Kim Novak. Tippi Hedren. Grace Kelly.
And now, Taylor Swift.
The notoriously polarizing mega-musician left another mark on the cinema world this past weekend when she briefly appeared as a character reminiscent of the Hitchcock blondes of old in the David O. Russell noir caper Amsterdam.
The catalyst for the movie’s mystery plot, Swift plays grieving daughter Liz Meekins. She wants answers as to how her father, war hero Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), wound up dead while at sea and enlists the help of experimental plastic surgeon Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington).
Like a lot of mysterious and icy blondes of classic cinema, Liz seemingly knew too much—and paid for it with her life. Burt and Harold, running into her on the street, witness hitman Taron Milfax (Timothy Olyphant) emerge from the shadows and send the young Meekins to meet her maker via oncoming traffic.
Early reviews of the film seemingly allude to a shot of the aftermath of the crash, which lingered on the character’s body as it was crushed under the wheels of a car. The shot is just long enough for it to become GIF-able. That, plus our collective inability to separate an artist’s work from her art, so that we see the scene as “Taylor Swift dying brutally” instead of her character being murdered, has made the scene a prime candidate to become an internet meme that could be used for anything from expressing exhaustion after a long day to imagining disposing of an unwanted assignment at work. On TikTok, “Taylor Swift Amsterdam meme” already has more than 20 million views—with captions like “this is better than the screaming goat” and “look what you made me do”—mere days after the film’s theatrical release.
What was required to build up to Liz’s brutal demise and make it look believable? Through representatives, neither Swift nor Russell agreed to participate in this story, citing time constraints, but Vanity Fair spoke with other key players in the film.
Dressing for Death
The first time we see Swift’s Liz, she’s dressed for death—she just doesn’t know it’s going to be her own. Bale’s Burt meets her for the first time when he shows up to a strange building to answer a vague request from his old wartime pal, Washington’s Harold.
The second time we see her is a few hours later, outside a restaurant and minutes before her fateful fall.
This created a design challenge for costume designer J.R. Hawbaker, as she told VF. She had to acknowledge that Liz is in mourning while also not tip off the audience that she would soon try to outrun an assailant. From a technical standpoint, this meant her dress needed to be stretchy enough to add mobility and that the material needed to be malleable.
Hawbaker says her first instinct was to dress the character in a “structured suit—a suit jacket and a skirt—which would have been in that tradition of the femme fatale” seen on Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, a film set around the same time as Amsterdam. She also didn’t want her in all black, saying that this way “we don’t hit it too hard right out of the gate and just tell the audience too many things” and that “you really want those performances to tell the audience the information.”
She chose Liz a hand-knit forest green dress, which Hawbaker says reflected the movie’s time period of the early 1930s and would allow extra padding for Swift’s stunt double, Kelly Richardson, to take the memorable fall beneath the car’s wheels. The material would also be easy to mend if it got snagged during various takes of filming the momentous event. Plus, the color blended well with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and production designer Judy Becker’s aesthetics. A small black fascinator hat with the netting up, a black (technically faux) fur collar, and black accessories were there to suggest bereavement without hitting the point too hard.
Swift wasn’t available for filming until the day of, which meant that a lot of prep and fittings had to be done prior on a fit model or a mannequin. And after working on Russell’s 2013 caper American Hustle, Hawbaker knew that his sets are “very fluid” and that “he’ll come up with stuff on the fly all of the time.” The costume designer decided that her best course of action was to do her work on set. Sketchbook in hand, at times she sat next to the director during filming, erasing and adjusting lines until they agreed on a silhouette.
A Swift Stunt
Stunt performer Richardson, whose résumé includes doubling for Blake Lively in The Shallows and TV series like HBO’s Westworld, was hired to take the fall for Swift.
Richardson, who—ironically enough, answered our questions via email on the way back from a vacation to the city of Amsterdam—writes that this meant that she not only bonded with the mega-star but also “observed how she moved, carried herself, walked, ran, and gestured.” They both had to reflect that this is a “period piece [with] wardrobe, heels, hat, socioeconomic status, and gender norms of the time.”
Richardson emails that she “cannot give away trade secrets about how exactly that stunt was created and executed,” but she does say that director of photography Lubezki and director Russell “planned a very specific camera move to accompany the action, so the stunt was designed to work in concert with the camera move to achieve the desired result.”
While Richardson stresses that she did feel safe on set and under the care of stunt coordinator Frank Torres, her biggest concern was the cold. They filmed through the night and the set was frequently hosed down so that it looked rainy and wet. Richardson would get soaked in the process.
She doesn’t remember how many set-ups and takes they did the night of filming, but writes that “I remember a lot of shivering and teeth-chattering and rushing inside to the warm heaters every chance I got.”
Sounds Effective
The scene’s pièce de résistance might be its sound design. Created by sound designer Ann Scibelli, the sound of a car driving over Liz’s body makes the message clear: Even 90 years ago, New York rush-hour traffic stops for nobody (or no body).
“David just wanted it to have a lot of chaos going on,” Scibelli says of the build-up to the accident. She was instructed to emphasize the various shouts and confusion from the characters on the street and she also researched what car horns and tire squeals would have sounded like in that period.
When it came to the part where the audience sees Liz’s body, Scibelli says that she wanted to play up the shock value. The trick was that it couldn’t be too morbid or campy because the camera does enough of that already. There’s no sounds of crushing bones or anything overly gory.
“There’s a fine line,” Scibelli says, adding, “I use the impact from the car and then a lower-end thumping like a body fall, but a little muffled-sounding.”
This is all to play up the shock factor of the scene.
“You don’t expect her to get pushed out and then run over by the car,” she says. “Visually, you can see she gets hit. The camera doesn’t cut away. So it’s definitely onscreen.”
Meme-able Moment?
There’s no debating that this scene is meme-able, there is a question of whether it should be. The shot may allow the audience—and if we’re being particularly meta, Swift herself—to poke fun at the star’s pop culture status. But it is still a scene where a woman is crushed by a car.
Jay’ana King, a counseling psychology doctoral student at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who works with the Alberti Center for Bullying Abuse Prevention, emails that “memes can perpetuate further racism, stereotypes, and sexism.”
“Memes that involve women and racially minoritized individuals, especially those who are Black, are often used with racist and/or sexist undertones and humor, even if they are shared innocently,” King continues in the email. “This is often due to women and those from racially minoritized backgrounds being stereotyped as overly emotional or incompetent. Memes depicting women and racially minoritized people are often ones in which the person/character is emotional, incompetent, and/or uneducated. Further, memes are often created from a white, heterosexual, and/or male perspective.”
It’s also a scene starring a woman who won a court case against her sexual assailant and directed by a man who has his own history of assault and harassment allegations. And as is the nature of GIFs and memes, it’s easy for the moment to be taken out of context even if the person who shares is doing so innocently.
Stunt performer Richardson acknowledges that this isn’t the first time her work has been memed, referencing Westworld as well as the film Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 and the FX series Legion.
“After a quick GIF search just now, [I found] at least five [of me] battling a CG shark on The Shallows,” she emails. But because of this article, “if this stunt takes off as a meme, it may be different because it will be the first time I’ll be directly associated with the image.”
