'You Belong With Me' - Taylor Swift
I am analysing the narrative styled music video for Taylor Swift’s, You Belong With Me produced by Nathan Chapman. The genre is country/pop which has been shown in many different ways. These characteristics include the number of costume changes – and persona changes for that matter as Taylor Swift plays the nerdy blonde and the mean girl brunette. There is also the dancing around her bedroom singing into the hairbrush which is clearly targeting the young teenage market that most pop music intentionally aims towards. On top of this the love story and happy ending all attract the teenage girl target audience and creates the characteristics of a pop video.
There are lots of relationships between the lyrics and visuals, partly because it’s a narrative video but possibly also because it is aimed at young teenage girls who stereotypically like more superficial concepts. From the opening line, ‘your on the phone’ there is an obvious link as she looks across from her window to see Lucas Till on the phone appearing to have an argument. This is followed up as Taylor Swift rights a note reading ‘You okay’ along to the lyric ‘She doesn’t get your humour like I do’, creating a sense of friendship and comfort around one another. When she is sitting in her room she sings ‘I’m in my room’ which is followed by ‘Listening to music she doesn’t like’ where the visuals come about five seconds later as she is dancing around her room like a typical teenage girl.
On the first chorus we see Taylor Swift pointing to her baggy t-shirt as she sings ‘She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts’. This is followed by ‘She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers’. At this point she is going through a number of costume changes where cheer captain is bright pinks and girly hair but bleachers is a dark hooded jacket with thick eye-liner creating the stereotypical image and contrast between the ‘popular’s’ and the ‘nerds’. This series of shots is summarised as she returns to her original costume to sing, ‘What your looking for has been here the whole time’ showing that she is what Lucas Till has been looking for.
After this the pair’s relationship grows as Taylor Swift sings ‘I’m the one who understands you’ as Lucas Till is looking through his window peeping out of the curtain to see her jumping around and dancing, his smile suggests that he understands her too, constantly making the audience realise that they are meant to be together. The next day Lucas Till walks down the street as the lyrics are ‘Walking the Streets’ and ‘laughing on a park bench’ as he sits next to her where we eventually see the pair together and not divided by the windows and street. As Taylor Swift’s brunette character pulls up we can see her nerdy characters disappointment accompanied by the lyrics ‘What you doing with a girl like that?’.
For the next chorus we see real situations for ‘cheer captain’ and ‘bleachers’ at the football game that Lucas Till is playing at. This is represented by the brunette characters cheer leading routine and the nerdy characters place in the stands. Here she emphasizes the ‘You belong with me’ through her hand gestures, pointing to him and then to herself. For this lyric in the prom phase of the video they are walking towards each other, show each other their ‘I love you’ notes and then share a kiss. This makes the audience happy as it was a happy ending.
There is also a relationship between the music as visuals with reference to pace and camera movement. For example, for the first forty sections the characters have minimal movement and the camera is static with shots no shorter than about two seconds. This is to reflect the slower pace of the music at this point. This then builds up through the start of the chorus as Taylor Swift is looking in the mirror as she is dancing and moving through a phase of costume changes. Eventually on the climax of the chorus she is jumping up and down and dancing on her bed to create maximum amount of energy to match the energy in the song. This is the same throughout the song where they capture more movement for the quicker parts of the song i.e. the chorus and slow it down for the verses.
There are many close ups of Taylor Swift in the video, however, not as herself but as her characters. She plays both Lucas Till’s mean girlfriend and his nerdy friend who has a crush on him. As the nerdy character gets Lucas Till by the end of the video it seems that she is trying to portray to all the teenage girls who would watch the video that you should always be yourself and things will go your way. The use of close ups are predominantly to express her emotions throughout the story line. Her previous video, ‘Love Story’ was also a narrative obviously with a love story and clearly aimed at the same target audience. She is creating a reputation for her country pop love stories.
There is little to no use of voyeurism for Taylor Swift in the video, however, the target audience is female and so this could mean that Lucas Till is on sexual display as there are many shots of him. He has previously been in Hannah Montana which created an idea opportunity as both that movie and this video have the same audience. I think that he was chosen because of this but also because he is relatively attractive. For the conclusion to the video Taylor Swift transformed from nerdy to beautiful at prom creating the happy ending. There are other references to looking, for example when she is in her bedroom looking at herself in the mirror. There were also the windows that they looked at each other through and her reflection in the window pane. This is enhanced by Lucas Till peeping around the curtain to see her dancing around.
There is intertextuality to an acting job that Taylor Swift worked on during the release of the film. She was on CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) portraying a mean and moody character whilst wearing a brunette wig. This reflects the moody character in the video with her brunette hair wig. There is also a slight link to the album title, ‘Fearless’. We see the portrayal of her confidence throughout the video showing that she has no fear which is the best way to be. Finally there is the typical boy meets girl love story and the high school setting makes it very stereotypical of this type of video.
The whole video is narrative based as the target audience are not so much interesting in who’s singing the song but what is happening during the song. This worked well as the lyrics had a clear story as well.
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