Sometime on Saturday, Oct. 5, 12 orange doors were installed in 12 cities around the world. They were not to be opened; they didn’t lead anywhere, anyway. Affixed to each door was a QR code that, when scanned, called up a YouTube Shorts video loosely themed around Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl.” Each clip contained hidden letters that spelled a word; taken together, these words formed a secret message, a classic Swift marketing tactic, which then helped her fans unlock more content elsewhere. The experience was part fantasy — one fan compared it to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia — and part sci-fi. It is a fitting device for an artist who has long seen herself as the creator of a parallel world: one where fans can go “down a rabbit hole,” as she has put it, hunting for clues to the star’s next move and subjecting her every word to endless exegesis.
At the end of this particular rabbit hole, it seemed, was more merchandise. The secret message appeared to point to a “summertime spritz pink shimmer vinyl” version of the album available exclusively at Target — one of more than 30 variants available in total. Fans kept checking Swift-dedicated Reddit forums for further clues. “Why do I keep checking here like something magical is going to appear,” one poster wrote in despair.
If there was any magic in the video clips, it was a weak spell. Lurching between slow zooms and jerky cuts, these videos brought vaguely aspirational images to uneasy, shambling life: petals on a bathroom floor; animals lumbering through a dewy garden; an unmanned treadmill running in an otherwise empty penthouse suite. Some disgruntled Swifties wondered if this could be the work of A.I. (The videos have since been made unavailable.) While once it seemed Swift couldn’t make enough product to sate her fans, now there was a surfeit of, to put it bluntly, creepy junk.
And there was more product still to come. The same weekend the album was released, a movielike thing called “The Release Party of a Showgirl” played in cinemas around the world. This “film” would consist of a new music video, behind-the-scenes content and a string of visualizers. All this would ring in the album that was being presented as Swift’s return to making pop bangers.
“The Life of a Showgirl” doesn’t quite fulfill this prophecy — or, rather, it delivers only technically. It is a work of hyperprofessional songcraft and production, but its emotional texture is curiously flat and joyless. The songs of domestic bliss feel as if they are sung through gritted teeth; the ballads are strewed with debris of obsolete internet-speak. Swift’s best work cracks open a secret world seething with private fantasies: happy endings, revenge, adulthood suspended just out of reach. “Showgirl,” for all its promise to reveal the secrets of backstage life, gives us more outward spectacle than inner fantasy — a collection of uncanny pop-banger-shaped objects.
Still, at the movies, surrounded by a matinee crowd of older Swifties and their kids, the Swiftian portal exerted its pull. As the muted opening keyboard chords to the new single “The Fate of Ophelia” sounded over the speakers and the music video flashed across the screen, I felt a soupy aesthetic atmosphere thickening around me. A few songs in, the film’s space-filling devices — the way the visualizers looped like screen savers — stopped annoying me and began to feel downright incantatory in their repetition.
Not long after, a sinuous bass line poked out of the mix, punctuating an emotional shift in the lyrics — and were those goose bumps breaking out down my arm? How could one part of me be trapped in our fallen world while the other was in a different one — down the rabbit hole, through the orange door? My mind was skeptical of this album and its accompanying content strategy; my body, meanwhile, as if through training, was reacting, bobbing unbidden like that runnerless treadmill.
To experience this zombielike fan response felt like watching a media franchise at a decisive moment of transition. “Showgirl” comes on the heels of the 2023-24 Eras Tour, in which Swift hit on a genius conceit for repackaging her own music. That conceit could be called a multiverse. Each “era,” centered on an album from her career, was a whole stylistic world, encompassing not just the sound of a moment in time but also fashion, history, ethos. The “Taylor’s version” series of rerecorded and extended albums, a project that began before the tour, even constituted a sort of alternate timeline in which Swift retained control over her own music. The universe also extends outward to the fans. Swift has long addressed her fandom as a world apart: wizards in a world of muggles. The uninitiated were either prejudiced haters or total nonentities.
Swift mastered this marketing form at the same time that the “cinematic universe” became the default narrative device for our too-big-to-fail media franchises. The phrase has been in use since at least 2008, and it quickly spread from Marvel to Hasbro and beyond. For much of the 2010s, these franchises felt inescapable. It was hard not to feel their totalizing power, whether you took them as pure entertainment or as everything wrong with our media regime — in fact, part of this power was the ability to sort the public into two opposing universes of taste, with no pocket dimension of neutrality in between. You could feel it in the merchandising, the augmented-reality experiences, the sheer saturation of discourse: Creating a universe was no longer just a way to wring content out of a popular thing, but seemingly the only way mass taste could be shaped.
Today, however, this franchise magic shows serious signs of weakening. A majority of Marvel’s cinematic offerings this year — a new “Captain America” chapter featuring Harrison Ford as a red Hulk-like creature, and the first installment in a new “Avengers” spinoff — have underperformed at the box office. DC’s rival cinematic universe continues to struggle to establish a cosmic foothold. The imminent reboot of “Harry Potter” will be lobbed straight down the middle of a fandom divided over J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans crusading. What once seemed like the triumphal high style of 21st-century entertainment franchises may actually be their late style, a sign not of dominance but of a slow decline.
The music video for Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” in which the star steps out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting and proceeds to clip through space and time, taking on different guises along the way, is meant to be a confident visual statement of the Swift franchise’s multiversal power — the kind that lets her conjure and connect endless versions of reality through the sheer force of her stardom. And yet it reads more like an admission of the record’s thinness, its insubstantiality behind all the lore and secret messages. To achieve its strongest effects, “Showgirl” relies on the listener’s interest in decoding the references to real people and situations the songs may or may not be about. A dig at another pop star; a mention of her fiancé’s podcast! The album feels less like an album, the marketing less like a way to bring that album to its fans. Instead, everything is simply another entry in the Taylor Swift Multiverse, a closed door with nothing behind it, affixed with a promissory note for more content elsewhere.
Universes can expand to the point of dissipation. With “Showgirl” confirmed to be “the fastest-selling-and-streaming album of the modern era,” as Pitchfork reports, Swift is at her commercial peak. But the signs of late franchise style are setting in; you feel that no number of alternate timelines can reverse their spread. What kind of art will be born from this slow entropic drift? If we ever open the door, what will be behind it?
Source photographs for illustration above: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images; Andre Dias Nobre/AFP, via Getty Images; Gareth Cattermole/TAS24, via Getty Images; Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images.
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