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redantsunderneath · 3 years

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VAL and BILLIE EILISH: THE WORLD'S A LITTLE BLURRY

I shouldn’t be allowed to watch documentaries. All that any documentary seems to be about (at this point, to me) is the relationship between itself and the truth. I don’t know if it’s 2000's reality TV or that one time I watched Capturing the Friedman’s and Waco: The Rules of Engagement back to back that broke me, but what interests me isn’t the subject matter but standpoint epistemology of the thing. These two docs are very different, diametrically opposed in almost every way, but both are defined by the ways in which the text struggles against reality. Val is about an old man who used cameras (himself) to capture his entire life as he pretended to be someone else on film. He is infirm, occluding his laryngotomy tube to talk, and his handlers try to manage his naps around meet and greets where he sells the shell of the person he once was for the fans who still care. It’s forbears are archeological dead celebrity docs that try to find the elusive star at the center (Robin Williams, Heath Ledger, Amy Winehouse) and those about reclaiming memory (Alzheimer Project, Waltz with Bashir) but it’s just… he’s the cameraman and he’s still shuffling around. Closest comparison (minus the age part) is probably Kid 90, which was being cut at the same time. This doesn’t get at how weird this is, though. He used to make movies with his brother, who drowned during a seizure and haunts the movie (he would put up his brother’s drawings in shots on film sets, the talks about or around the event constantly). He often hands off the camera to people so he can be seen in his world with complex instructions (when I walk off, focus in on that speaker so when I go onstage you will hear my first line) and when the camera hits a mirror he lingers (as in the video of his newborn baby). He seems to always be performing, an aspect of life we are all familiar with by now but less common when this footage was taken. His wife is uncomfortable on camera, usually mugging or hiding, and you get the feeling the distancing from his life is intentional as he focuses on internal transformation away from ego resolution, but he still needs to be seen, his sense of self tied up in an object permanence issue. The movie is structured as someone trying to sort through memories of their life and come to terms with them, although the memories in this case is a small warehouse full of video tapes and film canisters. In his current life he can only communicate with difficulty and tries to convey reaction with meaningful-but-of-what glances and gestures. Effacement by time and looming death drench the whole enterprise - when his brother dies he says his father “lost his charisma” (just contemplate that). His current simulacra of celebrity makes him feel like a ghost, signing “you can be my wingman anytime” multiple times for people who this means something to. So he brings up the footage and tries to reconstruct his life (his credit as cinematographer is both funny, touching, and chilling). This thing is full of interesting moments. He is doing a line reading of Hamlet at Juilliard and Peter Kass stops him to ask where the performance is coming from. He responds that he has never considered killing himself which causes Kass to explode, insisting that no-one in the history of the world has not had that thought. This seems to rob us and him of a potentially revelatory moment as Kilmer seems different, spiritual in an unusual way… maybe the reason why he never thought of that was more interesting than that point. His entreaty to Marlon Brando to tell him what his earliest childhood memory is is responded to by Brando asking for him to rock his hammock with repetition of the question only yielding feedback on the rocking until neonatal-fat Brando’s satisfaction at being rocked seems like an answer. The argument with John Frankenheimer who does not want to be filmed is something else. The major things going on are here are being haunted vs feeling like a ghost and an arrested Lacanian mirror phase that complicates his intersubjective context, with the karmic

self-assessment of who he is trying to chill in the middle. The filmmaking knows this and orients itself as a process of evaluating memory where what is true seems elusive, heavily edited, and hall-of-mirrors-like. The question of what is performance is a subconscious struggle. Conspicuous in their absence are his own feelings on his decline beyond the fact that he “doesn’t believe in death,” real insight into his marriage (and breakup, other than an allusion to his method acting Jim Morrison being a problem) and relationship with his kids (who are around all the time, but seem like Sixth Sense characters), and the fact that he’s a legendary asshole on set. This last is, like, the one thing everyone knows about him. But you can sort of sense this stuff secondarily, right off the edge of the screen and in him relentlessly projecting onto his parents. The real crux is the study of a man who never feels seen, but tries to become so by disappearing into someone else, who needs recording devices so that he can capture himself properly, all controlled performance; someone unaware of his own loneliness brought about by not being very good at making himself available because his “self” is externally resolved and constant inner transformation masks the unformed nature of his ego at rest. The film accomplishes this by allowing him to reveal what is absent by his preoccupations and bearing witness to his deflection mechanisms, so that he is no closer to knowing himself but, by being manipulated in a way we can see the frame of, we kind of get a glimpse. Good experience, wish there was more Christian Scientist material (that seems like an angle of understanding the film wasn’t interested in). Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is about a young girl who is followed by cameras capturing her entire life as she pretends to be herself on stage. She has a Simone Biles flavored psycho-physical compromise that everyone tries to “handle” while she sells herself as the person she isn’t to fans who care, at least right now. This is in the tradition of Truth or Dare mimics that seem de rigueur for female pop stars. Closest comparison is Miss Americana. This movie feels made by spreadsheet to contain scenes to develop the official narrative of an in-her-brother’s-room, in her suburban parent’s house, sui generis composite genius who is on the edge of mental unfitness trying to be as normal as she can in this crazy merry go round called fame. The obviousness of the put on is diffused by the relative lameness of the pieces. In some respects this is the typical documentary “look for the cracks for insight” play, but it is consciously using that as a tool too and doing it badly - the manufactured insight escape moments largely ring false. This comes off as a Zoom background era counterfeit, a series of YouTube clips where Markeplier or whoever lets the mask slip a little in the most forced bit of unbiddenness possible. There is a boyfriend who feels like a story mandated version of “from Canada.” But the interesting thing is the way it recapitulates the way modern pop is put together, not by writing, not by spontaneous “feel your way,” but by putting bits of ideas together and trying to emulate form. There are a lot of moments in the film that feel like they could have been real, but the non-actors were asked to do another take and can’t quite nail it. It actually has such a boner for produced casual that it is pretty much allergic to authenticity, which is quite a thing for a documentary. The major things going on are here are grappling with whether she brings anything musically to the table (the brother seems like the musical force, she’s afraid her voice is bad, they make a point to show her idea notebooks as work product), her wish to only perform if she can give the fans her best show (possibly her version of just wanting to call in sick, understandable) is at odds with her being the center of a machine that has to move, her as a product of a not entirely with it older parents who gave their kids an open creative runway

and now are instrumental in managing her as a resource that is tricky to work with, the work being her and her brother dicking around and making magic happen, and an attempt to paint her as a Beleiber who now is on the the other side of the fan dichotomy. Development of her style, arguably her #1 thing, is sort of left as her telling a video director “I drew this bleeding eye woman, can we do something like this?” and sort of suggesting through letting her point around that she is a de facto co director. At times, it feels like a try at icon forging that someone wanted to fail, but it is probably just the high school conception-to-production level tat ultimately comes off as a larger indictment of making a movie like you make modern pop music - overdetermined manipulation of flimsy elements without a satisfying ethos, that looks too be an insubstantial assemblage of spliced pieces that live of die by their stickiness. But it begins to feel, more and more, that it’s about how non-exciting pop stars can be as people and that a narrative that people respond to can kind of die if you show that’s it’s just work and somewhat normal people trying to be a piece of an illusion. It’s this partitioning away of the hyperreality and an attempt to show the official story acted by the sausage makers trying to pretend the banality is just crazy man. Where Val is a simulation of an habitual performer considering who they actually are selectively sorting their life and failing to confront the loneliness of age and death (more elusive to them than us), this is obvious hoax unintentionally (?) revealing the fabricated nature of the image-music industry by way of demonstrating the strangely normie creatives, green-yellow ombre or no, can’t be arsed to summon a proper freakout (the whining seems authentic, though). Music videos may lie to you, but the official story is strangely correct - kids living in mom’s house cobble together catchy stuff and pull off pop stardom due to social media age production savvy and a little zeitgeisty imagery, it’s just everyone is well adjusted if stressed and someone’s only donning the costume of the online archetype of a specific kind of girl. Val uses the constructed nature of these narratives as a tool wielded in the open to suggest the inner working of a mind failing to be honest with itself while the other is interesting in its transparency and failure to convince us of the loosely conceived fiction, leaving reality apparent as bong resin. Baudrillard would have liked this one more, probably.

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