Taylor Swift’s Adulthood Blues

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What fans will hunger to know, after watching the new Netflix documentary Miss Americana, is whether Taylor Swift prefers carnitas or carne asada. “Do you eat burritos?” Swift asks her producer, Joel Little, at one point in the movie. Little giggles and asks who on Earth doesn’t eat burritos. Swift answers that she didn’t until two years prior—“I just had never tried one.” Cut to her inserting a chip into a thermos-size mass of tortilla as she discusses her anxieties about soon turning 29.

That Swift lived for two and a half decades without experiencing a Chipotle coma is one of the more concrete revelations of Miss Americana, a stirring work of image correction. The director Lana Wilson, notable for her cinematic journalism about abortion and suicide, applies a vérité filter to Swift Inc. at a moment of transition for the now 30-year-old pop star. Wilson recaps Swift’s songwriting and scandals elegantly, with an emphasis on the star’s growing political consciousness. But mostly, the doc spins a fable about Swift loosening up from singing marionette to burrito-scarfing Real Girl. It’s a story packaged as triumphant, but it arrives at an awkward moment in Swift’s career and hints at an ambivalent truth: Adulthood can land like a minor chord, and self-actualization does not organize life so much as open new, messier possibilities.

The movie opens by conjuring the sense of intimacy familiar to fans who follow Swift on social media. Clad in overalls and a light-pink sweater, the star noodles on a piano as her kitten Benjamin Button creeps across the keys, or she sits next to a windowsill and pages through her teenage diaries. The images projected are cozy, cutesy, creative—but Swift’s out to question one of the fundamental ideas underlying Pinterest-ready perfection. “My entire moral code, as a kid and now, is a need to be thought of as good,” she says. “It was all I wrote about. It was all I wanted.”