After debuting in theaters around the world, the first music video from Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl era—made for the fizzy opening track, “The Fate of Ophelia”—has finally landed. That only means one thing, of course: it’s time for the Swifties to get out their magnifying glasses and analyze every single frame. Below, a full breakdown of every Easter egg and reference—cinematic, artistic, literary, and otherwise—we spotted in the video’s four breathless minutes.
The twin Ophelias
In the very first shot of “The Fate of Ophelia,” we’re in a gilded, mirrored foyer. The title of the song is written on the railings and carpet, and you can see one of the dancers from the Eras Tour, Sam Mcwilliams, hoovering the floor while listening to “The Fate of Ophelia” on his headphones. Behind him is John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, the inspiration behind Taylor’s album cover, which we’ll return to at the end of the video.
On the far back wall of the ground floor, there are posters featuring Taylor’s face—one reads “Wood,” Showgirl’s ninth track, one sees Taylor holding an opal stone (see also: track three, “Opalite”), and another reads “Female Rage” (back in 2024, Swift’s company trademarked the phrase “Female Rage: The Musical”). The giant chandelier up above is also blocking a large portrait—it features a figure who resembles Taylor, wearing the white dress we’re about to see her in, standing beside two bearded men with long hair, who seem to be her album producers Max Martin and Shellback.
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Then, the camera pans to our heroine, splayed out on the water in the style of Friedrich Heyser’s Ophelia. But unlike Ophelia, who died, Swift awakens and sits up, as an orange bird flies past (more on this later). The background scenery moves away, and the song begins.
The orange bird
Swift then takes her place in a second painting. The skies behind her are gloomy, a nod to her melancholy The Tortured Poets Department era; her cat, Olivia Benson, seems to be immortalized as a statue to the right; and on the table in front of her we can see a loaf of bread (Taylor spoke about her current obsession with sourdough during her appearance on Travis Kelce’s New Heights podcast), a peach, and a string of pearls (in the title track, “The Life of a Showgirl,” she and Sabrina Carpenter sing: “I took her pearls of wisdom, hung them from my neck” and “You’re sweeter than a peach”).
On Taylor’s hand sits the orange bird we briefly saw earlier. In the music video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” Swift, again dressed in orange, perched on a swing inside a gilded cage. The implication seems to be that this particular songbird has now been freed.
Gentlemen still prefer blondes
After lighting a match and tossing it, Taylor walks into the next scene, in which she’s the spitting image of Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, another classic showgirl reference. Watch as she enters her dressing room, and you’ll spot a black-and-white photo of her fiancé, Travis Kelce, pinned to the corner of her mirror to the left. The coordinated dance on chairs here also seems to call back to Taylor’s performance of “Vigilante Shit” on the Eras Tour.
A tribute to The Ronettes
In the next sequence, Taylor is performing in an intimate, low-lit venue with two backing dancers, in what looks like a nod to the Ronettes. (That Ronnie Spector hair reference is surely undeniable.) Like Marilyn, Ronnie, too, was a shimmering star who experienced tragedy—look out for the forthcoming biopic of her life from Barry Jenkins, starring none other than Zendaya.
A Swiftian odyssey
Cut now to a redheaded Taylor on a theatrical recreation of a ship, battling foes and then being made to walk the plank, as sirens sing in the foreground. The scene echoes William Etty’s The Sirens and Ulysses, the painter’s 1837 visualization of Homer’s The Odyssey, while Taylor’s red hair seems to match the subjects of Arthur Hughes’s Ophelia (And He Will Not Come Back Again) and John William Waterhouse’s Miranda (a depiction of Prospero’s daughter from The Tempest).
Oh, and that faux dive into the water? That is, of course, a reference to her Eras Tour stage dive.
The Busby Berkeley musical
Then, we enter a glittering, aquatic-themed dance number that nods to the Busby Berkeley-choreographed “Human Waterfall” sequence in 1933’s Footlight Parade. It’s yet another reminder of Ophelia’s drowning, though the use of lifebuoys here references Taylor’s metaphorical rescue from the same tragic fate. After that, Taylor reappears with a sparkly blue tinsel feather boa of sorts, which matches the style of the jackets she and her dancers wore for the Eras Tour finale.
The full showgirl
In the next scene, we see a clapperboard with the title Sequins are Forever—a play on “Diamonds Are Forever” or Marilyn’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”—plus, “featuring Kitty Finlay.” Kitty is the name of the character at the center of the song “The Life of a Showgirl,” and Taylor’s dearly departed grandmother Marjorie Finlay, about whom she wrote the song “Marjorie,” was an opera singer—another kind of showgirl, if you will. The board also says “Take 100”—a reference to the line “keep it 100” in “The Fate of Ophelia,” as well as the fact that Taylor’s lucky number, 13, and Travis’s jersey number, 87, adds up to 100. As Taylor said on New Heights, “That’s numerology.”
When we next see Taylor, she has dark, Elizabeth Taylor-esque hair and violet eyeshadow. (Elizabeth Taylor famously had violet-tinged eyes, and on the album’s second song, “Elizabeth Taylor,” Swift sings, “I’d cry my eyes violet.”) On a chalkboard behind Taylor, you can see the abbreviated titles of songs from The Life of a Showgirl and their corresponding numbers (“7. AR,” particularly prominent, is track seven, “Actually Romantic”), as well as a Sequins are Forever poster featuring Taylor and bearing the names of Sabrina Carpenter, Max Martin, and Shellback.
She flies into the rafters, and then emerges a sequin-covered showgirl à la Singin’ in the Rain—albeit in orange, the main color of the album, naturally.
The off-stage encore
In the video’s final scene, Taylor wears a fuzzy coat, similar to her Eras Tour look while performing “Lavender Haze,” and moves forward through bursts of confetti, another nod to her final on-stage performance. Above her head glows an “Exit” sign, indicating her exit from that tour and into a new era. One of her dancers joins the crowd through a door to her right, carrying a pink handbag with a chihuahua inside—a reference to “Actually Romantic,” in which Taylor sings, “Like a toy chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse / That’s how much it hurts.”
Taylor then catches a football and enters through a door marked “87”—two more nods to Travis—and parties with hotel staff dressed like the employees from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, except they’re in oxidized green (this album’s secondary colour) instead of purple.
She’s interrupted by paparazzi at the window, and so flees into the bathroom. The orange bird, now on the windowsill, flies away again; we briefly see an Oscar on the floor (“They want that… Oscar on their bathroom floor,” Taylor sings on track eight, “Wi$h Li$t”); the sink resembles the ones in that unforgettable bathroom in The Shining, when a terrifying woman emerges from the bath; and on the side sits an opal stone. In the video’s final shot, Taylor lies in this bath, identical in color to The Shining’s, in a recreation of The Life of a Showgirl’s album cover—itself a reference to John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. And that’s all, folks!
