Why does a billionaire feminist continue to write songs about being rescued from towers by men who “were just honing their powers”?
Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” from her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” is an infectious dance gem that checks lots of cultural boxes, from Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Ophelia, Hamlet’s beloved in the Shakespeare play, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott,” to Baroque opera, Gilbert and Sullivan musicals, Busby Berkeley musicals, Esther Williams water ballets and 1960s girl groups, with a nod to Marilyn Monroe in “Bus Stop” and Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
Swift clearly understands the dark side of stardom, exacerbated today by the tedium of social media (“Cancelled!”, “The Life of a Showgirl” title track), so why replay old hurts and old boyfriends? It’s so middle and high school. And why, if “The Fate of Ophelia” is code for her relationship with fiancé Travis Kelce, does she need saving, particularly by a man who did a layout for GQ that depicts him as a wild beast?
Swift seemed to hit boyfriend nirvana briefly with Tom Hiddleston. who has played everyone from Hamlet and Henry V to Hank Williams. But fans don’t get to choose their idols’ lives. It reminds me of what Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis once said: “People wanted for me things that I didn’t want for myself.” When her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, died, everyone assumed Jackie would marry a man like French novelist André Malraux. Instead she married Aristotle Onassis.
Swift and Kelce have chosen each other, and all we can do is wish them the best. Perhaps like Julia Roberts’ beck-and-call girl in “Pretty Woman,” she’ll “rescue him right back.”
Swift’s Ophelia isn’t the only “Hamlet” reference of the cultural season. There’s the film “Hamlet,” starring Riz Ahmed and set in present-day London amid its high society, Hindu temples and homeless camps; “King Hamlet,” a documentary about the 2017 Public Theater production of the play that I remember chiefly for Oscar Isaac’s title performance and the amount of dirt that had to be Hoovered from the stage after the graveyard scene; and “Hamnet,” a film based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the death of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, told mainly from the viewpoint of the boy’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife.
I’m not really interested in motherhood, particularly motherhood as the benchmark for emotions and understanding, as in the phrases, “as a mother….” You don’t need a womb to be compassionate.
I am, however, interested in how writers and other artists cope with or seek to complete grief through their art or their characters’ arcs. Perhaps the most prominent work of this genre is Ian McEwan’s novel “Atonement,” in which the narcissistic main character falsely accuses her sister’s lover of rape, destroying the couple’s lives, then writes a novel about them in which everything turns out fine.
In “Hamnet,” Shakespeare’s wife — called Agnes, but also known as Anne Hathaway — is furious that her husband, a father who has lost a son, pours his grief into “Hamlet,” a play about a son who loses a father. She’s furious, that is, until she sees the play.
Can art “atone” for the sins and sorrows of the past? No. But in memory and understanding it can bridge the living and the dead.