My Five Favorite Things About Taylor Swift's "Look What You Made Me Do" Music Video (in GIF form!)

Dissecting and deconstructing the latest music video from the undisputed Queen of Pop ... in fully animated pictorial form!

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

August 27, 2017 - a date that will live in eternal infamy. For those of you somehow out of the loop, that was when Taylor Swift debuted the spooky, cryptic video for "Look What You Made Me Do," the first single off her upcoming album Reputation. And to say that it was a watershed moment for contemporary pop culture is a gross understatement. I mean, shit, when was the last time you remember the unveiling of a music video being such a big deal? You'd have to go back to 1991 when Michael Jackson debuted the video for "Black or White" - you know, the one where Macaulay Culkin is the kid and George Wendt's his dad and there's that entire six minute breakdown where MJ bashes a car with a crowbar and keeps grabbing his balls before turning into a panther, for some reason - on Fox to find a music video reveal as heavily hyped as Swift's latest. And needless to say, it did not disappoint. 

The media frenzy started a couple of days before MTV's annual Video Music Awards (i.e., literally the only time all year the station actually plays music videos) when Tay Tay released a typographical, animated video on the YouTubes that just featured the song's lyrics laid over a bunch of crappy looking Clip Art montages. Naturally, it broke page view records and every radio station in the country was spinning the damn song on the hour. But what really made this one something culturally transcendent was the mystery surrounding the meaning and intent of the lyrics. Within minutes of the preview video going live scores of people were already online trying to decrypt the song like it was The Da Vinci Code or something. Was it a thinly veiled jab at arch rival Katy Perry? An oblique "fuck you" to Kanye West and the Kardashians? Some sort of Illuminati mind control claptrap tied to PizzaGate? EVERYBODY had their own theory on what "Look What You Made Me Do" was really about (complete with some wayward individuals accusing the laconic chorus of ripping off Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," when anyone with a working set of cochleas can yell you it's clearly ripping off 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" instead) and it made even the most jaded and apathetic media consumer at least somewhat curious as to what the full music video would reveal. In short, it was one of the most brilliant marketing ploys the music industry has pulled in a LONG time. This was no longer just another video being released; it had become a bona fide transcendent cultural experience, like the Mayweather/McGregor boxing bout or Starbucks' limited time only Unicorn Frapuccino.

To be fair, I haven't really been following all the Taylor drama over the last year or so, but one 20-minute dissertation from my GF filled me in on all the details of the whole "phone-gate" controversy with Kim K and Kanye - a pivotal piece of intel that makes the conclusion of the video (in which multiple incarnations of Taylor bicker back and forth about all the other Taylors being fake, manipulative and shallow) so much cattier and sassier. While there's a lot of stuff to digest and over-analyze, there were five things about the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" that I found particularly interesting, and as a public service to the denizens of Internet-land, I've decided to isolate 'em in easily redistributable animated GIF form for more pageviews  - I mean, to give you a better comprehension of the audiovisual subtleties of the short-form film ...

Zombie Taylor!

And just like that, my opinion on necrophilia did a total 180...

Right off the bat the video hits a high note, with the sudden emergence of Taylor Swift's "reputation" crawling out of the grave in full Evil Dead makeup. It's a really deft directorial decision and gets about as far away from the goofy, wholesomeness of "Shake It Off" as they could have without stocking the video with ACTUAL Faces of Death footage and the whole thing is just tremendous pro wrestling booking 101. You want to recast yourself as something dark, ominous, edgy and pointedly threatening? Shit, you might as well go all in and transform yourself from something that looks like this to something that resembles the goddamn Castle Freak. We're barely 20 seconds in and we just KNOW this new incarnation of Taylor ain't taking shit from nobody no more; WWE executives, take note - THIS is how you frame the initial setup for an effective heel turn in the post-Facebook era. And yes, I will just come out and say it - even as a desiccated, reanimated corpse with black ooze foaming out of her mouth, I'd still tap it.

The Diamond Bath!

Yeah, it looks all fun and hedonistic - up until the first gemstone gets stuck in your cooter.

Well, if you need a good visual metaphor for opulent indulgence, I guess taking a page out of Scrooge McDuck's playbook and literally bathing in precious jewels is a pretty good way to get the point across. I like how her appearance here kinda' sorta harks back to the video for "Blank Space," making for a nice touch of continuity. She just looks so psycho bitchy and seductive at the same time, like you KNOW she'd kill you mid-coitus like Doogie Howser at the end of Gone Girl, but damn it, you'd beckon her sultry siren song regardless. Also, I dig how her makeup toes a 50/50 line between classic and trashy. I mean, just look at those razor sharp, blood red finger nails - those things aren't for showing off at ritzy galas, they're for manually milking prostates behind dumpsters and we all know it. Then there's that brief clip at the very end of the sequence, where she takes a bite into a big diamond necklace, which you just know had to taste pretty gross. I don't care HOW many times they wash that shit, there ain't no way you're getting the smell of African dirt miner off those things; I really hope Tay Tay is up to date on her shots after pulling such a biologically perilous stunt.

Tea Snakes!

Yeah, they probably should've spent a little less money on the wardrobe budget and just a wee bit more on the snake CGI ...

Don't ever say Taylor can't act. Her mannerisms in this video are fucking Lillian Gish-like, conveying so much emotion (primarily, cerebral ill intent) with just the slightest of facial twinges. With her leggy red dress and hair pulled back behind her ears she almost seems to radiate a semblance of coyness, perhaps even submissiveness. But like that one serial killer from that old ass HBO special that used to squeeze-spray poison into people's faces, that reserved demeanor belies absolutely sociopathic rage. It's just so incredibly subtle, but you can tell she's thinking downright evil thoughts. And what better way to make that blunt as a sledgehammer than by putting her on a royal throne, covered in snakes that feed her tea and start jiving whenever she punctuates her sentences with exclamation marks? Yes, it is incredibly on the nose, but you know what? Sometimes, you just gotta say "fuck you, subtlety, fuck you right in the ass," and I, for one, am glad Tay Tay and company took the very low road on this one.

An Homage to The Silence of the Lambs? 

In the original video, I hear she ate Katy Perry's liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.

With everybody on the Internet analyzing and interpreting the video for hidden messages and clues into Taylor's psyche, I'm really surprised no one has picked up on this possible allusion yet. So there's this part in the video where Tay-Tay is inside what appears to be a giant golden birdcage. It seems innocuous enough, but at the very end of the clip we get the quick zoom-in above. Does this particular sight remind you of anything? Watching Swift nom-nom on champagne and lobster inside a circular panopticon while flanked by seven armed guards, I can't help but be reminded of the sequence in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lector has din-din inside a similarly shaped cell, also surrounded by police personnel. Does this mean there's a deleted scene somewhere where Taylor bites off a dude's tongue, pepper sprays another dude and wears his chewed off face to facilitate a getaway? My, we can only hope.

Be Still My Heart - GOTH TAY-TAY!

Sorry - I'm too busy fapping to come up with a pithy caption.

All guys have their specific aesthetic quirks regarding the female form (read: unapologetic fetishes) and my stylistic weakness has always been goth chicks. So imagine my sheer jubilance when halfway through the video Tay-Tay abandoned the bright red lips and flowing evening gowns for first-suicide-attempt black lipstick, clinically-depressed-high-schooler onyx nail polish and full body fishnet stockings! Even better, her gyrations and kinda-sorta Aquanet-overkill coif are eerily, eerily similar to the interpretive dance moves and ozone-depleting hairdo of Angela in the first Night of the Demons movie. Unfortunately, it looks like they cut out the part where she chewed off a fat dude's tongue or sucked face with a blonde bimbo wearing too much pink lipstick - but hey, she has to leave something for the next single, don't she?

I don't care if she's wearing lipstick made out of AIDS blood - I'd still snog her.

Of course, there a lot of other highlights from the video that are probably worth symbolically examining, but I'll let you draw your own illusions to what Taylor really means when she positions herself in front of a giant, crucifix-like "T" and starts kicking earlier iterations of herself into the hypothetical abyss, or the real message behind the part where the paparazzi snap photos of her behind the wheel of a crashed car while she's holding a Grammy and looking suspiciously like Katy Perry. Those thinly veiled messianic delusions and fuck yous to competing pop princesses aside, I think "Look What You Made Me Do" is just a flatout tremendous video and the perfect pop cultural burnt offering to officially kickoff the Halloween season. I absolutely LOVE how Taylor is embracing the heel role in the video - personally, I haven't seen someone do such a fanciful job of playing up their pseudo-megalomania since Hulk Hogan joined the N.W.O. back at Bash at the Beach '96.

Indeed, there is a very weird totalitarian vibe I get from the video, almost as if Tay Tay is channeling her inner Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. Seeing as how Swift is the kind of gal who likes to shitpost on 4Chan and hang out with dudes who wear swastikas on their shirts, it wouldn't surprise me one iota if she was secretly a total nihilist or maybe even a proponent of The Dark Enlightenment (do note that she was pretty much the only major female singer who DIDN'T spend all of last fall deriding Trump and figuratively fellating Clinton on the campaign trail ... how interesting.) Don't let her (relatively) desexualized, family-friendly appearance fool you, her pop songs are anything but lighthearted "take thats" to her romantic rivals - indeed, they are actually Iliads dedicated to her own cerebral barbarism. In a way, I almost feel as if Taylor is secretly embarking upon the plot of God Bless America in real life, only instead of shooting up the live finale of American Idol herself, she's slowly but surely molding an entire generation of 14-year-old girls to utterly despise liberal pop culture icons like Katy Perry and Kim K. Like Ah-nold in Pumping Iron, she's an absolute master of psychological warfare; shit, just by standing next to Lena Dunham in a posed photo, she literally makes her (possible) ideological rivals look like literal retards. Like The Joker in The Dark Knight, maybe the past ten years have been carefully plotted out as part of some impossibly grandiose scheme to decimate the pop music landscape, and this darker, edgier Tay-Tay is just the first metamorphosis before she turns into a full fledged anarchic powerhouse. From some jailbait country cutie that wore too much lipgloss and always said thank you to a red-lipped crossover pop-tart to a futuristic militarized music video vixen in fetish gear to a vindictive mass media empress, there's really nowhere else she can go that doesn't involve overthrowing entire conglomerates or throwing genre adversaries out of helicopters.

If Red represented Taylor's transition from country to pop and 1989 represented her ascension from pop novice to pop queenpin, the next logical step is that Reputation will represent her full-blown immersion into cult of personality politics. In that, the music video for "Look What You Made Me Do" could indeed foretell a major, MAJOR shift in the causa sui of Swift's career.

While other pop stars want to be bigger than Madonna, Tay-Tay wants to be bigger than Mussolini. And hey - if her critics are going to call her an "obnoxious Nazi Barbie," what better way to get 'em back than by transforming herself into an actual fascist? Forget bubblegum pop - if the darker, more sinister tone of "Look What You Made Me Do" is any indication as to what the rest of Reputation resembles, methinks Tay-Tay's about to drop the world's first Buchenwald pop album. Hey, don't say I didn't warn you, either - I KNEW that girl was trouble when she walked in.

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'The Witch' (2016) is Overrated Bullshit.

The best horror movie to come along in years? Try "one of the most overhyped" instead.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Over the last few years, there's been something of a mini-resurgence in critically acclaimed, under-the-radar indie horror. Seemingly finished with the Eli Roth/Saw/Rob Zombie pop-gorno craze and the done-it-to-death found footage fad, today's most celebrated new-new-wave genre flicks are artsy-fartsy, supernaturally-tinged films that run the gamut from legitimately creepy, expertly made psychological thrillers a'la It Follows to really, really mundane, self-mocking homages like Tusk, We Are Still Here and What We Do In The Shadows.

That said, for every legitimately great post-post-horror flick like Resolution or The Babadook, we are bogged down with about three or four really ho-hum, pretentious ones, with such pretentious, "look how much smarter we are than you" titles like Crimson Peak, When Animals Dream, The Falling and Goodnight Mommy. For fuck's sake, there's even one out there actually called #Horror - a rare triply elucidative title demonstrating the genre's infatuation with its own self-reflexivity, contemporariness and utter lack of inspiration.

And the inconceivably critically-acclaimed offering The Witch - complete with its smarmy subtitle A New England Folktale - is pretty much the poster child for everything wrong with modern-day horror. Right now, The Witch holds an 81 rating on Metacritic. Once again proving that film critics are gloriously out of touch with the American-movie going masses, the nation's number one audience poll CinemaScore rates the film a much lower "C-." Interestingly, the thing about the film that movie  snobs are praising is the very same thing Johnny and Joanie Q. Public dislike most  about the picture. If you will, compare and contrast these two reviews - one by professional TimeOut film critic David Ehrlich and the other by some random Internet commentator known only as "Bazza." Now, try and figure out which quote is from whom: 

"The Witch is careful to invite certain ambiguities and avoid others, but the judgment it passes on its characters does not come from on high. [Director Robert] Eggers prefers instead to ruminate on how the compulsion to live without sin might grease the wheels for it (The film's new-world setting naturally implicates America in the process.) A jaw droppingly bold gift from God, The Witch is a major horror event ... Haunting doesn't begin to describe it." 

"Seriously, how does this get such rave reviews? I am totally perplexed that even users on here are saying thing like 'stunning,' 'fantastic,' 'beautiful' when it's anything but ... Almost all of the cinema were baffled by what they were watching." 

Well, if you said the first quote was from an MFA candidate at Columbia who describes himself as "usually very sleepy" and the second is from somebody who probably isn't an annoying hipsters piece of shit, you sir\madame\transpronoun, would be correct. As the disparate quotes demonstrate, the critic\audience point of dissent is apparent: the highfalutin celluloid snobs like The Witch because it is so goddamn nondescript, they can paint whatever bullshit allegory on it they want to confirm their despotic personal biases (which is probably one reason why the film has gotten an endorsement from one of the U.S.'s largest "Satanist" organizations.) Meanwhile, normal human beings - you know, the people who have real jobs for a living and aren't taking out a $200,000 loan to study the sociopolitical intricacies of Tom and Jerry cartoons at NYU - look at the film's bland minimalism and see it for what it truly is: lazy and ambitionless. In lieu of a formal plot, first-time director Eggers just throws red herring after red herring at the audience, leaving everything about the flick opaque until the last ten minutes or so. You don't know if the family in the movie are just a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs or there really is supernatural hokum afoot or the kids are just imagining all this bullshit or what. Granted, this could be overcome a little if you gave a half-fuck about the characters, but they are so one-dimensional and personality-less that you can't goad yourself into caring if they live or die. Instead of being a character-driven, supernatural drama a'la The Exorcist or Suspiria or The Wicker Man - the very best kinds of horror movies, the ones where the characters slowly but surely realize the world they think they know is something totally different - you just keep waiting and waiting for ANYTHING to come along and give you a clue as to what the hell is actually going on. And like I said earlier, nothing - I mean nothing - really transpires in the film until there's about 20 minutes in screen-time left. 

As far as the threadbare plot is concerned, it's almost hyper-minimalist. The film begins with a bunch of Puritan settlers getting excommunicated from a village for some sort of unspecified transgression. Yeah, technically they say they got kicked off the commune for "prideful conceit," but what the hell over. So the exiled family moves off into the hinterlands and starts a farm and things are going kinda OK but one night, their newborn baby gets kidnapped by some old hag who proceeds to kill him to make some sort of blubbery, unbaptized child flying potion like in Warlock (although without the reference to Electronic Football and mocking of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I am afraid.) Oh, and the infanticide takes place entirely off screen, lest your eyes be offended by such dreadful things. 

Unsurprisingly, the family is pretty distraught over this. The father and eldest son talk about whether or not the stolen infant is going to heaven or hell and the two youngest toddlers tell the eldest sister that they can talk to the family goat. So the eldest son and eldest daughter go out hunting rabbits, but the daughter gets knocked out after falling from her horse and the family dog gets captured by the hag in the forest and ripped to shreds (presumably, for a snack, I take it). Then the witch shows up in the form of Snow White (yeah, I don't get it either) and hypnotizes the 10-or-11-year-old boy with a demonic smooch. 

So the eldest sister comes to her senses, realizes her younger brother is nowhere to be seen and she goes home and her mama almost lays the smackdown on her for letting her sibling get lost, but her dad steps in and saves her keister and the bewitched young boy comes ambling home all dazed and whatnot. He passes out and starts reciting some weird prayer about heaven and dies. Then, the youngest children start saying the eldest daughter is responsible for all of the supernatural shenanigans so the dad says "shut up you little cretins" and locks all of the little shits in a stable with their pet goat and the witch (basically, a wrinkly, lard-assed, stringy-haired old woman ... in short, what Amy Schumer is probably going to look like in about 30 years) breaks in and starts eating all the livestock. Then the mom has a nightmare her dead sons have come back from the dead and she starts breastfeeding the deceased infant but LOLOOPS! It's actually a hallucination and she's letting a huge ass crow peck her titties off. 

And here's where the film takes a hard left turn into crazy town (but uh, not the ones who sang "Butterfly," of course.) The dad finds the kids passed out in the pen with a whole bunch of dead animals everywhere and then the pet goat goes psycho, gores him and kills him. This causes his wife to go stark-raving homicidal, but she winds up getting stabbed to death by her own daughter, Carrie-style. Then the goat starts talking to the eldest daughter, and SURPRISE! It's not really a goat at all, it's actually Satan himself and he wants her to join a coven of witches out in the woods. So she signs her name in an evil guestbook of sorts, strips butt-nekkid (uh, I'm pretty sure they use a stunt double for the nude scenes ... or God, I hope they do), joins a bunch of wrinkly hags out in the woodlands dancing around a fire and ... fin. 

Yeah, not exactly what I would call a satisfying dénouement, by any stretch. Making it even more unbearable, however, is that the film never really builds to a climax at all. Basically, it is just a series of long, meandering shots of people’s up-close, befuddled faces accompanied by split-second shots of withered hands and dissected barnyard animals for 70 minutes. Worst of all, however, is the film’s irritating attempt at establishing ambiance. Since its one of those artsy-fartsy post-post-modern horror offerings, it eschews the conventional genre gore and jump scares for “tension-building” that consists almost entirely of a.) placing characters in pitch black environs with barely audible/visible monster sounds in the background and b.) constantly playing a shrieking violin chord over the soundtrack. It sounds like I’m being hyperbolic, but I assure you that one looping string note comprises about half of the movie’s audio. Sure, that may have been effective and innovative when The Exorcist came out, but relying on such dated scare tactics in 2016 is just the epitome of laziness.

I know that’s a word I keep using, but it’s for good reason. The Witch is just laboriously lazy, and not just because its plot is uninspired. It’s almost as if this Eggers guy had a quasi-decent 20-minute short film in mind, but he just couldn’t find a way to stretch it out into feature-length, so he just went out into the sticks and filmed a bunch of people in rags saying things in Ye Olde English accents and stitched it together with one-off shots of antelopes grazing and crappy, foam-latex hands stirring cauldrons. By and large, that’s the entire first hour of The Witch, folks – nothing but 100 percent formless, tasteless filler. 

Is the acting any good? Eh, I think it’s pretty unremarkable. Since it’s technically a period piece, everybody overacts and chews the scenery, so you never really get past the idea it’s just a bunch of no-name thespians wearing pilgrim garb screaming at each other with Game of Thrones brogues. The cinematography is nothing to write home about either, and the special effects – what few of them exist, anyway – are underwhelming. 

So why is The Witch being hailed as a contemporary genre masterpiece again? If anything, I’d chalk it up to good old fashioned pseudo-intellectualism. Reading Jason Coffman’s tiring screed over at Medium – in which he attacks populist filmgoer tastes with the irrational fury of an autistic wolverine– explains to a “tee” why so many cinema-dork eggheads and know-it-alls are creamin' their britches over The Witch. It’s a dreadfully boring movie that lacks any sort of profound context, so rather than admit the Great Unwashed might be right about something, they instead make up all of these cockamamie subtextual reasons for why The Witch is a great piece of artwork that us knuckle-dragging denizens of Wal-America are just too stew-pid to understand. I mean, sure, onscreen nothing worth talking about ever happens, but if you read between the lines, you will see that the film is actually a furtive commentary on (insert whatever nonexistent social construct the reviewer doesn’t like.) In review after review, you keep seeing the exact same references pop up – “Calvinism-this,” “primal roots-that,” “religious hysteria-everything else.” Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d surmise that such nondescript praise simply masks the blunt fact that none of the reviewers can come up with a single contextual reason why the movie is decent, and instead have to default to flowery celebration of the film’s “undertones” and “allusions" to justify their commendations. 

Although many great horror films throughout history have been laden with subtext, the commonality among the all-time greats is that they also have obvious contextual reasons for why they are genre masterpieces. The horror genre is the ultimate “show, don’t tell” cinematic platform: you’re supposed to go over the top with the visuals and wallop viewers over the head with as many stark images as you can dream up. Yes, The Exorcist works as a furtive allegory for geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, but it works even better as a Manichean tale about religion, science and the power of faith – all themes that are bluntly stated within the film’s narrative. Yes, Phantasm can indeed by read as a thinly-veiled metaphor for the fear of parental loss, but it can be read even better as a movie about a transdimensional undertaker who throws flying metallic death spheres into people’s foreheads. 

That’s why The Witch pales in comparison to similarly-artsy please-don’t-call-us-horror-horror flicks like Antichrist and The Angel’s Melancholy AND mass-produced popcorn genre offerings like The Visit and Goosebumps (two of the more enjoyable “lite” horror romps to come out of Hollywood in recent memory, in my humblest o’ opinions.) Those movies are about something AND they deliver the audiovisual goods. They have real characters and real tension. And the big special effects payoffs – those Grand Guignol “money shots,” so to speak – resonate with you. 

Simply put, The Witch is devoid of all that. Its characters are uninteresting, the pacing is absurdly sluggish, the effects have no visceral impact and the atmosphere is ultimately more perplexing than unnerving. It’s not scary, it’s not engrossing and by the time the end credits roll, you’ll be left scratching your head, wondering if there was anything even remotely resembling a “point” to the entire boring affair. 

The Witch may not be the worst horror film of the decade – lest we forget, Red Riding Hood and the dreadful Elm Street and Evil Dead reboots still exist - but it’s certainly the worst to receive such glowing critical acclaim. Your hirsute hipster art-house galleria friends may like it for its “style,” but if you’re looking for anything, you know, actually entertaining, I fear this is one indie darling bound to disappoint.

Score:

One and a Half Tofu Dogs out of Four

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