Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ Is the First Pure Piece of Trump-Era Pop Art
On Saturday night, after Hurricane Harvey made landfall but just before the floodwaters began to rise in Houston, a large portion of America gave its attention to a boxing match unsentimentally nicknamed the “Money Fight.” Even in different times and under better circumstances, the pay-per-view face-off between Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor was never going to be the kind of event that would inspire sportswriters to wax poetic about the “sweet science” or move Joyce Carol Oates to add a new chapter to On Boxing. Mayweather is a convicted abuser of women, McGregor a preening race-baiter, and they walked away from the weekend with at least a combined $130 million. It simply wasn’t possible to celebrate their showdown except in the most nihilistic, “lol nothing matters” way. But the news from Texas — not just what was happening but the certainty that it would only get worse — lent an additional while-Rome-burns quality to the spectacle. Actually, Rome always feels like it’s burning if you install an emperor whose sole delight is fiddling with his phone. (And in fairness to Nero, some historians say that after the fire, at least he allowed his palace to be used as a shelter for the displaced, so he wins this round on points.)
When we talk about pop culture in the age of Trump, we tend to mean art of the self-styled resistance. But what about the stuff that history will record as epitomizing our time rather than raising a fist against it? The phrase “Reagan-era culture” doesn’t call to mind David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart — it’s Dynasty’s slavering fetishization of wealth, power, and conspicuous consumption, or the lubed militarism of Top Gun. Mayweather-McGregor, the sports equivalent of one of those tiger-versus-alligator YouTube nature videos, was, in its way, tailored precisely to the summer of 2017: It required a lowering of standards — a suspension of norms — to agree to participate even as a spectator, and it was steeped in a kind of “Hey, everyone’s getting paid” cynicism that is by now familiar. It didn’t drain the swamp so much as suck us into it.
Of the more than half-a-billion dollars in revenue that the fight is expected to generate, only a small portion came from the 481 American movie theaters where it was simulcast. But that take was still high enough, even with just one showing, to make the bout one of the ten top grossers in the country over the weekend if we treat it as just one more summer movie — which, given its coarseness, violence, predictability, and lack of female protagonists, perhaps we should. Mayweather-McGregor was able to crack the top ten in part because last weekend was the worst at the box office in 16 years, since just after 9/11. It was a summer in which two of the best-liked stories of heroism, Dunkirk and Wonder Woman, had little if anything to do with Americans, a slumpy season in which most people neither sought nor found much inspiration on the big screen, and one that, because big-studio movies take so long to produce, offered little in the way of resonance beyond The Big Sick.