Billie Eilish’s second concert film joins a newly lucrative genre, following Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour’s $267 million box-office. Both are marketed as participatory filmgoing, turning cinemas into cut-price venues where fans can relive or imagine communing with their heroes. James Cameron’s co-direction with Eilish in his favoured 3D format adds supposed stature, but this remains incurious star-sanctioned product.
Eilish is the visual opposite of Swift’s traditionally glamorous feminine persona. The latter’s arch, “Oh, hi!” as she opened her Eras act in silver and red showgirl finery isn’t in Eilish’s more equable contract with her fans, whose perspective she avowedly shares. 3D foregrounds those fans as much as the star. The most moving aspect of classic pop footage from The Beatles to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust farewell is the screaming, soul-purging girls transmitting the music’s emotional heart, long before modern female dominance of its creation. Eilish’s near all-female equation is shown as girls weep more than scream, comforting each other and letting everything out. There’s much talk of being “heard”, “seen” and healed. “She saves a lot of people,” one fan says.
Why so many feel so fundamentally hurt is too big a question for Cameron to answer, but one his footage implicitly asks. Amid a range of finely honed songs from “What Was I Made For?”’s redemptive account of depression to the synth-sex guest-spot on Charli XCX’s “Guess”, “Your Power”’s quietly indignant #MeToo anthem perhaps significantly gets the biggest roar.
Cameron’s thin and indulgent post-Titanic career now comprises almost 30 years of mostly underwater docs, lonely 3D loyalty and Avatar. His features show none of the musical immersion of regular rock doc moonlighters such as Scorsese, making Eilish a baffling subject.
Cameron the rugged survivor type who believed he’d have beaten the Titanic’s Atlantic tomb approves Eilish’s mildly masochistic powering through damaged shins for shows mainly consisting, she notes, of “me running around and jumping”. He’s also fascinated by the phones which dominate the venue dark. The 71-year-old sees their strangeness, and the Tron-like sf spectacle of their devotional glow around the stage’s central cuboid shrine. Eilish’s spiriting through the crowd in a packing case to the Hobbit-low sub-stage realm where she crouches before showtime is also cinematic. Her co-directing credentials, assigned onscreen by Cameron, partly rest in her authorship of the show and giddy onstage filming of swirling, close-up selfies.
Backstage with Billie lacks the Seventies bad behaviour which enlivened the very fabric and faces of Scorsese’s formerly genre-defining Band doc The Last Waltz or Leon Russell’s notoriously hard-partying Mad Dogs And Englishmen caravan. The dog rescue centres Eilish invites to her shows and her sheer joy bashing at her hotel window and hanging out of her post-show car to provide personal and positive fan service is healthier for everyone except uncommitted viewers. It is, in the sense meant by the catastrophically debauched Stooges, No Fun. Eilish instead warmly nurtures her community in controlled but clearly genuine ways. Happiness at her position may be the secret of her healing’s success.
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