Death by a thousand cuts: how 'Too Much' and Taylor Swift render pain

please enjoy this guest post, written by my good bud Dana Elle Salzberg

What if I was so heartbroken that I took it too far, what if I jumped off a cliff, what if I inflicted the pain I feel? I'm just kidding, I won't, but I might! It's a question that Taylor Swift likes to ask.

Think of jumpin’ off of very tall things (“Is It Over Now?”)

Pulled the car off the road to the lookout / Could've followed my fears all the way down (“this is me trying")

Stood on the cliffside screaming, 'Give me a reason!’ (“hoax”)

In the TV show Girls, creator and star Lena Dunham doesn't jump. But she gets pretty close. In one of the most uncomfortably visceral moments of the show, Dunham's fictional surrogate Hannah Horvath, fueled by heartbreak, intense anxiety, and OCD, painfully and purposefully shoves a Q-tip in her ear and ends up in the ER, achingly alone. 

Dunham and her real-life friend Taylor Swift both know how to take it a step too far.

You're cursing my name, wishing I stayed ("my tears ricochet")

If you died, the world would blur. (Girls Season 3, episode 4, "Dead Inside.")

They both ask, what if this heartbreak physically hurts me? What if not being wanted feels like a cut? 

“Death by a Thousand Cuts” always struck me as a bit of an outlier on Swift's seventh album, Lover. It does what Swift does best: reel you in with pop synths and a candy color coating, so that you almost overlook how brutal her words are.

I can't pretend it's ok when it's not / It's death by a thousand cuts

My heart, my hips, my body, my love / Trying to find a part of me that you didn't touch / Gave up on me like I was a bad drug

The tempo is up, but the lyrics are simple and devastating.

'Cause the morning comes and you're not my baby 

But Taylor Swift loves to throw a breakup song on a romantic album, just as she loves throwing a love song on a breakup album. Red's “Everything Has Changed” arrives about twenty minutes after “All Too Well,” most Swift fans' favorite breakup song, and “So High School” perks up Swift's eleventh album, The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology. An album where she yells at her fans: I'm doing this with a broken heart! An album where she curses a prophecy and begs for her love life to go right just once.

Even with that pattern, "Death by a Thousand Cuts" just never fit the narrative of Lover. Who cut her? Where does the heartbreak come from? Surely not the same guy that you're keeping the Christmas lights up with until January? It could be the ex, but she forgot that he existed, so yeah…To me, that's not the kind of heartbreak that makes your ribs ache with sadness. 

Swift has claimed the song was inspired by the movie Someone Great. "Oftentimes I'll write stories about my own life, but there's always flickers of other peoples' work that influenced me in some way," she said on the Elvis Duran Show in 2019. That inspiration does make sense, given what's to come for her next album, folklore—an album where Swift deploys fiction in her lyrics for the first time, mainly in the form of a teenage love triangle between Betty, James, and Augustine. But while promoting Lover at her NPR Tiny Desk Concert, she said this about the time when she wrote the song: "In my life, a few of my friends were going through breakups. Like those kinds of breakups where you need to talk about it all day, every day." Interesting. 

Even with Swift insisting that folklore and “Death by a Thousand Cuts” are fiction, it's hard for any listener to not notice Swift’s real-life fears and love seeping through the cracks. Like any great writer, the seeds of her life are there. So were the characters from Someone Great her first Betty and James? A way to reveal her own heartbreak under the guise of fiction? Perhaps. Then I watched episode 5 of Lena Dunham's new Netflix show Too Much and thought: oh, it's Lena's heartbreak.

Dunham has co-created other TV shows (Camping), written for other TV shows (Generation) and directed other episodes of television (Industry), but Too Much is Dunham's first foray back into TV as a full-on auteur since Girls, and the show is unmistakably autobiographical. Main character Jess (Meg Stalter) breaks up with her music-obsessed neurotic Jewish ex—I can say that, I am one—Sev (Michael Zegen), then moves to London and falls in love with a new neurotic musician, Felix (Will Sharpe). This mirrors Dunham's own path of breaking up with her music-obsessed neurotic Jewish ex Jack Antonoff, then moving to London and falling in love with a new neurotic musician, Luis Felber (her now-husband, and co-creator of Too Much). Girl's got a type I respect.

I've had multiple people ask me who the real Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski), Jess's ex's new girlfriend, is supposed to be. I confess I'm not sure there's an exact equivalent, though she fits the famous Nora Ephron description of the proverbial new woman in your former man's life: "Thin, pretty, big tits. Your basic nightmare." I can't help but think Lena naming her own Too Much character Nora is a nod, perhaps not to this exact quote, but to Dunham's real-life friendship with Nora Ephron and the Ephron-ness of it all.

In one scene, Nora, depressed and unable to get out of bed, sobs to her mother (a perfectly cast Rita Wilson), "Sorry, I'm listening to Taylor Swift." While crying in your bed listening to Taylor Swift isn't exactly groundbreaking, the fact that it’s not played for a laugh is. It is a subtle reminder of Swift's power. She can bring you up, shine her light on the best parts of being in love, but when you're down, she can drag you deeper, forcing you to steep in your own pain and sadness.

How much sad did you think I had / Did you think I had in me? ("So Long, London")

A lot, apparently!

When we finally see the breakup of the pseudo Lena and Jack in an episode 5 flashback, Jess says, with tears streaming down her face, "I used to feel so special about me. And I really don't. You just want to beat me into submission. Maybe not with your fists, but with your words and your lack of love. It just feels like a bunch of little paper cuts. But imagine your whole body covered in paper cuts." Jess isn't just sad, she’s in pain.

Imagine your body covered in cuts. I'm sure Taylor Swift has. Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff officially called it quits in 2018 after five years of dating. Swift's Lover, whose tracklist is dominated by collaborations with Jack Antonoff, came out in August 2019. The dots of that heartbreak timeline feel pretty easy to connect. Taking your broken heart and turning it into art is Nora Ephron's decree for all writers, but making magic out of your friend's heartbreak, then having the object of the pain produce the record? Sensational.

Now, the fact that “London Boy” comes right after “Death by a Thousand Cuts” on Lover is something that can only happen in Swiftian invisible string theory. 

Thank you Dana! Follow her on Twitter.

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