Review
Culture
Music
Resurrection
Romance
Taylor Swift
6 min read

Taylor Swift proves Mr Bennet right

Romanticism: ruining lives since 1800. And we love it.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Hand-written poetry on a page
Memo: to JA from TS.
@taylorswift Instagr

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr Bennet has a conversation with his favourite daughter, Lizzy, about her older sister’s heartbreak. He says,  

‘Your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a sort of distinction among her companions.’ 

It’s one of those lines, genius as it is, that I would hate were it not written by Jane Austen. But it was, so I don’t. I do, however, like to think that his words are outdated. His thoughts, an artefact. That such a notion may have been true when women were unable to have any kind of aspirations that transcended romantic (and not-so-romantic) attachments, but we’re definitely over that now. I sit smugly in the knowledge that Mr Bennet’s words are a jibe that I can affectionately roll my eyes at; witty, yet redundant.  

At least, that’s what I did think. Now, annoyingly, I’m not so sure. What changed my mind? Well, Taylor Swift’s latest album dropped. And now I think that Austen, as usual, was onto something. 

The Tortured Poets Department has broken more records than I can count, many of which were broken before it was even released. Love it or hate it (I happen to be in the love it camp), Taylor is going to make it pretty darn hard for you to ignore it. Housed within this juggernaut of an album are thirty-one songs that seek to remind us that it’s better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Thirty-one songs that offer a masterclass in melodrama. Thirty-one songs that prove Mr Bennet right.  

Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? 

Here’s the theory, the premise, the pop-culture context you need to understand this album’s intentions: ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ was/is a WhatsApp group that Swift’s past-love, Joe Alwyn, was/is a part of. And so, this album is their story; it’s the story of their relationship crumbling, their hearts breaking, their understanding of one another disintegrating. Whether the lyrics are filled with fact or fiction, it doesn’t really matter. We’re soaking it up - every reference, every hint, every clue. These tortured poets have captivated us.  

Agony, tragedy, ecstasy, torment, regret: that’s the currency this album deals in. Heartbreak, I suppose. This record-shattering album is about heartbreak. And it got me thinking, why are we so obsessed with love hurting? Why are Romeo and Juliet something to aspire to? Why is tragedy some kind of signifier of ‘real’ love? Why, as Mr Bennet says, do we like being ‘crossed in love now and then’

The key lyric that holds the first song on Taylor’s album together sums it up pretty well, as Taylor melodramatically declares – ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life’.  

Firstly - no it’s not, Taylor. You’re Taylor Swift, a life less ruined no-one could find. But secondly, why is that tumultuous kind of love something to idolise? I’m genuinely wondering. Because, admittedly, I’m as guilty of this as anyone.  

Maybe it’s a way in which we feel as though we’re living a meaningful story, it’s our main-character-syndrome rearing its head. Somewhere along the line, have we been taught that tragedy is a signifier that our love is some kind of epic thing that is happening in the universe? That our relationship is re-arranging the cosmos somehow? That this pain is so powerful, stories will be told of it? Afterall, many of the greatest love stories end in agony, do they not? Would we care about Titanic’s Jack and Rose, La La Land’s Mia and Sebastian, or Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie and Lindsay had they lived happily ever after? Perhaps not. If a beige life is to be avoided at all costs, the torture of heartbreak is, I suppose, a particularly vibrant shade.  

Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious. 

Or perhaps it’s a sensation thing, akin to our obsession with jumping out of airplanes or walking over hot coals. Maybe we just want to feel. And according to most psychologists, heartbreak is one of the most powerful and emotive experiences one could face – a plane could not get high enough, nor coals hot enough, to compete. The science behind it is fascinating. I truly had no idea.  

Which leads me onto my second question – why don’t we care for the science of it?  

Why, when it comes to explaining what we’re feeling, do we declare our ‘heart to be broken’ as opposed to ‘the right side our brain is experiencing a deeply distressing emotional sensation following a shattering of an emotional attachment, triggering feelings of loss and inadequacy’? 

Interesting, isn’t it? How that second definition somehow feels less true. Maybe we have Romanticism to blame for that - the poets, philosophers and writers who shunned reasonable, practical, scientific language in favour of the tragic, the grand, and the sublime. Taylor’s whole album is an ode to Romanticism: its lyrics are dramatic, beautiful, grand and religious.  

In her song, Guilty as Sin, Taylor writes –  

What if I roll the stone away? They’re gonna crucify me anyway. What if the way you hold me is holy… I choose you and me, religiously.’ 

Yes, she’s comparing her crush on a man to the crucifixion of the Son of God. If this isn’t over the top, I don’t know what is. In many ways, this album knows it’s being silly, over-dramatic and naïve. But it also knows that to be those things is to be as honest as possible. It is shunning human-sized explanations of heartbreak, and is instead desperately searching for the deepest, highest, grandest language it can find - because that kind of language just feels truer. And I find it pretty fascinating that such language still has Jesus all over it.  

All of it has got me thinking, we don’t really want everything controlled, measured and understood, do we? We don’t really want to be the most powerful thing we know. I think that’s a myth. A convincing one, I grant you. But one that has cracks in it. Romanticism is one such crack. School of Life says this about the Romantics, ‘Romantics don’t believe in God, but they go in search of the emotions one might find around religion’. Awe. Transcendence. Our own small-ness in the face of something great – that kind of thing.  

They don’t believe in God, but they crave him. Interesting.  

I think maybe that’s (at least partly) why we want our love stories, the good and the bad, to engulf us, to be something we must succumb to, to be written in the stars – predating our awareness of it and transcending our control over it. We think, at least to an extent, that love and heartbreak, they happen to us. They’re a sacred hand that we have been dealt and must grapple with. This is Romanticism - and apparently it hasn’t gone anywhere, Taylor Swift and her band of tortured poets have just proved it.  

Perhaps Mr Bennet was right after all; perhaps we do have an odd thing about heartbreak. But hey, don’t blame women. Blame the Romantics and that God-shaped hole within them… and within us too, apparently.  

Article
Culture
Justice
Trauma
4 min read

Why are we so obsessed with true crime?

Our prurience often mistakes curiosity for compassion

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Crime scene tape
Joshua Coleman on Unsplash.

Last month, Terry Barnes wrote in The Spectator about the ‘Trial of the Century’: that of Erin Patterson, a middle-aged Australian woman accused of murdering a dinner party-full of people with deadly mushrooms. 'All this week, on unusually cold and frosty southern Australian winter mornings, pre-dawn queues of rugged-up and puffer-jacketed hopeful spectators formed outside the rural courthouse, breath steaming in television spotlights as people stamped their feet to stay warm.' 

Journalists covering the ongoing trial compete with those spectating - and reporters have flown in from around the world to an obscure, otherwise undisturbed country town. The general fascination mirrors the streaming charts, where you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to observe a pattern in what’s hot. True crime – whether recreated on TV or happening in the courts - is having a moment.  

The attention of criminologists, the press, law enforcement and the justice system on real life cases such as Patterson’s is paramount. But is ours? 

A voracious appetite for true crime isn't new. In St Augustine's Confessions, he writes about a friend called Alypius who resisted peer pressure to go into the gladiatorial amphitheatre. Augustine writes about his friend being dragged in: 

'When they arrived and had found seats where they could, the entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty.' 

Alypius kept his eyes closed, but eventually gave in to the spectacle: 

'As soon as he saw the blood, he at once drank in savagery and did not turn away. His eyes were riveted. He imbibed madness. Without any awareness of what was happening to him, he found delight in the murderous contest and was inebriated by bloodthirsty pleasure.' 

Alypius' story is one of being freed from this addiction, but there's still a thirst for blood today in the arena of both true crime and cancel culture. The human condition, as well as being predisposed to voyeurism, is closer to William Golding's Lord of the Flies than we'd like to admit. It doesn't take much displacement of order for chaos to unravel. 

And this is why we're so fascinated: that true crime is true. The whodunnits of Agatha Christie have kept people entertained for decades, but truth is stranger than fiction. The perpetrators aren't ridiculous 2D villains and monsters, but men and women who for whatever reason have given themselves over to darkness. The mixture of motives, methods and mania aren't easily unscrambled, so we like the serialisation. The devil is in the detail, and it takes time to pore over. 

The Russian author and dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, when he was sent to the gulag, gradually solved his own puzzle: that evil can be observed, but it is much closer than we think: 'Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an un-uprooted small corner of evil.’ 

Even so, we don't like to admit that sobering reality, or nuance. We like to think we're on the side of justice. We confuse curiosity with compassion. But the Netflix shows, podcasts and twists and turns of the courtroom upend our 'just world hypothesis': we see that justice often isn't fully served in this life, making us wonder if it might be possible eternally. 

Then there's also the reality of truth being contested. The prophet Isaiah writes of a time where 'Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far off. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter.’  

Perhaps our thirst here is not just for all the gory details, but for justice and truth. It's a theme picked up by St John in the New Testament, writing 'And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed.' Jesus declares later in this same gospel: 'I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’ 

The only way we can begin to make sense of evil is to consider one who absorbs our darkness, absorbs all darkness, and yet remains light, even against the backdrop of our world’s darkness.  

So what's the right balance? Can I enjoy a true crime show and be filled with light? The tipping point will probably be different for each of us. St Paul, himself a victim of injustice, writes from his prison cell: 'whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.’ 

This isn't a call to turn a blind eye to evil. Paul isn't escaping his prison cell with escapism. He is starkly, soberingly honest about the nature of his own sin and its pervasive, polluting quality in the human condition. And we all have a responsibility to one another to detect, be vigilant and call out where there's injustice. To be ready for it. Our world is in a mess because of blind eyes and burying heads in the sand. Jesus quite clearly says he brings that light to expose the darkness. But meditating on and marinating in darkness as entertainment? That is something different.  

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