What Should Come Across As Carnal Is Only Creepy and Unsettling in Taylor Swift’s “I Can See You” Video

It’s appropriate that Taylor Swift should feel comfortable, only now, with releasing “I Can See You” from “the vault” of her Speak Now era. For, even though it was a time in her life when she was reconciling with the raging urge to acknowledge that “ho is life,” it was never her “brand” to fully embrace such a “persona.” That was more Britney Spears’ thing, which she whole-heartedly executed on her own third album, Britney. This complete with the skin-baring aesthetics of “I’m A Slave 4 U,” “Overprotected” and “Boys.” Swift, however, was always about the long, flowing dresses that only ever allowed her arm skin to be “exhibited.” Instead favoring the idea of “letting her songs speak (now)” for her, in lieu of her body.

If that’s still to be the case with “I Can See You,” then Swift is saying far more than her “flesh” could. Even so, the chanteuse displays more skin than she ever would have in 2010 during her appearance in this video, in which she’s joined by co-stars Taylor Lautner, Joey King and Presley Cash (the latter two having previously appeared in the video for Swift’s Speak Now single, “Mean”). It is Cash who serves as the getaway car (or van, in this instance) driver of the outfit, watching her surveillance screens from inside the vehicle as King exits into the dark, empty street. As she approaches the premises, Cash fiddles with the computer keyboard to ensure King can gain entry into the building where Swift is being held in captivity. But Swift The Person is a symbol of Swift The Body of Work in this scenario.

Locked in a literal vault—fitting, as this song is “from the vault”—Swift sits with her knees almost pressed to her chest, showcasing an arm with the “Long Live” lyric, “I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you.” This being a clear nod to her fans and her team of handlers that continue to make all of this possible. It’s obviously King’s job to extract Swift from the vault in which she (and her talent) is wasting away. So it is that she must pull a Virginia Baker (Catherine Zeta-Jones) in Entrapment or Baron François Toulour (Vincent Cassel) in Ocean’s Twelve maneuver by dancing around some lasers designed to set off the alarm system if any movement is detected. When she makes it through the rather easy-to-navigate barrage of lasers, what King finds is a museum-like display of numerous Speak Now-era outfits, some of which aren’t even Swift’s own—like the white dress King wore in the “Mean” video.

All at once, Lautner jumps down from the ceiling behind her, apparently there to help with Operation Set Taylor Free (#FreeTaylor, if you prefer). Meanwhile, we see Swift ticking off another mark on the wall of the vault, indicating how many days she’s been trapped inside. But now that she knows reinforcements are on the way, she has no hesitation with setting off the alarm (invoking the arrival of a bevy of security guards) by pulling the curtain off a framed photo of her new Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) album cover. And yes, it appears intentional that Swift wants to make it come across like some Mona Lisa-esque painting in terms of appearance, therefore value. After all, her entire aim with reclaiming the rights to her masters is to make people—fans, suits, whoever—understand the full weight of her worth. For this is still the woman who once wrote, “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” Swift didn’t feel her valuable art was being paid for at Big Machine Records. Quite the opposite, in fact. No, instead she was being ripped off, stolen from. Which is why it’s apropos that, in this video, she decides to steal back her work (represented by the framed album cover in the “I Can See You” video).

As the security goons are fought off by King and Lautner, Swift can feel them getting closer, edging toward completing the rescue mission. Because, lest anyone forget, Speak Now was rife with a fairytale motif. And fairytales are nothing if not founded upon a girl “being rescued.” As the duo approaches the vault, Swift presses her ear against it as they proceed to take out all the tools necessary to rig up the steel trap with some heavy-duty explosives that will, at last, free Taylor.

Emerging from the smoke with a wide-eyed expression of wonderment, she smiles gratefully at King and Lautner before they all run out of the building as everything else starts to crumble and fall. The building, too, explodes once they’re outside. Swift looks back at the wreckage before getting into the van and being whisked away across a bridge and into her new, liberated future.

As far as tying in with the lyrics, the video has little to do with the hyper-sexual tint of verses like, “But what would you do if I went to touch you now?/What would you do if they never found us out?/What would you do if we never made a sound?” Overtly referring to the arousal of “secret sex,” Swift then alludes to the type of person she used to be in songs such as “You Belong With Me,” this time singing from the perspective of the admired one who knows she’s being admired from afar. Yet she turns the dynamic on its ear by saying that she does, indeed, see the “stolen glances” and “far-off gazes” cast in her direction by this “wallflower” as she sings, “I can see you waitin’ down the hall from me/And I could see you up against the wall with me/And what would you do?/Baby, if you only knew/That I can see you.” Probably shit a brick, that’s what.

Perhaps un-coincidentally, Swift conveys certain lines in the same intonation as “she wears short skirts and I wear t-shirts” from “You Belong With Me.” This further evincing the notion that she knows all too well what it’s like to be the person who thinks no one can see her admiring from “a safe distance.” So it is that she says in a “You Belong With Me” “inflection,” “And I could see you being my addiction/You can see me as a secret mission/Hide away and I will start behaving myself.” With a backbeat that sounds slightly like a tamer version of The Clash’s “London Calling,” the single is a vast departure from anything else of the Speak Now oeuvre, and Swift seems to want it that way. For it only serves to make this (Taylor’s Version) all her own. Distinct from the original Speak Now not just because her girlish country twang can’t be recreated, but because it reveals the range she was already capable of before Red.

Although “I Can See You” bears lyrics that are meant to suggest sizing up a not-so-secret admirer and indulging in one’s own fantasies about what it might be like to blow their mind by reciprocating the lust, in the present, “I Can See You” as a title (and music video) has more sinister implications. Not just that Swift now sees how she was wronged by her label, but how we’re all being seen constantly. Whether we want to be or not. Swift, undoubtedly, still wants to be. Only now, it’s become far less “cute”/“endearing”/“arousing” and much more Big Brother-y. As Lana Del Rey once said, “Look at you looking at me/I know you know how I feel.” And something about that is all too meta (in the Zuckerberg sense as well) in its unsettling nature.