The Sundance Film Festival kicks off on Thursday. Sundance is always a clusterf-ck, at least in the years I used to cover it, as celebrities, their entourages, publicists, marketers, party planners, sponsors, filmmakers, and the attendant media jam themselves into Park City for a few days – and this year, since Taylor Swift’s Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, is opening, it’ll be even more chaotic.
Ahead of Thursday’s premiere, Taylor covers the new issue of Variety to promote the film, which she says will be her only interview about it. Miss Americana begins streaming on Netflix at the end of the month and follows a year in her life during which she balances professional and personal changes with her increased activism and advocacy. According to the piece, there’s a part in the film where she’s debating with her advisors, including her father, about this post on Instagram:
She was counselled against it and pushed ahead anyway – even though her dad, fearing that she’d be targeted and attacked by the political right, cautioned her to step away. I am looking forward to watching how that plays out.
This, as we’ve seen, is more of the current era of Taylor Swift, unlike the Taylor Swift who closed herself off during the reputation era, Lover Taylor is wide open, or at least as open as she wants to seem to be. We all thought she was going the Beyoncé way of not talking ever, simply letting her art speak for itself. Taylor tried that on and, evidently, it didn’t. I appreciate the way she explains it:
“I don’t really operate very well as an enigma,” she says. “It’s not fulfilling to me. It works really well in a lot of pop careers, but I think that it makes me feel completely unable to do what I had gotten in this to do, which is to communicate to people.
“I don’t really operate very well as an enigma” is GREAT quote. I feel like this is one area where she’s ahead of others. A lot of stars *think* they’re enigmatic when they’re far from: Justin Timberlake. I enjoy this self-awareness from Taylor. And that’s why this photo shoot, while on the nose for Sundance, kinda works. She is 100% an on the nose person.
