Argylle Movie REVIEW | Who Wrote Argylle Books?! Is Taylor Swift it's Mystery Author?!
How the internet built a conspiracy theory around a new spy flick, a debut novel, and Taylor Swift The Argylle authorship controversy, explained.
The internet has gone into a frenzy over Argylle, a forthcoming spy movie, and its supposed source material, a yet-to-be-published novel by one Elly Conway. The author’s identity is a buzzy mystery far more gripping than novel itself: Is Elly Conway actually Taylor Swift?
The thing is, Elly Conway doesn’t seem to exist. She does appear as a (suspiciously Swiftian) character played by Bryce Dallas Howard in the trailer for Argylle, but there’s no trace of her in real life except for almost comically fake-looking profiles on Twitter and Instagram. Someone, clearly, has decided to make it look as if Elly Conway is an actual person - and why do that (people on the internet have demanded) if she is not a globally renowned superstar who wants to keep her head down on her fun writing hobby?
Allow me to present my own, much less scintillating and much more mundane theory. What we are dealing with here appears to be at worst a good old-fashioned movie tie-in novel with a clever marketing plan, and at best a fun metafictional game in the spirit of The Princess Bride
What’s the big mystery here?
Argylle the movie is directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman, and it stars Henry Cavill, Ariana DeBose, Bryan Cranston, Dua Lipa, and Bryce Dallas Howard as Elly Conway herself. It comes with a hefty price tag. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Apple paid $200 million for the deal - although no one has reported on whether Apple was paying for the book’s film rights, just that the movie would be based on the book.
In the film, author Conway is a central character, a writer thrust into the all-too-real world of her own spy novels. As Vaughn told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in October, “I love the idea of what would happen if J.K. Rowling met a wizard and was real.”
Vaughn explained on that podcast that his Argylle movie would be based on the as-yet-unwritten fourth volume in Conway’s Argylle series, saying, “I read the book, they bought the manuscript of the book, and met with [writer Jason] Fuchs, and we just came up with this.” Vaughn went on to explain that “Book 4, which is what the movie’s based around, was the one that would work for it. Mr. Lucas was clever enough to start Star Wars with Episode 4, so why not us?”
How did Taylor Swift get dragged into this?
In the trailer for Vaughn’s movie, Bryce Dallas Howard’s portrayal of Elly Conway has what I can only call a Swiftian aesthetic. Howard’s wavy red hair is reminiscent of the red wig Swift donned to play a writer in All Too Well: The Short Film, and her big cozy cardigan could easily be a nod to, well, “Cardigan.” For many Swifties, though, the smoking gun was the cat. In the trailer, Elly totes her cat around in a specially designed backpack with a window, exactly like the one Swift wears in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana. Moreover, Elly’s cat is a Scottish Fold, the same squishy-faced breed as Swift’s two famously doted-upon kitties. For some Swift fans, the coincidences seemed to be too many to bear.
“I’m sorry to put it this way, but it really has the Swiftie erogenous zone covered,” Ringer staff writer Nora Princiotti said in the Washington Post.
“imagine if this is just a random writer and not TS I’ll die dead,” wrote one Swift fan on Conway’s Instagram.
Swift is famously one of the hardest-working women in show business, but it takes a fair amount of willful suspension of disbelief to imagine that, while she was in the middle of a record-breaking world tour, she also found the time to write one book in a mystery series and plot out the details of all its sequels. Nonetheless, when you create a mystery, it calls the mystery-minded. Swifties are some of our most dedicated detectives.
In a recent interview on The Graham Norton Show, Howard acknowledged the similarities between her character and Swift, at the same time denying Swift was in any way connected with the film.
“We can’t pretend she was involved,” Howard said. “The reality is she was in many ways a great inspiration. She is a cat lady. She’s got this awesome backpack with a cat in [it] that she walks around with. She loves a good argyle sweater, and there is a sort of unapologetic dorkiness about her. That’s a little bit like what my character is like.”
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