At midnight on October 3, Swift released her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, and in just 11 hours, it achieved more streams than any other album of 2025.Footnote ¹ And yet, by 7 AM the next morning, the internet was ablaze with some of its most scathing indictments of Swift’s songwriting. The Life of a Showgirl is the first album Swift has released after her record-breaking tour, The Eras Tour, and it follows Swift’s 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department, which is deeply introspective, poetic, and saturated with literary references of the most “tortured” kind. In comparison, the internet is right to notice the tone shift in The Life of a Showgirl, but what needs further consideration is how Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl is not “lazy,” “uninspired,” and “MAGA coded,” as so many internet personalities have charged. Rather, Swift’s writing on The Life of a Showgirl gets into character as adroitly as she does on Folklore, Evermore, and The Tortured Poets Department. The difference is, where the culture has been settling into Swift’s nineteenth-century allusions for the last five years, she has now stepped into a mid-twentieth century story-world with the likes of Jacqueline Susann and her 1966 cult classic, Valley of the Dolls.

Valley of the Dolls is a cautionary tale of the ingénue. The novel follows four women—Anne Wells, Neely O’Hara, Jennifer North, and Helen Lawson—as they are inducted into and then ushered through show business. Building on her own experience as a Broadway and television actress (including a role on the 1956 variety show, This is Show Business), Susann captures the showgirl’s off-stage fight to remain relevant and the dressing room friendships that sour under the bright lights. It was the bestselling novel in 1966Footnote ² and yet, critics called it “trash.” Valley of the Dolls was Time’s “Dirty Book of the Month,” and it was considered so pornographic that stores sold it “from under the counter.”Footnote ³ The novel broaches themes of women’s sexuality, industry violence, and substance abuse in a way that “made you feel as if you were talking to your smart, frank, and funny best friend who told you things no one else dared to discuss.”Footnote ⁴ It is this same “frank,” “funny” writerly voice that makes Valley of the Dolls “shocking,” to use Susann’s own descriptor, and, it is an aesthetic—the “showgirl aesthetic,” we might say—that Swift adopts on The Life of a Showgirl.

The showgirl aesthetic, as it appears in Susann’s writing, is confessional, uncensored, and unapologetic in its use of industry slang and show business jargon to talk about the unsettling reality of women in the industry. For instance, the novel’s titular reference to “dolls” is the industry term for a variety of barbiturates the four female characters use to help them sleep, lose weight, and maintain energy through arduous performance schedules. The pills are referred to as “gorgeous red dolls,”Footnote ⁵ and they are prescribed to showgirls by doctor’s paid by industry men to keep their stars in performing condition. The pretty misnomer—“gorgeous dolls”—is an affront to the showgirl’s masked suffering, and it serves the literary purpose of unsettling the reader’s assumed knowledge of the showgirl’s easy, unbothered lifestyle. In the last pages of the novel, Anne Wells appears to have achieved her wish list of desires and stands to represent the showgirl’s ultimate success—“She had Lyon, the beautiful apartment, the beautiful child, the nice career of her own, New York—everything she had ever wanted”Footnote ⁶—and yet, she also succumbs to the emptiness of these desires. Her husband is a perpetual adulterer, she has lost all her friends to overdose, institutionalization, or betrayal, and she must battle every day to keep her career as the aging face of a beauty empire. Anne, the once girl-next-door, is calloused by her experiences in show business and ends the novel thinking that “from now on, she could never be hurt badly,” not because she is secure in her success, but because “there were always the beautiful dolls for company.”Footnote ⁷ The “beautiful dolls” cover up the ugly truth of Anne’s empty life and the regrettable choices she made to reach the heights of showgirl success.

In part, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department explores this ugly, shallow nature of fame. While tracks like “I Can Do It with A Broken Heart” capture Swift’s drive to work through heartbreak and the physical toll performing takes on her body, Swift’s “Florida!!!” takes up the escapism that makes such a life endurable. In the bridge to “Florida!!!,” Swift writes, “I need to forget, so take me to Florida/I’ve got some regrets, I’ll bury them in Florida/Tell me I’m despicable, say its unforgivable/At least the dolls are beautiful, fuck me up, Florida.”Footnote ⁸ The sentiment Swift captures in this bridge is indicative of Anne’s ending in Valley of the Dolls. Swift is haunted by her “despicable,” “unforgiveable,” “regrets,” but she is soothed by the “beautiful dolls.” As many have noted, Florida was the next stop on Swift’s tour after news of her breakup hit the internet. As such, this song likens “beautiful dolls”—the barbiturates used by Susann’s showgirls to ease the pain of performing—to the act of performing itself. For Swift, her escapist drug is performing. The stage is where she can endure her heartbreak.Footnote ⁹ But performance as escapism has harmful effects as well, and that is the story Swift tells on The Life of a Showgirl.

One of the internet’s loudest criticisms of The Life of a Showgirl is that the showgirl theme has nothing to do with the music itself. A well-followed and rather contrarian online personality, The Swiftologist, claims that “the showgirl concept was nothing more than a marketing tool…She definitely implied in the rollout that there would be this dark and mysterious undertone and there is some of that, but certainly not enough to carry a whole concept.”Footnote ¹⁰ This line of critique wishes to see more songs that provide listeners a peek behind the curtain. I would argue that the album does provide those songs, though Swift uses the unapologetic, “frank,” and “funny” showgirl aesthetic to (re)tell the lore of her come-up, of her rise to larger-than-life fame, of the constant attempts to “cancel” her, and of the things—like love—she almost missed out on because of her cultural identity as a performer.

In The Life of a Showgirl’s opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” Swift pulls inspiration from Shakespeare’s Ophelia, who is driven mad and ultimately to suicide by the men in her life, to tell the story of her close call with a similar fate. The song is a nod to the album’s cover art, in which Swift is pictured in a bedazzled showgirl dress while soaking in a bathtub. The cover is inspired by Millais’ mid-nineteenth century painting, Ophelia, in which he paints Ophelia floating in a river, surrounded by flowers, in death. Swift double-downs on this reference by beginning her music video for “The Fate of Ophelia” with a living depiction of a similar painting. But the showgirl soaking in a bathtub is also evocative of Susann’s showgirl character, Neely, who, after being replaced in a film by a younger actress, overdoses on “beautiful dolls” and is hospitalized. Neely is administered a form of hydrotherapy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century called “continuous bathing.” Nurses force Neely’s clothes off and coercively get her into a bathtub before securing a canvas cover across the top of the tub so that only Neely’s head is free. This therapy was intended to treat insomnia and aggression and would sometimes last hours at a time while the patient, like Neely, screamed to be let out. Neely emerges from the therapy “cured” and becomes submissive to the industry and to the men running it, at least until once again it becomes too much and she is hospitalized a second time, this time indefinitely.

In effect, the bathtub reference on The Life of a Showgirl’s cover is a dark callout of the industry-inflicted pain the showgirl endures and of the harsh conditioning she receives when she steps out of line. On the cover, Swift’s entire body except her face is submerged in the water and the water itself is eerily still, as if mimicking a taught canvas overlay. Swift places this in contrast with Millais’s painting of Ophelia when she ends her music video with a living depiction of her own cover. In the music video’s hotel room party scene, Swift is dancing with a group of friends when, through the hotel windows, the paparazzi break in to try to snap a photo of Swift. Swift flees the room, heads for the bathroom, where we are left with an abrupt tone shift and the image of Swift floating in a bathtub, recovering from her torment. She stares up at us with an expression that is both resigned—as if she expected to be found, even in the bathtub—and defiant—she is cold, even as her privacy is invaded.Footnote ¹¹

On “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon, Swift mentions that her songwriting on this album was inspired by a juxtaposition of the old and new.Footnote ¹² It’s evident in her music video’s references to both Ophelia and to showgirls such as Neely or even Elizabeth Taylor that Swift acknowledges the path her carefully crafted showgirl character might have found herself on had she not been pulled out by some outside force which is, in this case, love. The Swiftologist remarks that The Life of a Showgirl “is the ‘I love Travis’ album,”Footnote ¹³ but even in a song like “The Fate of Ophelia” that does seem to reference Travis Kelce in concrete moments such as “I pledge allegiance to your hands, your team, your vibes,”Footnote ¹⁴ the narrative purpose is not “I love Travis,” so much as it is emphasizing the showgirl’s realization that (1) her environment is inhospitable to love (thus, one must make their own sunshine) and (2) had she not stopped performing long enough to be vulnerable to love, then she might have ended up like Ophelia or Neely.

The showgirl character Swift crafts on The Life of a Showgirl must negotiate between her identity as a performer and her identity offstage. This negotiation is most directly addressed in “Eldest Daughter,” in which Swift offers an honest take on the difference between the performance and her life. She sings, “I’ve been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness/I’ve been dying just from trying to seem cool/But I’m not a bad bitch/And this isn’t savage/But I’m never gonna let you down/I’m never gonna leave you out/So many traitors/Smooth operators/But I’m never gonna break that vow.”Footnote ¹⁵ These lines have drawn immense criticisms ranging from the Swiftologist calling the lines “cringe” and “bad writing” to others suggesting the phrases “bad bitch” and “savage” indicate racist attacks on women of color artists. These claims miss the ways Swift borrows from an historic showgirl rhetoric to make sense of the built-in paradox of the showgirl figure. After getting ripped apart by critics as “dirty,” Susann pens a defense of Valley of the Dolls, in which she argues, “[p]eople often confuse the words savage and dirty…There is nothing in Valley of the Dolls that is dirty. There are plenty of savage chapters.”Footnote ¹⁶ She goes on to define “savage” as the necessary sacrifices and abuses showgirls must not only endure but inflict upon one another to win at the industry. She says, “The world of show business is one of the toughest arenas of combat. Every star is a gladiator of the moment…My gladiators in Valley of the Dolls are human…They have their failings, their weaknesses, and some of them get crushed in combat, or bruised, and I show the gore of the inside battles…Rough, yes. Savage, you bet. But not dirty.”Footnote ¹⁷ Not only is Swift’s fashion aesthetic for the album full of chainmail dresses, which I like to think wink at Susann’s “gladiator” metaphor, but in “Eldest Daughter,” Swift questions the purpose in the combat and the cost of the gladiator-like façade she’s put on in order to win her battles against the “traitors” and “smooth operators.”

The lines “I’m not a bad bitch/And this isn’t savage” borrow upon an industry slang to allude to the ways she has performed the “bad bitch” (the gladiator), and to the ways she has had to be “savage” (the lamb dressed as a wolf, but always fire), as we see in “Actually Romantic,” “Father Figure,” and “Cancelled!” All of these “industry songs” depict the showgirl’s cutthroat defense of center stage. In contrast, “Eldest Daughter” grapples with the moment this performance of strength and power registers as a lie that even the showgirl has tricked herself into believing. In the second verse Swift sings “Pretty soon I learned cautious discretion/When your first crush crushes something kind/When I said ‘I don’t believe in marriage’/that was a lie/Every eldest daughter/was the first lamb to the slaughter/so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.”Footnote ¹⁸ After learning “cautious discretion,” Swift the showgirl performs a character version of herself, one who does not “believe in marriage”; and she dresses up in the costume of the wolf—a hardened predator—in order to escape the softer parts of herself that have been “crushed” by boyfriends, sure, but also by industry expectations and social chatter about her public persona.

Ultimately, Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl is a curated narrative about performance and its potential to overwhelm the artist’s life. The album is shocking—as was Susann’s Valley of the Dolls—because it delivers unsettling glimpses of the life of a showgirl in a “beautiful,” boppy pill. In the final track on the album, “The Life of a Showgirl (featuring Sabrina Carpenter),” Swift crafts a multi-generational story about a fictional showgirl, Kitty, cautioning a young aspiring performer to stay away from the industry. But of course, the lure of the stage is too strong, and the young showgirl pays her dues and makes her rise until she too must accept the catastrophic fate of the showgirl. She becomes cold—“Do you wanna take a skate on the ice inside my veins”—and she is discarded and replaced—“They ripped me off like false lashes/And then threw me away/And all the headshots on the walls/of the dance hall are of the bitches/who wish I’d hurry up and die.”Footnote ¹⁹ But just as we might start to feel pity for our showgirl and internalize her cautionary tale, Swift reaches the song’s hook: “But I’m immortal now, baby dolls/I couldn’t if I tried.”Footnote ²⁰ The showgirl is immortal. The heights she has reached, the undying performances she has given, the shocking stories she has told will reign forever. And once again, the reference to “baby dolls” suggests the undying cycle; this is the seasoned showgirl now passing down her own advice to the ingénues hurrying her up to die so that they might take her place in the lineup.