If teen-age pop stars were once saddled with pressure to maintain their perfect images, today they face the equally weighty burden of appearing perfectly imperfect: authentic, flawed, and wholly honest, at all times. In “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,” the new documentary about the ascent of the anti-pop star Billie Eilish, a debate erupts between the musician (then seventeen years old), her mother, and Chelsea Dodson, who is one of the film’s producers. Eilish is wondering whether or not to speak out publicly against drugs, alcohol, and smoking, none of which she partakes in. “My only thought is how, like, you say things, and then maybe you grow up and feel differently,” Dodson says, “And then get dragged for it.” Eilish’s mother interjects, exasperated. “Wait a second. Are you actually not going to let her be authentic to who she is now in case she grows up to do drugs?” she asks. But Eilish understands the great risks associated with saying one thing now and doing another later. “Well, she’s right though,” she tells her mother. These are the sorts of calculations that Eilish, who appears to exercise total control over her creative output, must make from moment to moment. At times, being real seems like such an exhausting endeavor that it’s easy to see why so many stars who’ve come before Eilish have chosen the alternative. Nobody could blame Eilish for the amount of sulking she does throughout the film’s drifty two hours and twenty minutes.
Eilish is an unconventional pop star, and “The World’s a Little Blurry” is an attempt at an appropriately unconventional take on the pop-star documentary, a promotional format that has become standard in the age of content. Filmed during the lead-up to and aftermath of her début album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” the documentary chronicles Eilish as she struggles to finish the record, fumbles through live shows, suffers injuries that undermine her ability to perform, and strives to sustain the attention of her boyfriend, Q. Directed by R. J. Cutler, the documentarian behind critically beloved films like “A Perfect Candidate” and “The September Issue”—and, notably, funded and produced by Eilish’s label, Interscope—the film features no talking heads, no flashy graphics or tidy edits. The project is presented as vérité footage, and much of it has the intimate feel of a home movie. This is less an artistic choice than a reflection of Eilish’s real life, which has been unusually family-centric. Raised in a tiny house in Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood, Eilish was homeschooled. Her father was a construction worker, and her mother was a teacher. Both parents also had small acting roles, played music, and cultivated a creative atmosphere in the home. As a result, Eilish and her older brother, Finneas, developed a fondness for music and performance. Eilish and Finneas wrote most of her début album together in his bedroom. The film is a testament to their family bond, and to Eilish’s closeness with her parents, who come across less as interventionist stage parents than a cocoon of support.
The film is also a testament to Eilish’s profound understanding of obsessive fan culture, which is critical to her success. In one scene, Eilish—who’s talked openly about her Justin Bieber obsession—offers a potent description of the parasocial relationships that superfans develop with their idols. “Justin Bieber, right? When I was like twelve, I was not a fan of him,” she says. “That was, like, my first love. That was the person I was in love with. In my head, he was in love with me.” Then she pulls up a clip of herself as an adolescent girl, describing her fear that any boys she dates in real life will never live up to the model that Bieber has provided. Later in the film, Bieber reaches out to Eilish’s team expressing his support and asking to collaborate with her. Eilish meets Bieber in person at Coachella, at a moment when she’s especially crestfallen about her middling performance at the festival and the absence of her boyfriend. Cradling a sobbing Eilish, Bieber is tidily cast as the knight in shining armor about whom she’d fantasized as a young fan.
The film is partly designed to underscore the artist’s agency in her own career—she works on music almost exclusively with her brother, records in the comfort of her own home, and is often seen calling the shots on set. If there is anyone who bears the standard pressures of the music business, it is Finneas, who is tasked with not only helping to turn Eilish into a pop star but insulating her from anything that might compromise her quest for artistic legitimacy. He is four years older than his sister, and presents as her best friend, her closest collaborator, and her protector. At one point early on in the film, under pressure from Eilish’s label, he anguishes in private. “It feels kind of like a minefield to me,” he says. “I’ve been told to write a hit, but I’ve been told to not tell Billie that we have to write a hit. But Billie hates writing songs in general, and, you know, is, I don’t know, so woke about her own persona on the Internet, that I think she’s terrified of, like, anything that she makes being hated.”
It’s easy to see why Eilish is so consumed with her own relatability, given that her success was predicated on it. She’s well versed in the language of mental health, and known for making taboos normal. She speaks openly about her struggles with depression, as well as her experience with Tourette’s syndrome, which she says once caused her to bite down on a piece of glass. She is so averse to skimpy or form-fitting clothing that a cottage industry of memes has been built around photos of her cartoonishly baggy wardrobe. During the promotional tour for the album, she tells an interviewer: “People are always, like, ‘You know, it’s so dark. Have happy music.’ But I’m, like, I’m never feeling happy. So why would I write about things I don’t know about? You know, I feel the dark things. I feel them very strongly. And, you know, Why would I not talk about them?”
“The World’s a Little Blurry” provides a stark portrait of how pop stardom has changed, or at least how it has appeared to change. One month ago, FX released “Framing Britney Spears,” a new documentary that chronicles the epic rise and fall of Britney Spears twenty years ago, beginning when Spears was the same age as Eilish was when she released her own first hit. That documentary casts the older artist as the tragic victim of the corrupt and voyeuristic pressure cooker of pop stardom. Spears, according to the film’s narrative, begins her career as a virginal Southern sex kitten, and eventually buckles under the weight of the public’s leering eyes and unrealistic expectations, in catastrophic fashion. She’s later robbed of ownership over her life and livelihood when she is placed under a conservatorship.
Maybe it’s the synergistic timing of these releases, but the spectre of Spears looms large over “The World’s a Little Blurry.” Eilish’s entire career—one defined by agency and candor, or at least the performance of agency and candor—feels like it was created in resistance to the forces that crushed Spears. And yet the film shows just how impossible it is to vanquish fame’s most oppressive elements. In one scene, Eilish is criticized on social media for being rude during an impromptu meet-and-greet session. She rages at her team: “I don’t want anyone who knows who I am, and is any sort of fan or knows a fan, to see me in any sort of awkward situation,” she says. “It’s embarrassing, and I have to keep smiling. And, if I don’t, they hate me, and they think I’m horrible.” Being consumed with a desire to be liked is as authentic as it gets.
