BAt the age of 19, singer Billie Eilish has reached heights of fame and success that seem supernatural and familiar, carried by the same tides of generational megapopulation that propelled teen music idols like Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus before her, but with a Generation Z twist. It is the advertising canon of Eilish that the 15-year-old reached 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, which recorded her successful debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in his childhood room, that the two sounds of day-to-day MaGyver – a dentist’s drill, the sip of Eilish’s Invisalign retainer – in songs that accumulate billions of streams.
These are not myths; as captured in RJ Cutler’s mesmerizing and generous Apple TV + documentary, The World A Little Blurry, Eilish, in fact, spent those supersonic teenage years at his family’s modest home in Los Angeles; she and Finneas compose their music in their bedroom with such organic sibling telepathy that it seems almost too casual to be the ubiquitous dark pop hits Bad Guy or Bury a Friend. But over almost two and a half hours, The slightly blurry world offers a fascinating retort to any cynicism that this could be maintaining the image of a teenage superstar. The verité-style documentary, filmed from the end of 2018 until the Eilish Grammy in 2020 (11 awards, including the album of the year), observes an enviably talented and most enviously confident young woman dealing with twin rockets of stardom and adolescence with surprising awareness, if not always in control.
The trust placed in Cutler (The War Room, The September Issue) by the Eilish family – mother Maggie Baird and father Patrick O’Connell, both of whom are almost constant presence – is evident. The camera roams the family home, falling into family arguments (Maggie and Finneas, then Eilish, arguing about the family’s reluctance to make an “accessible” success) and in Eilish’s room the morning of her Grammy nominations. The film slides over the ever magnetic juxtaposition of the superstardom’s strangeness with the ability to identify – Eilish running his idol, Justin Bieber, posting to his millions of followers on Instagram, selecting his loose haute couture clothes for the tour; Eilish studying to get a driver’s license, complaining about his family’s bad cars or moaning when his father compares a new song to a Duncan Sheik song.
It also includes all the promises of authenticity that we expect from modern musical documentaries: quiet moments, the stress of touring, the vertigo of rapid fame on the set, pornography with competence in the work process. But while Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, released last year on Netflix, often looked like a meticulous yet fun advertising project, The World a Little Blurry portrays an artist for whom the idea of ”authenticity” is artistically important and for filming, outdated.
Eilish was born in 2001 and grew up accustomed to documentation, by the family and by himself; as she said to Colbert this week: “I don’t really change in front of a camera”. Part of The World A Little Blurry’s hook is watching a star who understands, as well as her fans who grew up on Snapchat and Instagram, that being in front of the cameras is being yourself and not – the calibration is very fluid, and so ubiquitous , which is almost indistinguishable, or perhaps more precisely, irrelevant, to “real” life.
Thus, Cutler’s film seems to watch Eilish being Eilish, even as she attacks the camera in the style of her favorite show, The Office. The film has its fair share of intimate moments: a tic attack from her Tourettes, a helpless phone call with a distant and inattentive boyfriend (now ex) that she has not previously discussed with the audience, silent disappointment behind the scenes with what she considers to be a below-average performance at Coachella (“You forgot a few words of a new song, big deal, who cares?” O’Connell, consistently the most parent of parents, supplies).
Its strongest element, besides Eilish itself, is the generosity and empathy provided to the fandom experience. Eilish, so dedicated to Bieber at the age of 12 that Baird considered putting her in therapy, speaks fluently of the hyper-intense worship launched by millions, predominantly teenagers. When she passes out for a full 30 seconds when she meets him, in one of the best scenes in The World a little blurry, it could very well be any of the tearful and lively faces in her crowd. The cosmic emotion, the consuming devotion to your artistic heroes, the way it makes even the darkest recesses of your brain temporarily look OK – this, to Eilish, her fans and viewers, is incredibly real.