Taylor Swift: "Fifteen"

Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen” follows the plot of “White Horse,” “All Too Well,” “Dear John,” “Forever and Always,” “You’re Not Sorry,” and portions of “Begin Again.” An innocent girl is duped by an erotically powerful swindler/trickster-man. (You can see some actual evolution in “1989.” In “Style,” when TS confronts Harry Styles with evidence of his roving eye, she does not become righteous and enraged. She in fact empathizes; she says, “I have a roving eye, as well.” In “Wildest Dreams,” TS knows where she’s headed before she starts—and doesn’t really blame Scott Eastwood for being a cad. These little bits of complexity represent a leap forward—and they may help to explain why the “1989” persona seemed slightly less popular, in some camps, than the wide-eyed “Speak Now”/”Fearless” persona.)

What’s remarkable to me, in “Fifteen,” is the way that TS is able to shoot herself forward into the late “aughties,” and to look back at one year of high school with a wise, world-weary eye. (She wasn’t all that far from fifteen when she wrote the song.) At the start of Lena Dunham’s career, Lorrie Moore wrote, “Dunham has teleported herself into the future in order to see herself as a survivor—a pre-survivor, not yet quite survived—of a terrible time. It’s what true artists [particularly comedic artists] do.” It seems to me TS accomplishes something similar in “Fifteen.” The great thrill of the song is simultaneously identifying with the protagonist and feeling like she’s a bit of a space alien, as most fifteen-year-olds are. (When a writer uses de-familiarization, she makes us see familiar phenomena in a new way. So, when young TS gets in her date’s car and “feels like she is flying,” we are briefly transported back to the experience of a little teen, to a time when ownership of a car, however crappy, seemed comparable to ownership of a flying carpet. TS does this so well—and the same trick comes up in “The Best Day.” “Don’t know if Snow White’s house is near or far away—but I know I had the best day with you today.” Using childhood to re-enchant the ordinary—this is something that goes a long way toward explaining young TS’s appeal among adult listeners.)

“Fifteen” is famous for launching one of TS’s shrewdest lines: “When you’re fifteen and somebody tells you they love you, you’re gonna believe them.” Some people go through all of life without even acquiring a basic knowledge of subtext, but here’s almost-tween-era TS hitting the irony/hypocrisy nail on the head. In high school, “I love you” can mean many things. It can mean: “I want to get in your pants,” “I’m bored,” “My parents are mean to me,” or “I’m feeling strange chemical urges.” In high school, it rarely means: “I love you.” TS goes on to new heights in her devastating depiction of adolescence: High school means “feeling like there’s nothing to figure out.” (In fact, the opposite is true, and how many other teenagers have the depth and cunning to observe that certitude is often a sign of foolishness? I’m telling you! This kid!)

Then TS brings down the hammer. Adolescence is “when all you wanted was to be wanted.” Battle-scarred, teen TS extricates herself from a bad relationship with “the boy on the football team” and discovers some steely professional ambitions and self-worth. Meanwhile, the red-head Abigail “gives all she has to a boy who will change his mind” (and I’m always startled by this euphemism—surely, I’m not a creepy old man when I read this as an allusion to lost virginity?—and by TS’s blithe insistence on applying it to Abigail, not to herself. Note that TS doesn’t give “everything she has.” TS can cry for Abigail, but she also wants to make very clear that she is not Abigail. It’s a weird, complicated moment, and I sometimes wonder how the real-world Abigail feels about it.) Never fear: “Time can heal most anything and you might find who you’re supposed to be.” Having survived the crucible of high school, TS and Abigail emerge, more skeptical, sadder, smarter. They have wrested a magical elixir from their straying boy-toys—and the elixir is self-knowledge. A healthy sense of caution (“Look before you fall.”) The curtain closes; the fairy tale ends.

Do you sometimes think about that early line—“Try and stay out of everybody’s way”? Do you think that that weirdly prefigures TS’s maddening refusal to endorse Hillary in the most recent campaign? That there is a strange guardedness in TS’s persona—and that this guardedness was present even in high school, and that it may prove to be TS’s fatal flaw? Do I have too much time on my hands? I’m going to Scotland soon; I might then develop new preoccupations. But maybe not. Till next time!

Oh, and P.S.: Does it bother you that TS has basically only one plot, one story? Well, that’s true of all writers. You’re born with one story, and you tell it over and over, in different guises. Look at Alice Munro: How many times could she dust off that book-smart farm girl and put her through her paces in a humbling big city with a treacherous man? The answer is: Many times. Many, many times. And Ms. Munro walked away with a Nobel Prize. This is how the world works—and we have to make use of the stuff that God gave us.

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