…Ready For It? A theory.

Ok there isn’t any “real” and “fake” Taylor here. Well, there is but the way people are describing it is insufficient. And there’s no “the media” bogeyman, I’m tired of that being shoehorned into every analysis this era. The point of this video isn’t that Taylor is a victim or that she’s fake or is being controlled or misrepresented by some bad guys.

The video very much says that she’s in control and she created herself and her image. But there is an important development of that dynamic that happens towards the end of this video.

OK, this is what’s going on: There are two different aspects of Taylor here:

* Hooded Taylor is Taylor the artist, Taylor the creator, the experimenter. This room with the glass cage is her laboratory, the glass cage a test tube.

* Naked Taylor is a template, a **canvas** on which she paints and experiments with.

These are of course the same Taylor, this dichotomy is just a metaphor for how a showman and artist like Taylor plays different parts, creates different personas for us to be entertained by.

In her lab, the experimental artist has created many different characters for us, as shown by the different forms the naked Taylor takes, but all painted on the same **canvas**, her “real” self.

Now for the main event of the video:

The artist and her canvas (aka the unaltered, “real” Taylor if you want to frame it like that) walk up to each other and come face to face. What happens next is up for interpretation but I read it like this:

Taylor the artist, that mad scientist who has experimented on “real” Taylor for all these years, decides to set her free (“are you ready for it?” she asks her). As she breaks free from her test tube, she wounds the artist and exposes a robot skeleton. After all, artist and canvas are different aspects of the same thing: Taylor Swift. Both characters exit the laboratory at this point.

“Real” Taylor escapes into the world and you can see the feeling of exhilaration in her face, she’s finally free and it makes her cry from happiness.

Taylor the artist is wounded but still standing. “Burn all the witches”, the graffiti says as her intellect and creativity continues to be seen as sinister, lightning strikes her and monsters chase her but she still stands, for now.

@taylorswift did I get that somewhat right? 😅