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Perhaps the thing that comes to mind as the most blatantly unbelievable—and, to be sure, there are many to choose from—in Trap is the idea that a Taylor Swift-esque pop star would ever use her powers for true (rather than ultimately performative) good. M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie (the sixteenth one he’s directed, to be precise), however, would like to posit just that. The woman playing such a pop star is none other than Shyamalan’s daughter, Saleka (not to be confused with his other daughter, Ishana, whose movie, The Watchers, he recently produced). Indeed, the Trap Soundtrack serves as her second full-length album, albeit under the moniker of “Lady Raven,” with generically-titled songs like “Don’t Wanna Be Yours” and “Dreamer Girl” performed during the concert that serves as the primary backdrop for most of the film’s narrative. And yes, said concert is very clearly meant to mirror (or troll, as it were) The Eras Tour, not to mention the ilk that it attracts.
In point of fact, Shyamalan supposedly pitched the idea as: “What if The Silence of The Lambs happened at a Taylor Swift concert?” Well, for a start, it’s a major insult to The Silence of the Lambs to compare Trap to it in any way, shape or form (where film releases of 2024 are concerned, that luxury is reserved solely for Longlegs). And, secondly, the musical style of Lady Raven is far too R&B-infused (circa the 00s) to be comparable to Swift’s typically vanilla stylings. Though one thing that is comparable between the two women is their costume choices, often awash in flowy, ethereal dresses. But, as is the case with Swift, it doesn’t really seem to matter what Lady Raven wears. To her adoring, devout fans, she can do and don no wrong. With that in mind, at one point in the movie, our “anti-hero” (read: murdering psychopath) Cooper Adams (Josh Hartnett), an “all-American dad” who works as a firefighter, remarks to a “spotter” at the concert (played by Shyamalan, who likes to pull Hitchcock-inspired cameos in his own movies) that Lady Raven has a cult-like power over the mostly tween and teenage girls who worship her—that they would listen to anything she said.
Such a specific way of phrasing something is, of course, foreshadowing for the way in which Lady Raven will turn out to be the primary key in apprehending Cooper a.k.a. The Butcher (a serial killer nickname almost as unoriginal as Trap itself). Even though she’s already done enough on that front—certainly above and beyond what any ordinary “mega star” would do—by allowing the FBI to wield her concert date in Philadelphia as a trap for The Butcher. Who, for whatever reason, left behind a remnant of a receipt in one of his safe houses indicating that he would be at the Lady Raven show.
The profiler heading up the investigation, Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills, who was cast literally only because she was in The Parent Trap—get it?), is, in truth, more out of her depth than she realizes once Cooper catches wind of the concert being a full-on sting operation (taking inspiration from the 1985 sting known as Operation Flagship). For, unsurprisingly, a psychopath of this level is fully capable of playing the part-time role of “family man” when he’s not out…butchering people. Hence, being the “dutiful dad” for the night by taking his twelve-year-old daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue), to see Lady Raven. Almost as socially awkward and gawky as the Riley of Inside Out, her obsession with Lady Raven is basically the only thing that’s getting her through her ongoing painful ostracism by a group of girls who she once considered her friends.
Although Cooper tries his best to be “sympathetic” to Riley’s sensitivity to this often teen girl-specific plight, not only does he overtly find the concert and its audience annoying, but his attention is more than somewhat divided by the fact that he keeps noticing police officers escorting away random men at the show. Per Dr. Grant’s statistics, only three thousand men are in attendance among the twenty-thousand-plus crowd of women. On that note, the idea that such concerts, particularly The Eras Tour, are so often viewed as one of the few “safe spaces” where women can “just dance” and unapologetically exist precisely because of how repelled by such music/representations of femininity men are, has become a thing of the past. It first became one at its grandest scale in 2017, with Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman Tour in Manchester.
Then, it almost happened again at The Eras Tour itself, with the botched attempt at another terrorist attack in Vienna designed to kill as many female acolytes of Swift’s as possible. As one concertgoer put it in the aftermath of Swift’s subsequently cancelled Vienna dates, “There’s a feeling of inclusivity at her concerts. There are, after all, not many spaces in the world where women can go and have a drink and a dance and feel safe. It’s mainly women, children and gay men at her concerts. And now, you can no longer guarantee.”
Lady Raven’s concert, “little did they know,” also presents just such a case of an infiltrated “last bastion” where younger girls and women alike can “feel safe,” unburdened by the fear of a psychologically wounded man’s wrath (and yes, the two-dimensional Cooper character is slapped with cliché mother issues out of the Hitchcock playbook). A concept that is, in reality, the ultimate impossibility, particularly in the United States. What’s more, despite the “hope” presented by a female candidate currently running for president (with infinitely better chances of winning than Hillary Clinton in 2016), the backlash that will inevitably result if she does win is bound to be rooted in radically enacted male chauvinism.
And so, women in power or not, in an evermore (no Taylor pun intended) misogynistic society, to present, as a horror premise, being trapped in a stadium full of tween and teenage girls screaming and mindlessly mimicking the dance moves and lyrics of their favorite generic pop star, well, it doesn’t exactly do much to bolster the overall female reputation (that Taylor pun intended).
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Genna Rivieccio
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