I'm SURE you haven't missed the news that Taylor Swift dropped her new video at the MTV VMAs. Here's a cute shot of her throwing dirt on my grave because she definitely killed me.
The video calls out everyone who's thrown shit at Taylor over the past 10 years, and my girl DID NOT HOLD BACK.
View this video on YouTube
If you watch it closely, there are a lot of hidden elements that truly make this video A WORK OF ART.
The video opens on a graveyard, and one of the graves has the name Nils Sjoberg. This is the pseudonym that Taylor used when she co-wrote "This Is What You Came For" with Calvin Harris.
Dead Taylor is wearing the dress from the "Out of the Woods" music video.
Guess she didn't make it out of the woods...
And the dress she's wearing in the grave is the same one that she wore to the 2014 Met Gala.
The shot of Taylor in a bathtub full of jewels reminds me of her quote in 2015 when she said that the media paints her as someone who sits at home and cries in a bathtub of pearls.
This media misportrayal of her was what inspired "Blank Space". Her look in the video for that song is pretty similar to her hair, makeup, and jewellery in this bathtub scene.
In the bathtub, there is one single dollar bill among the jewels. This is in reference to her recent court case, where she sued David Mueller for $1 after he grabbed her butt during a meet-and-greet in 2013.
She's wearing a lot of snake jewellery throughout the video, referencing everyone calling her a snake.
This happened after Kim K released footage of Taylor and Kanye's phone call last year.
And a snake literally serves tea.
If you look closely, the throne she's sitting on is inscribed with the quote "Et Tu Brute". This is a Shakespeare quote from Julius Caesar. As he is being stabbed to death, Caesar realises he has been betrayed by his friend Brutus.
This could be a reference to Taylor being betrayed by Katy Perry, which she addresses in the song "Bad Blood".
The quote also appears on pillars in the same scene.
The cheetah in the car she crashes is wearing a "13" necklace. This is Taylor's lucky number which she references in a lot of places.
The number also appears in the model squad scene.
There are also quite a few references to Taylor being called a cat lady.
She's shown as the ~squad leader~ of a bunch of models, calling out all the times people have criticised her squad.
That company she robbed? If you look in the background, it appears that it's some kind of streaming company, a callback to her open letter to Apple Music in 2015.
This sequined dress she wears has the quote "Blind for Love" on it, referencing the stereotype of her falling in love with every man she meets.
She also burns money, which leans into her "money-hungry" stereotype.
There's a scene where she's dancing with male dancers and they're wearing "I ❤️ TS" shirts, just like the one Tom Hiddleston was photographed wearing last year.
And there are eight of them, the same number of exes she has.
(Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, Conor Kennedy, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris, and Tom Hiddleston.)
She's shown standing on a mountain of bodies, and when you look closer, it's actually a bunch of "old Taylors", wearing iconic outfits from throughout her career.
These include the swan outfit from "Shake It Off", a costume from her Red tour, the Junior Jewels outfit from "You Belong With Me", a silver dress from the Fearless era, the outfit she wore to the 2009 MTV VMAs when Kanye interruped her, and various red carpet looks from the last eight years.
Here are a few of the ones I could see:
UPDATE: Tumblr user passinnotesinsecrecy has pointed out all the different outfits in this post.
The boot she kicks one of the old Taylors with looks a lot like the Vetements boots she wore on the cover of Vogue when she debuted her ~new look~.
The "You Belong With Me" shirt has the names of her A-list friends on it, as pointed out by Tumblr user thisloveisglowing.
This shot of her sawing the wings off a plane could be a metaphor for the media and other haters stopping her from spreading her wings and being her true self.
If you look really closely, on the tail of the plane, you can see "TS6", which is what fans have been calling her upcoming album for the last two years.
The last 40 seconds of the video are truly ICONIC. Fifteen different Taylors stand in front of a jet plane, arguing.
(Please also note that her upcoming album Reputation has 15 tracks.)
The "You Belong With Me" Taylor is making the ~surprised~ face that she got a lot of heat for early in her career. Then the dead Taylor says to her: "Stop making that surprised face, it's so annoying."
Then one of the "new" Taylors says, "What's with that bitch?", to which Dead Taylor replies: "Don't call me that." This could be referencing Kanye calling her a bitch on his song "Famous", despite her asking him not to.
The country-era Taylor says "y'all", the Red-era Taylor calls her fake, and one of the new Taylors, says "There she goes, playing the victim. Again."
Basically, she's quoting all the shit that stan Twitter and the media have ever said about her.
One of the new Taylors is taking photos on her phone, and when Met Gala Taylor asks her what she's doing, she replies: "Getting receipts. I'm going to edit this later."
This is probably in reference to the videos that Kim Kardashian uploaded of Taylor Swift and Kanye's phone call about the "Famous" video, and speculations that the video was not shown in its entirety.
The Taylor dressed in the outfit from when Kanye interrupted her VMAs acceptance speech then says, "I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative". This is a now-iconic line from Taylor's statement condemning "Famous".
And there you have it. WHAT. A. MASTERPIECE.
Say what you want about her, but this video is true perfection.
(Thank you to my Taylor Swift fam on Twitter for helping me compile this – you're all a bunch of geniuses.)
CORRECTION
David Mueller's name was misstated in an earlier version of this post.
UPDATE
This post has been updated to specify why Swift sued Mueller.
