“The Destiny of Ophelia” opens The Lifetime of a Showgirl with Taylor Swift doing what she does greatest: taking a cultural touchstone everybody half-remembers from highschool English and making it about her. And actually? It really works.
The tune itself is pure Max Martin gloss. That springy bassline, the best way Swift’s voice sits low within the verses earlier than the refrain cracks open extensive.
At 3:46, it’s tight sufficient to keep away from overstaying its welcome, which is greater than you may say for a few of her current album openers. That is Swift in full 1989 mode: synth-pop that sparkles with out apologizing for it.
However let’s speak about what she’s truly doing right here. Ophelia drowns in Hamlet. Swift’s model? She swims.
The entire tune is constructed on this rescue fantasy (you saved me from going beneath), and relying in your tolerance for Swift’s specific model of romantic mythology, you’ll both discover it swoonworthy or eyeroll-inducing. I’m someplace within the center.
There’s one thing compelling about reclaiming a logo of female tragedy, positive, however Swift’s been taking part in the saved-by-love card for years now.
In some unspecified time in the future, Ophelia stops being Shakespeare and begins being one other costume within the dress-up field.
The music video makes this literal. Swift directed it herself (in fact), and it’s a one-take fever dream via speakeasy levels, that Millais portray everybody is aware of, and 9 (9!) costume adjustments.
The web’s already calling it her “showgirl period,” which feels each inevitable and barely exhausting. Sure, it’s beautiful. Sure, the bathtub scene echoes the album artwork. Sure, each body is a temper board Pinterest would die for.
However there’s a nagging query beneath all that opulence: when does pastiche grow to be persona?
Right here’s the place I’ll give Swift credit score: she is aware of precisely what she’s doing. The fan discourse is already fracturing into predictable camps.
Some name it “empowerment.” Shakespeare students shrug and say artists have been remixing Ophelia for hundreds of years.
A vocal minority on Reddit needs the manufacturing would breathe just a little. All of that is by design. Swift builds songs that operate as Rorschach assessments. You see what you deliver to them.
Musically, there’s craftsmanship right here that shouldn’t be dismissed. That verse-to-chorus carry, the best way the melody stays sticky whereas the lyrics do their cryptic work… it’s Martin and Shellback working on the stage that made “Clean House” plain.
Swift’s good sufficient to allow them to prepare dinner whereas she handles the literary Easter eggs. The road between “destiny” and “alternative” runs via the entire thing: in case you present up, I received’t go beneath. It’s a pact dressed as a pop tune, which is classic Swift.
However I hold coming again to the core query: does rewriting Ophelia’s ending truly give her company, or does it simply swap one image for one more?
Swift escapes the tragic heroine function by… turning into the rescued heroine. That’s not nothing, however it’s not precisely radical both.
The showgirl framing offers her permission to be theatrical, to lean into extra and spectacle. Tremendous. Nice, even. However theatricality will not be the identical as transformation.
What saves “The Destiny of Ophelia” from collapsing beneath its personal references is that it’s genuinely catchy.
You possibly can argue concerning the semiotics all day, and other people will, however the tune succeeds first as a pop object.
It’s an opener that does what openers ought to: it units a tone, pronounces an aesthetic, and will get caught in your head.
Whether or not that tone is empowering or simply costly depends upon how a lot you’re prepared to put money into Swift’s private mythology.
Me? I’ll take the tune. I’m much less satisfied by the iconography. However possibly that’s the purpose. Swift’s all the time labored greatest when you may hum alongside whereas rolling your eyes.
“The Destiny of Ophelia” doesn’t drown, however it doesn’t precisely break new floor both. It floats, glamorously, precisely the place Swift needs it to.
