Taylor Swift Drops Music Video for "The Fate of Ophelia"

Taylor Swift dropped the long-awaited music video for her new single “The Fate of Ophelia” on YouTube on Sunday, just a little over 48 hours after it had its first bow on the big screen in theaters nationwide. 

The music video for the lead single from her new album is joined as a YouTube exclusive by the lyric videos for all 11 remaining tracks from her smash “The Life of a Showgirl” album.

The “Fate of Ophelia” video, directed by Swift, features the popstar and her dancers and other participants from the Eras Tour moving exuberantly through a variety of costumes and settings. 

The singer’s looks in the video include her being pictured as a classic showgirl with Marilyn Monroe-style platinum-blond tresses; a brunette go-go dancer out of the 1960s; an Esther Williams-style bathing beauty in a Busby Berkeley/MGM musicals tableu; and a raven-haired actress walking a pirate’s plank in an old-school theater setting.

While theater owners often complain about short theatrical windows, and they don’t come any shorter than the barely more than two days that “The Fate of Ophelia” and the lyric videos were exclusively on cinema screens this weekend as part of the program dubbed “Taylor Swift: The Official Release Party of a Showgirl,” many of those cinema operators won't complain in this case.

“Release Party” was always advertised as a three-day-only affair, and while Swifties knew in advance that much of the material in “Official Release Party” would go online on Sunday night, they still flocked to theaters anyway. 

The theatrical presentation landed with a boffo $33 million U.S. box office gross for its Friday-through-Sunday limited run. Furthering the incentive to flock to theaters, “Release Party” did include elements that are not going up on YouTube, at least at present, like behind-the-scenes footage and spoken introductions to each new song.

Those who saw “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” in theaters got plenty of context for the making of the “Ophelia” music video and the intent behind it.

“The idea I came up with for this music video was sort of a journey throughout all these different ways in which, over time periods, historically, you could be a showgirl,” Swift said after premiering the video in the theatrical presentation. “Like, how you would be in the public eye back during the 1800s, when you’d sit for a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Or you could be a showgirl by being a cabaret burlesque club performer. You could be a theatrical actor putting on a performance. You could a Vegas showgirl. You could be one of the girls in the Busby Berkeley screen-siren era of the ‘30s and ‘40s. You could be a pop singer on the Eras Tour.”

One of the reasons for her excitement over the “Ophelia” video is that “is that we got everybody back together from the Eras Tour,” she said. “All of the performers that you saw on that stage are back in this music video, as well as so many of the people who worked behind the scenes to create the Eras Tour.” That includes everyone from the dancers to production designer Ethan Tobman and choreographer Mandy Moore.

There is no appearance from Travis Kelce, but a football does make a cameo, as, during the lines “Pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,” Swift catches a ball thrown her way and then immediately tosses it behind her. In the BTS footage in the movie, Swift is heard worrying about her lack of football experience before pulling the move off with aplomb.

It’s not a big spoiler to say that the music video ends with a recreation of the album cover image of Swift, mostly submerged in a tub in full glam attire. What many fans may not know is that this was all borrowed from a classic painting.

For the denouement of the “Ophelia” video, Swift “wanted to match the framing ideally to the album cover and kind of just frame it exactly like that, so that people are like, ‘Oh, so the cover is a reference to the Ophelia painting, and this ending is a reference to the cover.’ So, art history for pop fans!”.

The painting she’s referring to is a circa-1850 painting of the Shakespearean character Ophelia by British artist Sir John Everett Malais, which portrays the doomed woman floating and singing in the water before she drowns herself, as described by Gertrude but not directly portrayed in “Hamlet.”

“Ophelia drowned because Hamlet just messed with her head so much that she went crazy and she couldn’t take it anymore, and all these men were just gaslighting her until she drowned,” Swift explained. But in her version, “what if the hook is that you saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia? Like. Basically you are the reason why I didn’t end up like this, tragic, poetic hero girl, who passed away in a fictional world?”

Admitting that it might sound like “a stupid thing to say,” Swift continues ahead and declares: “I love Shakespeare… It holds up. It’s actually not overhyped! And I love those tragedies so much. I fall in love with those characters so much that it hurts me that they die. … This is now the second song where I’ve gone back in and (am) like, ‘Yo, what if they got married instead of they die?’” (The other one she’s referring to is, of course, “Love Story,” which lets Romeo and Juliet off the double-suicide hook.)

There’s a deeper meaning to some of the other imagery in the music video than might first be intuited by viewers. For instance, that classic movie-musical scene in which she and all the dancers are wearing bathing caps and carrying life preservers… it celebrates the famously swimming movie star Esther Williams, cineastes will now, but it’s also, yes, an Ophelia reference. “Right now we are sitting on the set of what we’re kind of calling our Busby Berkeley-inspired, MGM, screen queen 1930s and ‘40s” motif, she says, “and we’ve got it looking kind of a little bit like a beach/swim/pool thing. And that’s a play on Ophelia.” The Shakespearian character drowned herself, as previously noted, but in her movie-musical homage scene, “we’ve got these lifesaving devices, which could have prevented that from happening,” she pointed out, with tongue firmly in cheek.

Viewers also learned, in the movie presentation’s behind-the-scenes footage, how a certain very handsome bread came to make a cameo. She is seen going over the shots planned for the next day and remembering that some loafing around is planned. 

“Oh, I can bake the bread… Can it be my bread? Can my bread be in the music video?” she says. The next day, she is delighted to personally add that to the set design. “This is a really exciting day for me as a baker,” she says, “because my bread is actually a music video star as of today.”

One point that comes up as the dancers learn their choreography: “The Fate of Ophelia” was not actually played on-set, to avoid leaks. And so the dancers required extra direction because of that. “We’re in secret sauce,” she said, between takes, as she directed on-set. “No one’s hearing this track. All anyone’s hearing in the room is just click. So I also have to be able to inform the dancers, ‘You need to feel this in this moment.’”

YouTube views will go some small way toward the massive consumption total that her “The Life of a Showgirl” album has been racking up before the video’s online release. 

On Saturday, the album had sold 2.7 million copies on its first day, including pre-orders. That one-day tally gave it the second-best sales total for any full week since the advent of Soundscan in 1991, trailing only the first-week total for Adele’s “25.” 

With six days of sales yet to come after that opening day, not to mention a full week of streaming numbers — including this new video — Swift may be poised to break Adele’s record in the days to come.

The 11 lyric videos — which are rolling out on YouTube one by one, starting with “Opalite,” following the “Ophelia” online premiere — have the onscreen lyrics backed by repeating video loops of Swift that were shot on the “Ophelia” set.