Taylor Swift‘s new video for “Fortnight,” which she wrote and directed, is a black-and-white fantasia of paper, rain and a dash of Poor Things.
The clip starts with Taylor, in heavy makeup and a fancy gown, handcuffed to a hospital bedframe that’s affixed halfway up a wall in what looks like a mental hospital cell. She frees herself and stares in the mirror; as she wipes her face, her duet partner Post Malone‘s tattoos magically appear on it.
Next, Taylor’s in an office, wearing a black, old-fashioned gown like the one her friend Emma Stone wore in the movie Poor Things. She and Post Malone sit at different typewriters, typing at each other as colored clouds emanate from their machines.
Cut to Taylor and Post lying together on a huge silhouette of Taylor’s face made up of white pages. They embrace tenderly as the pages swirl around them, and we see that all of Post’s facial tattoos have disappeared.
Next, we’re in a lab where Taylor is strapped to a table, being studied by two scientists played by Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles, who starred in The Dead Poets Society. Cut to Post in a phone booth on top of a mountain in a rainstorm; Taylor’s kneeling on top.
Then we see Taylor back in the office, surrounded by swirling, burning pages. Back in the cell, she smashes a two-way mirror. Back at the phone booth, Posty and Taylor clasp hands. The end.
On Instagram, Taylor wrote, “When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music. Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another.”
“@postmalone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration,” she added. “I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, @ethanhawke and @mrjoshcharles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets).”
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