Going broad and selling out, The Moment imagines the end of an Eras Tour

There are a dozen pop stars who put on shows like this. But it’s hard not to see one sequence—the film’s finale, where Charli completely caves to Johannes’ plan—as a reference to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the biggest concert tour of all time with a smash hit concert film and a Disney+ docuseries to boot. Gone is Charli’s nightclub aesthetic; instead, she performs clad in a Hot Topic outfit, with lime-green streaks clipped into her hair, beneath a giant bedazzled lighter. Her backup dancers wear sequined leotards and mug for the camera. As confetti falls, the film cuts to the outside of the venue, where a message from Amazon Music reads, “Be a 365 Party Girl from the comfort of your own home.”

Like the lyrics of “Sympathy Is A Knife,” this allusion has less to do with Swift as a person than what she represents as a brand. The Eras Tour was a years-long, globetrotting, self-mythologizing epic. Unlike The Moment, its title invokes history. It was the kind of show you could go to with your eight-year-old daughter or 80-year-old grandmother. Swift can hardly take credit for inventing the greatest hits tour, but it was unique for the tour to happen as Swift rerecorded and rereleased her previous albums. She and her team figured out how to keep a successful album cycle—eight successful album cycles—going in perpetuity. Its success helped make her a billionaire, twice over. 

This is a level of mainstream commercial success that Charli has never even come close to touching, even in the midst of Brat Summer. In fact, on the brat track “Rewind,” Charli questions whether she made the right choice by not making commercial success and Billboard numbers more of a priority. After Charli still achieved some of that with brat, The Moment examines what it would even look like if the artist leaned all the way in and sold all the way out—allowing her to define herself against the toothless, Swift-style pop star. To offend as few and appeal to as many as possible, her film argues, is to look patently ridiculous. In The Moment, dangling in the air, dressed like a deranged Tinkerbell, Charli knows she looks so foolish that she’s brought to tears.

This career pivot wouldn’t just be a personal betrayal of values. When Celeste and Johannes debate what kind of concert to put on, Celeste makes the point that (unlike the explicitly all-ages Eras Tour) Charli’s show isn’t the kind of thing you’d want to take your parents to, and that many of Charli’s fans probably don’t even talk to their parents, because those parents “don’t approve of their lifestyles.” It’s not a high-minded statement about safe, inclusive spaces; if anything, she’s making the argument for spaces that deliberately exclude and alienate some people for the benefit of others. Charli makes pop music that is often hedonistic and sometimes knowingly vapid, intended for an adult audience. And yet, as The Moment sees Charli give in to that broad-appeal impulse, the fans who reveled in Brat Summer precisely because it was an adult-oriented space have been sacrificed on the altar of Amazon Music. This new, sold-out version of Brat Summer may have a longer lifespan, but it’s in service of people who were never that into it in the first place. 

Even if The Moment is fiction—and satirical to boot—it does document the brat era, both in Charli’s work and in the pop music it was rebelling against. Those on the other side during this period might instead call it the sell-out era, the win-at-any-cost-era, the fuck-you-got-mine era. The Moment draws both sides of this era to a close by bringing them together, by having Charli sell brat out as broadly as possible. In the film, a faux pas involving a brat-branded credit card spirals so comically out of control that Julia Fox denounces her, Kamala Harris makes a point to distance herself, and many of her fans abandon her. Her brand becomes so toxic that no one wants anything to do with it. The Moment tears down her brand (a parallel to her multiple real-world declarations that Brat Summer was dead), giving Charli what she wants—the ability to move on—at the expense of everything she built. It’s very brat, which is to say it’s very temporary. A moment, not an era.