“Shake It Off”

“Shake It Off” is the song Margo Fairchild plays over and over in her Honda Fit before speaking at the Senior Center. The sequence makes the song more than background music: its video offers Margo an image of happiness and freedom in which ordinary bodies belong, while her repeated listening gives her a brief private refuge before she must step into public view. Her closing thought, “Someday,” leaves that promise open rather than presenting it as already achieved.

The song as refuge before the lecture

The song enters the scene through the small interruption of an incoming text. The music is loud enough that Margo barely hears Eve Fletcher’s message, sent because Eve is beginning to worry. Margo replies that she is on her way, then admits to herself that she has been sitting in the Senior Center parking lot for fifteen minutes. She is hiding in her Honda Fit and listening to “Shake It Off” repeatedly. Her delayed reply lets her conceal the truth for a little longer: she is not yet ready to leave the car and face the gathering waiting for her.

The setting gives the repetition its particular tension. Margo is not simply taking a break in private; she is the evening’s guest speaker, due to address older people already making their way toward the lecture hall. She imagines how silly she might look singing along as a middle-aged transgender woman with a Ph.D. and a public role to perform. The song creates a pause between that anticipated appearance and her willingness to enter it. The car feels safe, and the music is good; for a few more minutes, she can remain inside that shelter rather than cross into the space where she is expected to speak.

Margo’s identification with the video

What holds Margo is not only the song but its video. At the end, dancers include both lithe, gifted professionals and ordinary people: bald, chunky, self-conscious, plain, wearing eyeglasses and cardigan sweaters. They are visibly unlike an idealized group of performers, yet they dance alongside them. Margo recognizes them as her people, connecting the video’s mix of bodies to her own longing for love, happiness, and fun.

The scene places that recognition beside Margo’s sense of herself. Although she imagines how a middle-aged woman in her position might appear to passersby, she does not feel middle-aged in her heart. She feels like a teenager still learning the ins and outs of her new body. The song’s video therefore gives form to a feeling the scene has already established: Margo is still in the process of becoming at home in herself, and she sees in the dancers people trying to free themselves from whatever holds them back or makes them doubt that they will find what they seek.

A role model and an unfinished promise

Margo’s interpretation of the video complicates her identification with its dancers. She thinks of Taylor Swift as not one of them but as someone pretending, in the way Jesus had pretended to be a man. In this reading, Swift stands ahead of the others, not among them, because she occupies the position of teacher and role model. She has already shaken off the haters and doubters and reached a state of happiness and freedom that the other dancers are still pursuing. The contrast matters: Margo sees herself with the ordinary people, not with the figure who has already arrived.

The video’s image of a person glowing, doing exactly what she wants, and remaining unmistakably herself offers Margo a possibility, not a report of her present condition. Her closing thought, “Someday,” holds both desire and distance in a single word. The song can show her what happiness and freedom might look like, but the scene does not say that she has already reached them. Its promise stays ahead of her, bound to the life she hopes to claim rather than a transformation completed in the parking lot.

Repetition and the return to public life

Margo knows it is past time to get out of the car, yet presses play for one final encore. The extra repetition makes her reluctance concrete: even after recognizing the moment to leave, she chooses to stay with the song once more. Its comfort does not erase her obligation to speak, but it gives her a little more time within the safety she has found there.

The surrounding messages keep that retreat connected to other people. Eve is waiting and has become worried; Dumell sends encouragement, and Margo smiles back after their brief exchange. Neither message substitutes for the private reassurance she draws from the video. Together, however, they place her between companionship and solitude: other people are reaching out, while the song lets her gather herself alone. The scene ends before the lecture itself, so the song’s significance rests in this threshold moment. Margo has not yet entered the hall; she has only found, in the video’s ordinary dancers and its ideal of freedom, a reason to imagine that someday she might.