Emma L Davies

LOS ANGELES: In 2020, Taylor Swift told us she read Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the 1938 bestseller about a young bride haunted by the memory of her husband’s glamorous first wife.

The song was about trying hard to impress an older partner and going unappreciated. Swift explained that she’d identified with the book’s narrator, known only as Mrs de Winter (the successor of Maxim de Winter’s late first wife, Rebecca): “She’s trying so hard […] to impress him and he’s just tolerating her.”

Six years later, Swift returns to Manderley – the fictional Cornwall estate in which Rebecca is set – with her new single Patient Zero and its self-directed music video. It’s the latest entry in the genre of Swift gothic, a strand of her music that takes on doubles, hauntings and darkness.

Swift says her new video was inspired by “gothic ghost stories” and it’s evident that Rebecca is one of them. But this time, rather than playing du Maurier’s insecure new bride, Swift haunts the narrative as Rebecca.

Last year, Swift told interviewer Stephen Colbert that Rebecca has everything she looks for in a novel.

The music video for Patient Zero has almost every trope on that list. Dakota Johnson plays Colin Farrell’s wife, shadowed everywhere by Swift, who wears the same clothes, mirrors her movements, and repeatedly knocks drinks out of her hands as the relationship falls apart. Swift turns out to be the ghost of Farrell’s first wife, whom he poisoned.

The haunting in du Maurier’s novel is not so literal, but the second Mrs de Winter is obsessed with “Rebecca, always Rebecca,” seeing evidence of her everywhere she looks. Her jealousy is only deepened by the other characters, who like to tell her how “different” she is from Maxim’s late wife.

When Maxim throws a fancy-dress ball, she gets a costume made and is delighted when she sees herself, “this self that was not me at all”, in the mirror. At the party, she finds her husband horrified because Rebecca wore the very same costume. In trying to escape comparison, she walks right into it.

Patient Zero mirrors this scene when, at a party, Johnson’s character takes a drink and turns to find Swift’s ghost behind her, wearing an identical dress. The shock (and a little poison in her wine) causes her to collapse at the ghost’s feet. In the car home, the husband compares the two women directly: “I thought you were different.” She asks: “Different from whom?”

But Rebecca never gets to speak for herself. We learn about her through the narrator’s insecurity and the mouth of the man who killed her. When Maxim confesses to the murder, the narrator assures him everything will be fine, because “Rebecca can’t speak, can’t bear witness”. She is quick to help him cover up the murder when he tells her that he “never loved Rebecca”, and after this she feels the ghostly presence disappear:

“She would never haunt me again. She would never stand behind me on the stairs, sit beside me in the dining-room…”