Taylor Swift’s latest misandrist song
In “Patient Zero,” Taylor Swift plays the victim card, flinging it so hard that it flies off the cultural poker table and into the face of fans who know nothing about the AIDS crisis. Not even that reprobate Madonna, recently seen nostalgically celebrating carnality, would sell out her fans’ suffering for such cheap feminism.
An ingrained contempt for men comes through in the song’s brooding lament for a woman who is abused by a heartless male. (“If you’re sick of him, I got you / I was patient zero.”) The spite song is Swift’s specialty and the basis of her juvenile appeal, which includes the barely buried resentment of adult women — those moms and professionals who unite with scared tweens and misguided gay men at Swift’s concerts.
“Patient Zero” exemplifies this era’s prevailing ignorance of history. Swift’s fans, the Swifties, probably don’t know that the term “Patient Zero” comes from a misnomer by CDC researchers in the early 1980s who used “contact-tracing” to investigate a cluster of AIDS cases among gay men, centered in Los Angeles, identified by coded number and locales. Because of a typographical error, a Canadian cited as “Patient O” (for “Out-of-California”) was misread as “Patient Zero,” then was mistaken as the origin of the AIDS epidemic.
It takes inexcusable temerity for Swift to flaunt her social ignorance this way — using a phrase loaded with the memory of generational devastation for a vapid romantic complaint. As with the current misuse of the term “genocide,” it’s a potent example of moral insensitivity.
Swift also tosses in the term “trouble in paradise,” with similar dangerous naïveté (coming many ignorant decades after Leonard Bernstein’s clever marital opera Trouble in Tahiti). Her lyrical jibe “the devil on his shoulder / Under his halo” is mere blame, omitting the woman’s complicit responsibility for the relationship. Swift intentionally emphasizes jealousy through pop’s vocabulary of complaint, as in her rap interlude:
Let’s get into it
I know he seems to shine so bright
but he’s bathing in your reflected light.
It accompanies a dramatic segment where Dakota Johnson plays arm-candy embarrassment to Colin Farrell’s cruel business tycoon. “You stutter when you lie,” he accuses her. She responds, “I’m not lying. I don’t feel good. I’m dizzy, and I feel nauseous, and I don’t know why.”
Here the visual story shifts to that of Swift portraying Johnson’s predecessor, the song’s narrator, who warns her successor to escape (“Run” scrawled in blood on the floor). Instead of examining the ultimate unhappiness that feminism has brought to Millennial women — and acted out in an endless series of media-favored social protests — Swift contrives a romantic mystery starring herself. She exposes Farrell’s history as an archetypal wife-killer, fantasizing that Farrell poisons her, just as Joan Fontaine feared Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s Suspicion. But Hitchcock never paired bitter with maudlin.
Swift so badly wants to be thought an auteur — an artist whose personal expression can be read across all genres — that she even insists on pretending to be the director of her own videos. (Swift hasn’t learned the Michael Jackson, Madonna, Walt Disney secret of commanding your own vision though hired help.) She wants credit for exploiting female animus and inspiring some of the most corrupt group-thinking this political year.
Narcissism ruins the “Patient Zero” music video, which begins morbidly at a woman’s gravesite, usurping AIDS tragedy to reconfigure the “toxic male” as Farrell’s brutish, murderous executive. Swift’s anti-male perspective is emblazoned in a newspaper headline: “Heiress dies of mysterious illness. Husband inherits billions. Spouse inherits estate amid unanswered questions.” Coming so soon after Swift’s highly promoted wedding event at Madison Square Garden to football player and Pfizer Covid-jab spokesman Travis Kelce, “Patient Zero” seems a helluva honeymoon track.
In her Instagram post for the premiere of the video, Swift wrote: “With the Patient Zero video, I got to explore the cinematic and literary genres I love so much. I wanted to incorporate elements of gothic ghost stories, true crime, psychological thrillers all in a setting I hadn’t really shot in much.” Yet Swift performs with a pout and always sings in a girlish voice. Using her own celebrity dating history as the model of the “contact-tracing” in “Patient Zero,” Swift sets a trap that Supervillains author Peachy Keenan described as “what young normie females have been taught about sex and sexuality, the influencers who they follow, the porn they like to watch, the x-rated romantasy they read, etc.”
“Patient Zero” is a cynical, nearly clinical romantasy that keeps the sexes at bay. Swift’s zero-charisma smears the tradition in which Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, Valerie Simpson, Stevie Nicks, and Chrissie Hynde could compete with men, not dread them.
