Taylor Swift to Hollywood: Women are a force to be reckoned with
Swift’s new music video is all about girl power.
Taylor Swift brought the fire last night. Literally.
In her new music video for “Bad Blood’’ which premiered at the Billboard Music Awards, she and a gang of Hollywood’s most boss-lady women suited up in bondage-like action hero bodysuits and battled against a backdrop of flames. There were CGI explosives. There were knives. There were automatic weapons. There were round-house kicks to faces. And there was a message.
Over the past few weeks, Swift rolled out Instagrams announcing who’d be in the video, the fourth off her 1989 album. The cast is a who’s-who of Hollywood: Selena Gomez, Cindy Crawford, Mariska Hargitay, Ellen Pompeo, Lena Dunham, Jessica Alba, Karlie Kloss, and many more. Kendrick Lamar (whom Swift has said she listens to to feel “awesome’’) pops up to rap a few verses, but he doesn’t engage in the action. Other than that, there are no men.
Swift wrote the song about a feud with pop star Katy Perry, after Perry apparently tried to hire Swift’s employees out from under her. Emily Yahr at The Washington Post said that the video is Swift’s way of sending Perry the ultimate “don’t mess with me’’ message. Marlow Stern at The Daily Beast said it’s Swift showing the industry how powerful she is.
But that’s a pretty one-dimensional take. Another way of looking at it is that Swift is saying women in Hollywood are a force to be reckoned with, and that the male-dominated industry better watch its back.
Action movies have been dominated by men forever. Only recently have studio execs realized that movies starring female leads actually make more money. Still, only 23 percent of internationally distributed movies (all genres, not just action films) between 2010 and 2013 had female leads, and only 31 percent of the speaking characters were women.
So for Swift to come out swinging—she knocks out some bad guys in the first scene—with a band of the most powerful women in Hollywood transcends one enemy and even herself.
Not much actually happens in the video. It’s basically just a lot of preparation for the final scene, in which two bands of women (one led by Swift, one led by Gomez) ultimately line up to fight each other. But it ends before the battle royale. It doesn’t seem that plot—something Swift is usually so focused on—was the point.
The point was: Hey Hollywood, don’t mess with my squad.
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