To celebrate the release of her highly anticipated 10th studio album Midnights, Taylor Swift dropped her first music video of the album era on Friday (Oct. 21) and Swifties will be dissecting this one for a while.
The super dramatic clip for “Anti-Hero” features Swift attending her own funeral, Tom Sawyer-style, doing shots and drinking wine straight from the bottle with her party hard doppelgänger and blowing up to 50-foot giant Tay size for a trippy Alice in Wonderland-style dinner party crash.
“Track three, ‘Anti-Hero,’ is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written,” Swift previously said of the song. “I really don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before.” The singer/songwriter directed and wrote the treatment for the five-minute clip that dropped on Friday morning. It opens with Taylor seated at a 1970s breakfast table in a kitschy home haunted by ghosts wearing sunglasses before she opens the door to find party Taylor waiting outside, reciting the instant classic line, “It’s me, hi/ I’m the problem, it’s me.”
The dynamic duo then down some shots as bad Tay smashes a guitar before oversized Swift crawls into a dinner scene and has her heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow, drawing purple glitter blood. Then it’s back to double Taylor bouncing on a bed and throwing back more shots (followed by purple glitter puke) before a dramatic interlude at her own funeral.
The reading of the will dramedy that unfolds amid the song/video that takes on insecurity and self-consciousness is heightened with cameos from comedians Mike Birbiglia (Don’t Think Twice) and John Early (Search Party), who battle over not-dead Taylor’s earthly possession with entitled daughter-in-law Mary Elizabeth Ellis (It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia). “Watch my nightmare scenarios and intrusive thoughts play out in real time,” Swift tweeted about the theme of the clip.
Sorry kids, there are no secret encoded messages or Easter eggs, the disappointed heirs find out as Taylor peeks at their misery from inside her coffin — which sits next to a classic Easter egg picture of aged-up cat lady Taylor cradling two armloads of kitties. After the room erupts into grief chaos, the clip ends with the two Taylors meeting up with Giant Taylor for a swig of bottled wine on a rooftop at night.
“I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized,” Swift continued in the video previewing the visual, aptly posted at midnight. “Not to sound too dark, but I just struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person — don’t feel bad for me, you don’t need to. But this song really is a real guided tour through all the things I tend to hate about myself; we all hate things about ourselves.”
Watch the “Anti-Hero” music video below.
