“On the Right Side of History”: Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana and the Gauntlet of Cultural Liberalism
The culture industry is running on a marathon of apologies. In the post-reality-TV world of celebrity confessionals, specials by Aziz Ansari, Kevin Hart and, most recently, Pete Davidson, all build on the singular message: “I made mistakes but now I know better.” Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift biopic on Netflix, is a prime example of pop-culture apologia bound up in a coming-of-age tale. The film follows Swift as she leaves behind her small-town girl naivete to become today’s progressive archetype of the “independent woman,” a stand-in for the good conscience of cultural liberals.
Review: The People v. O.J. Simpson
As The People v. O.J. Simpson artfully pieces together, in the 1990s, O.J.’s acquittal provided the semblance of racial justice by eliciting a feeling of victory through the spectacle of a televised trial. This dose of self-delusion was delivered in bleak times in America, especially brutal if you were poor and black. Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne—featured in the show as the wealthy, but culturally-conscious, New Yorker—wrote in 1997 that the O.J. trial had something for everyone: “love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth… the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides,” and “all the justice that money can buy.” The verdict was all the justice a black man in America could buy in 1994—if he could afford the price. However, The People v. O.J. Simpson suggests that there may have been a greater cost: this judicial victory was gained by peddling a false promise of redemption to working black Americans.