BAt the age of 19, singer Billie Eilish reached heights of fame and success that felt both worldwide and well-known, carried by the same tidal generational mega-popularity that such teenage music gods as Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus had exercised before her, but with a Gen Z rotates. It’s the Eilish public canon that the then 15-year-old rocked to fame on social media after her older brother and co-producer, Finneas, posted a song they recorded for her dance class, Ocean Eyes, on Soundcloud , that they recorded her smash. debut album, If we all fall asleep, where are we going? in his childhood bedroom, that the two MaGyver everyday sounds – a dentist’s exercise, the trunk of Eilish’s Invisalign container – to songs that collect billions of streams.
These are not myths; as captured in RJ Cutler’s enchanting and generous Apple TV + documentary The World’s A Little Blurry, Eilish has indeed spent these supersonic teens in her family’s modest home in Los Angeles; she and Finneas do compose their music in his bedroom with such organic brother telepathy, it seems almost too comfortable to be the ubiquitous brunette hit Bad Guy or Bury a Friend. But over the course of nearly two and a half hours, The World’s A Little Blurry offers a fascinating connection to any cynicism that it could be image content for a teenage superstar. The verité-style documentary, filmed by the Eilish Grammys auction in 2020 from the end of 2018 (11 awards, including the album of the year), sees an enviably talented and more enviable young woman observed, if not always control.
The trust that Eilish’s family places in Cutler (The War Room, The September Issue) – mother Maggie Baird and father Patrick O’Connell, both almost constantly present – is clear. The camera traverses the family home and falls on family arguments (Maggie and Finneas, and then Eilish, arguing about the latter’s unwillingness to make an ‘accessible’ hit) and Eilish’s bedroom the morning of her Grammy nominations. The film shifts over the ever-magnetic continuity of superstar strangeness with relativity – Eilish DM-ing her idol, Justin Bieber, and send her millions of Instagram fans and choose her distinctive baggy couture outfits for touring; Eilish studies for her driver’s license, complains about her family’s lame cars, or groans as her father compares new music to a Duncan Sheik song.
It also contains all the promises of authenticity we expect from modern music documentaries: quiet moments, the tension of touring, the vertigo of quick fame on the set, skill pornography for work processes. But while Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, which was released on Netflix last year, often felt like a meticulous, as entertaining, propaganda project, The World’s a Little Blurry portrays an artist for whom the idea of ”authenticity” is artistically important. and for the filming, passé.
Eilish was born in 2001 and has become accustomed to documentation, by family and yourself; when she told Colbert this week, “I’m not really changing in front of a camera.” Part of the hook of The World’s A Little Blurry’s is to look at a star who, like her fans who grew up on Snapchat and Instagram, understands that to be on camera, you have to be both yourself and not – the calibration is so fluid, and so ubiquitous, that it is almost indistinguishable, or perhaps more accurate, irrelevant to “real” life.
So Cutler’s film feels like seeing Eilish be Eilish, even as she focuses on the camera in the style of her favorite show, The Office. The film has a lot of intimate moments: a typing attack from her Tourettes, a deserted phone call with a distant, inattentive (now-ex) boyfriend she has not previously discussed with the public, silent disappointment behind the scenes about what she considers to be a sub-Coachella performance (‘Did you forget a few words in a new song, what is it, who cares?’ O’Connell, Daddy throughout, stock).
The strongest element of it, except for Eilish himself, is the generosity and empathy to the experience of fandom. Eilish, who as a 12-year-old was so committed to Bieber that Baird considered putting her in therapy, speaks fluently of the hyper-intense worship that has plagued millions, mostly teenage girls. When she breaks down a full 30 seconds after meeting him, in one of The Worlds A Little Blurry’s best scenes, it can only be one of the crying, light faces in her crowd. The chasmic emotion, the consuming devotion to your artistic heroes, the way it makes even the darkest corners of your brain temporarily feel OK – it’s strikingly real for Eilish, her fans and viewers.