetheless bummed to have missed one of the concert events of the decade, I’d argue that The Eras Tour film is a more-than-ideal experience.
The Eras Tour kicks off with no added fanfare, which I liked. After all, how do you simulate the experience of spending hours in the merch line and/or half-listening to multiple openers, in the wait for Swift to get onstage? Instead, the film gets Swift singing and dancing as soon as possible.
The camera makes sure we can appreciate just how impressive all that singing and dancing really is. Cutting between close-ups of the crew onstage, wide shots of the entire set, and the screaming members of the audience, the film does more than place you within the experience. It gives you the best possible seat in the house, one that I absolutely never would have had access to otherwise. It’s possible to see Swift’s every little smirk, booty-shake, and bemused look in a way that even the biggest monitors in an arena could not communicate—and with a large part of Swift’s appeal being how endearing she’s able to make herself seem to her fans, this is a huge benefit for the film.
Having this kind of intimate access to Swift’s performance is remarkable, especially as the film improves upon moments of the set that I imagine may have come off as goofy otherwise. I’m not a huge fan of Reputation, whose lyrics I find navel-gazing at best and embarrassing at worst. But with the camera hewing so closely to Swift’s facial expressions and dazzling costumes, along with her live vocals coming through so strongly, the fun she’s having onstage becomes palpable. “Look What You Made Me Do,” one of my least-favorite pop songs, became a veritable showstopper on the big screen—an incredibly likable display of commitment to the bit.
Similarly, when it was released, I found Evermore to be Folklore’s YA fantasy novel-reading little sister in a way that made me cringe. The concert’s elaborate set designs played right into that aesthetic, as did Swift’s Little Red Riding Hood-esque outfit. But watching The Eras Tour, I could appreciate the sheer detail and work that went into her set pieces, and the curated tracks from the album played well both on a huge stage and into Swift’s quest for “sonic cohesion.”
That said, The Eras Tour itself fails to assert any kind of authorial vision in its own right—or, rather, doesn’t seem to have interest in asserting it. It’s edited like a music video, darting around to different angles in time to the beat. This can be distracting in a song like “Lover,” which would benefit from a steady hand that allowed us to focus on the beauty of both the song and Swift’s acoustic performance of it. The kinetic energy mirrors that felt by the crowd, dancing along nonstop; but as a viewer, I wish I had the same control over how I physically viewed my experience as those who got to go in-person did. Director Sam Wrench doesn’t have any feature filmmaking on his resume, and I can’t see this film getting him any calls from proper Hollywood studios. (Although once execs see those box-office receipts, that could change their minds.)
But then, The Eras Tour isn’t exactly a feature film. This is a Swift presentation, and you are here to see unyielding shots of Miss Swift. While the film packages them in a specific way, how you intake them is up to you. Should you want to treat the movie theater as such—like me—you certainly can. But the internet is also already rife with clips of fans doing choreography under the screen, singing along loudly, and waving glow wands. This isn’t inherently a bad thing—but not having to endure the high-decibel screeching that accompanied every TikTok I saw from the Eras Tour itself was one of the appeals of seeing it in a theater in the first place.
Thankfully, there were a lot of benefits of my specific Eras Tour viewing. For one, I purposefully went to one of Manhattan’s smaller AMC theaters, where our Saturday-at-noon screening wasn’t even sold out. The majority of people appeared to be in their late-twenties, and it led to a calm, respectful crowd of folks who bopped along to the music unobtrusively in their seats. I knew I was in for a good time when two people started cheering loudly at the film’s opening countdown and several more people shushed them—if you wanted a rowdy screening, you should have gone somewhere else.
I also went with the best possible guide: my best friend, who went to see the Eras Tour on two different dates. (Again: I’ve forgiven her.) She filled me in on the tracklist when I didn’t know the song; she warned me that Swift would skip over her debut album entirely during the set, helping me redo my bathroom break plan accordingly.
Swift is picking things back up with her live shows later this fall and into next year, with a brief return to the U.S. planned for next October. I, obviously, failed to get tickets to those shows either. But I’m satisfied with my incredibly pleasant, entertaining, even emotionally affecting Eras Tour experience—and I didn’t even have to fight Ticketmaster for it.
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