I enter into evidence this special Music Videos into Stories take featuring the music video for “Fortnight”—the lead single off Taylor Swift’s April 2024 album release The Tortured Poets Department.
In case you’re new here, I use this area on The Cat’s Cradle to feature a music video and deliberate on what type of story (potentially a novel) I would write based on it if given the chance.
This take is no different.
Here are some of the lyrics in case you missed it:
I was supposed to be sent away
But they forgot to come and get me
I was a functioning alcoholic
'Til nobody noticed my new aestheticAll of this to say
I hope you're okay but you're the reason
And no one here's to blame
But what about your quiet treason?And for a fortnight there we were
Forever running to you
Sometimes ask about the weather
Now you're in my backyard
Turned into good neighbors
Your wife waters flowers
I want to kill herAll my mornings are Mondays
Stuck in an endless February
I took the miracle move on drug
The effects were temporaryAnd I love you, it's ruining my life
I love you, it's ruining my life
I touched you for only a fortnight
I touched you, but I touched you
I won’t get into semantics about the music video and interpretations about who/what/where/when the actual inspirations were for the visuals and lyrics. What I will say is that I love the Neo-goth vibe to the music video that has a very Lana Del Rey-ish spirit to it. It’s nice to see great artists of the era influencing other great artists of the era.
As for the story itself, let’s take a walk, shall we?
Imagine if you will a young woman named Clara. Clara lives a boring life, trapped in an office setting, while she types out missives every day that don’t mean anything. It is the same every day. The same boring thing. Over and over and over. Even the only coworker she sees every day is the same man who just types in his missives too as he goes about his day. They never know what meaning their missives hold, but that’s not the point, is it? It’s all about the productivity. Things are getting done.
But at the end of the day is always a meeting with the Overseer—the big boss in charge, a faceless entity they never see because he does not want to be seen even though he is the be-all, end-all in this establishment that seemingly consists of Clara, her drab coworker, and other beings who waft in and out of the picture as if they don’t really exist at all. It’s almost as if the entire world just consists of Clara, her coworker, and the Overseer.
But what we soon find out through flashbacks interwoven through the narrative is that Clara is not an office worker: instead, she is a patient in an asylum where she undergoes experiments daily that infiltrate her mind for the select purpose of seeing if there is a Great Purpose and Seed to the notion of Productivity (notice the capital letter). In her old life, Clara was the CEO of a billion-dollar company until she had a mental breakdown when she found out her husband was leaving her for another woman.
Fragmented, Clara ended up in the psych ward—where she undergoes delusions every day that she is still trapped in an office, her drab coworker is her cheating husband’s doppelgänger, and the Overseer is a stand-in for the very system of overwork that led her to have the breakdown (and the dissolution of her marriage) in the first place.
In later chapters, we would also meet other sides of Clara’s personality that infiltrate the office setting in her delusions: a young girl with a notebook and a boy with snake tattoos. These would be just thematic representations of her younger days: the girl she wanted to be (the writer) and the boy she wanted to be with (her first love). That’s why in her delusions she has tattoos of all kinds as if she has been marked.
And the greater purpose of the asylum? We learn it’s a place they send people when they are Too Much for This World: too intense, too passionate, too caught up in the gleam of greater lives. In this way, there would be thematic purpose there too as we see how Success—as it’s deemed in real life—can take a big toll on a person’s psyche just as much as things like poverty and the like could.
The culmination? In one last effort for agency, Clara breaks out of the asylum to get away from the experimentation. She has essentially become a Dark Empath who can now sense the feelings of others, and she wanders with her delusions beside her as she looks up at the sky building with storm clouds.
Then, in the distance, she sees her ex-husband—in reality—with his new wife on his arm.
She falls to her knees.
It begins to rain.
Nearby, an old telephone booth rings with a call.
But no one picks up.
What did you think? It probably seems more at home in a short story, doesn’t it? But if it were fleshed out, it could be an interesting novella to tackle at the very least (I imagine).
Fragmented Me—coming to a bookshelf near you?
That sounds interesting - I would certainly read it.