Media and Music: Swift Loses “Someone Great” in “Death By A Thousand Cuts”

Inspired by the 2019 film “Someone Great,” Taylor Swift wrote “Death By A Thousand Cuts.” Both pieces explore what happens when “great love” ends — not in one final night or goodbye, but in a thousand terrifying moments.

In Media and Music, our writers take a deep dive into how movies use scores and songs to engage viewers, give new meaning and tone to some of our favorite scenes, and establish themes. It almost goes without saying, but there are spoilers abound.

Written by Anjali Krishna

Illustrated by Behr Rinke

One last night. One last kiss. One last goodbye. 

With Jenny’s impending move to San Francisco, she’s looking for these hopeful finalities to wrap up her life in New York after her breakup with her boyfriend of nine years. To ease the pain, she and her best friends go searching for one last big night in the 2019 film “Someone Great,” directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson. But Jenny discovers that things don’t always end cleanly.

This same concept is what Taylor Swift explores in “Death By A Thousand Cuts.” Swift and Robinson’s connection is a funny coincidence. Robinson thought of “Someone Great” after hearing Taylor Swift’s “Clean,” about washing away the stains of a relationship dead after drought. Without knowing this, Swift was inspired to write “Death By A Thousand Cuts” after watching “Someone Great,” in which she’s anything other than clean. She’s bloodied and beat-down, “‘cause [she] can’t pretend it’s OK when it’s not.”

Both works focus on the desire for these “ones” but it takes time and maturity to realize that endings often aren’t so: love, grief, or any other emotion doesn’t end in a split-second epiphany. It’s a “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” a slow killing that hurts more than an instant blow to the heart ever could.

 The message of “Death By A Thousand Cuts” is one that can only be understood with time. If true love ever ends, it won’t be forgotten in a three-minute song or even an album. It’ll take “forever and ever,” just as long as you thought love would persist.

In “Someone Great,” Jenny is a music journalist seeking the opportunity of a lifetime by moving to San Francisco, consequently leaving behind her best girlfriends and her now-ex Nate. On her last night in New York City, she shares one last adventure with her two best friends and gives herself one more chance to lament over Nate. But as much as she’d like it to all be finished and done at Washington Square Park, where Nate and Jenny met, things don’t end so quickly. Love may last, but heartbreak lasts longer.

As much as Jenny wants to be independent and happy about her dream job in San Francisco, she can’t be: she’s still entranced with the idea of ending up with Nate. She cares about love just as much as she cares about her job, making her move one of haunting hesitation. She’s not a “career girl,” as she jokes, drinking on the subway platform moments after Jenny and Nate’s breakup. Swift parallels this in turn: “I get drunk but it’s not enough / ’Cause the morning comes / And you’re not my baby.” For both Swift and Jenny, even substances can’t relieve the pain of losing a love “for the ages.”

Nate and Jenny’s montage in the film is set to Lorde’s “Supercut,” and it’s just that. There’s a text from Jenny to her best friends in the blossoming solidity of a real relationship, “I think I’m gonna marry this guy.” There’s piggy-back rides and working too much. It ends with the couple screaming on the street and sleeping as far as possible on their bed. These are Jenny’s memories, “flashbacks waking me up” as Swift would put it, as Jenny grieves. 

They’re not breaking up because either one of them is the “bad guy.” They aren’t, and they can’t even make each other out to be. Work and lack of time draws them apart, and when it comes time for Jenny to move, their breakup isn’t necessarily surprising. Their relationship hasn’t been working for a long time, but that’s what makes it all the harder for Jenny to stop “look[ing] through the windows of this love / Even though [they] boarded them up.”

As much as she wants to think that Nate quitted her as if she was a “bad drug,” she herself hasn’t given up on him, desperate to see him after she announced she was moving. Deep down, she knows that adding more miles between them wouldn’t augment the distance they already face as they lead busy, separate lives. Swift’s cutting tone in relating herself to a “bad drug” parallels the moments where Jenny tries to trash Nate, but they both seem to know that giving up was necessary.It wasn’t cruelty but reality that drew the lovers apart. Still, Jenny and Swift linger in the past, unable to “find a part of me that you didn’t touch.”

The film, for the most part, follows Jenny and her girlfriends’ quest to Neon Classic, a New York music festival they all used to attend together. Though Jenny might say she’s not going in hopes of seeing Nate, it’s obvious to her best friends and on some level, herself. When love is rampant, even in New York it might seem like “I see you everywhere / The only thing we share / Is this small town.” This night is more than one last hurrah for the girls’ twenties: it’s also an attempt to see if the “chandelier’s still flickering here.”

At some point, for Jenny and Swift, it’s terrifying to see that things are over, but it’s even harder to believe. It’s with a “great love / One for the ages” that things feel all-consuming. Afterwards, that rush doesn’t end with the immediacy of a person’s leaving; rather, it remains with thousands of little rips to the soul. Jenny’s body, “our songs, our films, united we stand” are marred by Nate — she can’t listen to their songs without crying in her underwear. The movie opens with Jenny dancing in her apartment to Lizzo and singing “100% that bitch,” but when Jenny and Nate’s song comes on the shuffle afterwards, she starts to tear up. It takes Jenny’s best friends to get her to stop sobbing and get out of the apartment.

At Neon Classic, Jenny spots Nate. But in the moment they should run together and kiss, the moment she finds all the “signs in a haunted club” she’s been looking for, she takes off in the other direction. She takes the subway to Washington Square Park, where their relationship began with a kiss and a heart with both of their names in it. On the way there, Jenny writes a realization in her diary: “if we add up the “one mores,” they’ll equal a lifetime and I’ll never have to get to the part where I let you go.” Perhaps, her audience can believe she’s heading to Washington Square Park and he’ll meet her there. But she also writes, “unfortunately sometimes things don’t break. They shatter.”

When Jenny sees Nate at the fountain and he says they should try again, she never gets the chance to reply. Viewers come to find that it was all a dream: she’s passed out, asleep, and even in her dreams she isn’t certain that they can be put back together again. These cuts, these “paper cut stings from our paper thin plans” seem to finally be enough. Jenny and Nate’s unexpected meeting at Neon Classic was perhaps the thousandth one — the one it takes to pull herself together and remember what they had. As much as her heartbreak isn’t over, she realizes that her relationship is. It can only exist in the past, in memories.

All she can do is drive around, no destination in mind, as she wonders what she’s meant to do after the love of your life ends. There’s no one around, and she can only “ask the traffic lights if it’ll be alright.” 

And all they can say is “I don’t know.”