Taylor Swift Gone Girls herself in the music video for Look What You Made Me Do

The music video for Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” premiered at the 2017 MTV VMAs, and it featured a strikingly familiar plot.

After years of framing herself as the Good Girl, Taylor Swift is apparently embracing some of the nastier labels bestowed upon her. Earlier this month, she made headlines for her powerful testimony that eventually helped win her sexual assault case against David Mueller, a former Denver DJ accused of groping the singer at a meet and greet in 2013. Then, she wiped all of her social media clean. Slowly, creepy videos of snakes started to appear, and then she announced her new album Reputation, as well as a tour, and dropped her new single.

“Look What You Made Me Do” is, presumably, about Swift’s ongoing feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian-West. She’s been criticized for once again exploiting feminism to promote her brand, and Twitter has had a field day with meme responses to the song’s lyrics.

Then, the video premiered at the 2017 MTV VMAs, and Swift went all-in on her newest persona: Amy Dunne. Apparently, “Look What You Made Me Do” is also about Swift killing her doubles. Even though they’re (literally) still holding her up in the spotlight. Um?

For those unfamiliar with the most disturbing lady villain of all time, Amy Dunne is the main character in Gillian Flynn’s best-selling murder-mystery novel, Gone Girl. David Lynch directed the 2014 film adaptation starring Rosamund Pike, and both the novel and the film were terrifying. Amy Dunne creates personas and pursues them as needed, going so far as to structure a whole life that doesn’t exist in a diary so when she fakes her death and frames her husband for murder, the evidence will be totally damning.

Taylor Swift standing on a mountain of her old personas in the “Look What You Made Me Do” video is Peak Amy Dunne.

The singer’s various personas standing in front of her private jet painted with “Reputation” in massive red letters akin to the Chiller font is maybe even moreso. Swift has been called an anti-feminist snake of the worst caliber. Every time she re-invents herself, she draws criticism. And she never manages to escape her past, each persona building on the last. The common thread has always been that she’s a Good Girl, and Other Women are Bad. Now, Swift is apparently willing to play the villain. It’s an interesting choice, since her sexual assault case just gave her tons of positive press.

Reputation‘s first single features a version of Taylor Swift that we’ve seen hints of before: dark lipstick, short hair, glittery ensembles. The vehement denial of her past personas isn’t new, either, but the fact that she wiped every self-presented image of herself from the internet does beg the question… Is Taylor Swift purporting to be done with her Good Girl image forever? Didn’t Miley Cyrus just go back to her country roots after a similarly appropriative attempt at being the Bad Girl? Will we see the same happen with Swift?

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How will Swift structure her life now that she’s villainizing herself? Does she possess the self-awareness to do it well? Past experience says no, but as press continues for Reputation… we’ll have to wait and see.