The Eras Tour is a Multiverse Movie

I saw The Eras Tour in theaters on Friday night. People were lined up down the block to get into the first showing, which I haven't seen since at least The Force Awakens.

I don't have strong feelings about Taylor Swift, but I guess I'd lean more positive than negative. Seeing the joy and electricity in the theater on Friday, and even being reminded of how many bangers and classics Taylor has put out in the last decade, it was hard not to enjoy it.

Around the 20-minute mark of the concert, though, something else hit me—something that had my mind and attention contemplating throughout all of the following 2 hours: The Eras Tour is a multiverse movie.

I know what you're thinking: "yeah, haha, because she has different outfits and musical genres? That's a fun little one-liner but it doesn't really have any substance beneath the surface observation."

Or maybe you're not thinking that, and we're totally on the same page.

If you don't already know, The Eras Tour is called The Eras Tour because it's an explosive celebration of Taylor Swift's entire career thus far, taking the audience on a journey through all of her musical "Eras" in all their aesthetic and contextual diversity. The show has 10 acts, each based on one of Swift's albums, and each with a distinctive style and flavor (through visuals, sounds, costumes, and tone) that stands out from the rest. In a sense, each act represents a different Taylor Swift from the others, nostalgically reminding fans of the evolution of her voice and the moments they've loved and remembered from along the way.

Indeed, the Eras are very different from each other; when Taylor sings sweet romantic odes from Fearless, wearing cowboy boots and calling back to her young country music days, she's a very different person from the one saying "sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now" during Reputation, where she's decked out in a provocative snake-covered leotard and singing about revenge and retribution.

So, in other words, it's a little like watching two different universes.

I'm sure I don't have to explain the multiverse trend to you. Since Ricky & Morty paved the way for the pop culture prominence of the idea in the 2010s, just about every sci-fi and superhero property has been toying with multiverses in every other project. It's not just comic-book movies, either; Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Picture this past year by taking the concept and generating compelling, universal human drama mixed with absurdism.

I've written in the past about the way that, I think, one aspect of the multiverse's appeal (especially among Millennial and Gen Z audiences) lies in the way that it captures the frenzied information-overload and algorithmic content bubbles of our digital era. Living out your existence on social media, where you're constantly assaulted by humor and tragedy, real-world news and clips from anime, apocalyptic climate predictions and updates about the latest Super Mario game, opinions from immediate real-world friends and memes from people you've never met—it can start to feel like being catapulted through multiple realities. Particularly with a movie like Everything Everywhere All at Once, the overwhelming existential crisis the main character experiences upon encountering the multiverse resonates with younger audiences because we're living that existential crisis every time we refresh our feed.

An essential and thought-provoking aspect of the multiverse that I haven't touched on, though, focuses less on "overwhelming parallel realities" and more on "the essence of the self."

While many multiverse stories show alternate worlds with various differences (primarily aesthetic) from ours, far more are focused on the people who live in those worlds: namely, on alternate versions of the main character.

Marvel Studios' Loki frames the idea as "variants," where the original Loki character has an infinite number of alternate versions of himself, all slightly or drastically different based on an event that did or didn't happen to change the course of his personal history. One Loki is a kid version who killed his brother Thor when they were children; another Loki decided to run for president. One Loki embraced his Frost-Giant heritage and looks blue all the time; another is an alligator. One Loki, called Sylvie, is female. It's not just Loki either; the show posits that everyone has variants of themselves, beginning from roughly the same starting point but diverging into vastly different branching timelines and lives.

Everything Everywhere explores this idea with even greater intensity—when Michelle Yeoh's Evelyn discovers all of alternate selves, she feels regret and envy at all of the other lives she could have lived instead of running a failing laundromat. Eventually, Matrix-style, she learns to channel the abilities and skills of her alternate selves (like kung fu, or using your feet like hands) to save the world. Into The Spider-Verse is perhaps the most prominent in incorporating the alternate selves idea as part of its premise; the appeal of both Into and Across is seeing a bunch of different versions of Spider-Man team-up together. In Spider-Verse, things are less about alternate versions of Peter Parker and more about alternate versions of the mantle of Spider-Man, calling attention to the common trauma and unifying mythos that defines every Spider-Man across every universe even in the midst of all their differences. Elsewhere in the superhero world, these team-ups (and sometimes battles) with alternate selves have been more and more frequent, from Doctor Strange to The Flash.

Up until recently, I've been a little perplexed by the prominence and appeal of this idea. I mean, it makes perfect sense from a business perspective; the multiverse has enabled corporations and studios to bring back old versions of well-known heroes for nostalgia, sell more toys with varying outfits and styles, and even (in the case of Spider-Verse) portray more race/gender diversity within the same franchise and thus appeal to an even wider audience.

That's business, though. For a while, I've had a feeling that there must be something else subconsciously appealing to audiences (myself included) about this notion of alternate selves across an infinite multiverse. I just couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.

Then I saw The Eras Tour.

Put simply, The Eras Tour is a spectacular and retrospective journey of independent self-invention.

Taylor Swift has always been an icon of self-made stardom; on a pure financial level, she's currently listed as the 2nd richest self-made woman in the music industry behind Rihanna. Especially since the late 2010s, though, this journey of self-making and radical artistic independence has also bled into her personal mythos; as portrayed in the documentary Miss Americana, in recent years she's leaned heavily into expressing political beliefs she'd have previously shied away from sharing, re-recording all of her old albums under "Taylor's Version" titles to regain ownership from Scooter Braun, and even working directly with movie theaters to release The Eras Tour movie without needing to share profits with a studio.

The Eras Tour, in many ways, feels like a culmination of this collective "Era" of Taylor's career—an era where she stopped only being what others wanted her to be, refused to let executives and media tell her how to use her voice, and started confidently making decisions to define her brand outside of conventional structures; indeed, at this point, Taylor Swift is the structure. I mentioned earlier that The Eras Tour was a celebration of Taylor's career, but it's also a reclamation, taking disparate parts and uniting them into one cohesive whole.

In a sense, the distinctiveness of each Era—and the fact they're all combined into one tour, separate and yet united—is the point of the whole show. From 1989 to Folklore, from Speak Now to Reputation, Taylor is taking the diverse and wide-ranging nature of her career and crafting a sort-of self-mythology, a coherent journey to the current moment.

In spite of the tonal fragmentation of Taylor’s brand and personality (aren’t they the same thing?) across multiple eras with multiple aesthetics, tones, genres, and voices, The Eras Tour manages to synthesize this disparate multiverse of music into a cohesive, modern Taylor. The main thesis of the show is that Taylor has had a lot of different albums, a lot of different looks, and a lot of different voices, but they’re all her. In bringing the diversity of Taylor’s Eras to the surface, the show transforms that diversity into a confident identity—one where the artist is unashamed of their letting their past lives (we'll come back to that) stand right alongside their present.

In more ways than one, it's a journey which mirrors that of Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once or the various Spider-Man characters in Into The Spider-Verse: finding a sense of harmony across multiple versions of your own persona.

There's been a lot of talk in this piece so far about being "self-made," which might seem odd in the broader context of history, given that "making" our "selves" at all is a relatively recent idea. Obviously, individualism has been the water we've been swimming in (with the levels rising steadily) for the last couple hundred years—but nothing has accentuated its prominence quite like the internet.

Ironically, the internet started as a place where anonymity was a primary appeal. Dark corners still use and abuse that advantage today, but far more often, we are now navigating social media as ourselves—and living under the weight of self-making that this fact carries. And even if we're not operating under our irl name online, we still hold the liberating freedom and crippling responsibility of shaping how we are perceived from scratch.

In her recent book Self-Made, author and essayist Tara Isabella Burton talks about the way this has changed how we interact with ourselves:

"We live, after all, in a social media saturated era, where more and more of our most notable celebrities are influencers. They present not only their work, but their meticulously curated personal lives for public consumption and private profit. Even those of us who aren't necessarily looking to land a brand partnership or to post sponsored content on our Instagram pages are likely to have encountered the need to create or cultivate our personal brands. More and more of us work to ensure that our social media presence reflects the way we want others to see us, whether we're using it for professional reasons, personal ones, or a mix of the two. Our cultural moment, in the contemporary English-speaking world at least, is one in which we are increasingly called to be self-creators: people who long not just to make ourselves a gift to the world, but to make ourselves, period. Our economic, cultural, and personal lives are suffused with the notion that we can and should transform ourselves into modern day deities: simultaneously living works of art to be admired by others and ingeniously productive economic machines."

In light of this description of the moment, the cultural obsession with multiverses and alternate selves takes on new hues. In a way, we are all like Evelyn in Everything Everywhere, faced with an infinite picture of the selves we could become through changing our bio and profile pic, curating our aesthetic, speaking out for various causes and tribes, expressing love for various products, and honing our personal brand. Perhaps it is the abundance of choice in the shaping of our digital destiny, then, that also results in an abundance of existential turmoil about the amount of possible lives (variants) we could be living or could have been living had we chosen to shape things differently. Like Taylor Swift, however, we are all searching for a way to integrate and unite our fragmented parts into a satisfying and whole identity, both digitally and physically.

Celine Song's Past Lives is a movie that is good, and it's a movie that you should see. It's also another movie that came out this year which is a secret multiverse tale—but not in the way you might think. Past Lives follows Nora, a Korean immigrant who had a young romance with a boy named Hae-Sung in elementary school right before she moved away to immigrate to Canada. Over 20 years later, Nora is married to a white guy named Arthur in New York City, and she and Hae-Sung meet again as adults for one week and reminisce about what might have been. Ya know, like peering into an alternate universe.

It’s a story you might assume would be all about a love triangle, a will-they-won’t-they, a questioning of whether the protagonist made the right choice. But here’s the thing: it’s not at all. Nora’s grief and turmoil in the film is less about being romantically attached to Hae-Sung and more perplexed by what he represents to her: the completely different life that she could have lived in Korea, and the alternate reality where she could have been equally happy elsewhere. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that I found the way Past Lives ends to be shockingly mature and subversive for one of these things; instead of embracing a multiverse of choice and dwelling in the what-ifs and various alternate selves of the past, Past Lives confronts its characters with the reality of the lives they live and forces them to sit in that unchanging reality with another path being more-or-less out of the question.

It prompted me, in my short Letterboxd review, to quote what Aslan says to Lucy in Prince Caspian: "To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that. But anyone can find out what will happen."

In Past Lives, then, the landscape of infinite choice and endless self-making possibility must be wrestled with and processed, but it is not to be worshipped; the limitations of the lives we've chosen must be grieved and accepted, allowing us to move forward. In Past Lives, there is peace around this through a surrender to the transcendent forces shaping our lives, mercifully outside of our choices or control. It is an antidote to a multiverse of identity.

This might all sound pretty damning against the hyper-individualistic brand-making of Taylor Swift, but it's important to remember that this is a cultural trend and not a personal sin; if anything, Swift has directly noted in the past that, "female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves 20x more than male artists. They have to, or else you're out of a job." She's playing the game, playing it well, and even playing it with a sense of artistry and true experimentation. I don't think The Eras Tour's takeaway and Past Lives' takeaway are necessarily opposed, either; both express and articulate a desire for self-harmony—one through active making, the other through surrender.

It will be interesting to see what comes of the multiverse genre in the next few years; in my experience recently, it feels like oversaturation has already caused many people to grow exhausted with it, outside of a few exceptions like Spider-Verse. Perhaps we needed a moment for our art to articulate the overwhelmed, overstimulated, and over-individual "era" we're living in, but we will ultimately move towards simpler and more low-budget stories (like Past Lives) to remind us of our humanity. That's what I'm hoping for, anyways.

Either way: as much as The Eras Tour's success in the coming weeks may be about good songs performed skillfully by a talented singer, I think it will also inevitably express something deeper: our collective desire to see a human being effectively synthesize a multiverse of identity into one reality.