Taylor Swift’s new new deluxe deluxe album, The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, drops tonight with four new tracks including “Patient Zero”, the lead single. The full video for “Patient Zero” will premiere at the MTV VMAs on Sunday where she will also receive the inaugural Artist Director Award so it’s an additional exclamation point on the honour since she’s premiering her new directorial effort.  

This morning she shared a 13-second teaser for the video which explains some easter eggs she’d previously planted and leaves behind a few more. The biggest reveal here is that her co-stars in the “Patient Zero” video are Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell.

So this explains some of what was said in the Emmys sketch with Mariska Hargitay. "Saccharide, Aries, From the Vineyard, North or South" – Sugar and Dakota are pretty obvious and I have no bandwidth to CSI the rest, I’m sure the Taylor Swift Reddit subthread(s) have all the answers, zooming on every scene, including the graveyard, to solve for TS.

I am interested, though, in the whole mirror mirror twin twin thing that’s happening here between Taylor and Dakota. They’ve been friends for a while, they were both born in 1989, they are styled the same in virtually every frame in which they appear together in this teaser. A love triangle is being teased. There are some tonal similarities here to Verity, Dakota’s new film with Anne Hathway and Josh Hartnett opening next week, based on Colleen Hoover’s book…which is interesting because the last time Taylor was connected to someone who was in a film adaptation of a Colleen Hoover book… well… we don’t need to get into that.

Let’s talk instead about the celebrity friend factor, and how often her celebrity friends, and/or acquaintances, are showing up in her videos, most recently “Opalite”. Her wedding alone was like the Oscars and Grammys and Emmys combined and consistent with how Taylor performed her celebrity in the mid-2010s, with Taymerica and the friend collecting. Taymerica in Rhode Island has been retired but the spirit of it isn’t dead, it just became something else: Taylor Swift’s Hollywood. Taylorwood? Swiftwood? Whatever you want to call it, it’s the manifestation of the friend collecting that started over a decade ago and continues in a different form now – only instead of frolicking at the beach and coming down the water slide, they’re hanging out on film sets, spilling any tea that there is to be spilled on film instead of Instagram.

I’m a fan of the showgirl’s friendshow. Celebrity friendships, the overlapping social circles, the bonding and the beefs, are essential to gossip – Taylor Swift isn’t just upholding that pillar, she’s becoming the whole foundation, lol.  

Taylor Swift's "Patient Zero" music video teaser stills

Photo credits: YouTube

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