Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry Review

For those of us who have followed her as she grows up on the internet, this documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry reminds us that she is still muddling through the arduous process of growing up under this spotlight.

It burns brighter on her than any of us can imagine, never mind when, months after she turns eighteen, she wins a record-breaking number of grammys. Her career has been working towards this point: where, suddenly, she is one of the greatest performers in the world and everyone has an opinion. Watching it, I had painful flashes of those difficult and complex feelings working through my own adolescence, only without the international pressure from a recording label.

A lot of attention has been placed on the age difference between Billie, who was seventeen and her older boyfriend, Brandon Adams who goes by Q, who was twenty-three at the time they broke up. Whilst I am trying to adopt a mentality of staying out of other people’s relationships because there is no way me, an outsider, would begin to understand the dynamics of that relationship, the large age gap will always set alarm bells off. There is something incredibly sweet about watching Billie be swept away with all the excitement of first love. Though it is focused through her experience and, therefore, we are only with her for their subsequent breakup and sit through the same disappointments as she does, like Q not getting her anything for Valentine’s Day. It is particularly painful to hear her plead to see him over the phone when he’s out with his friends and she’s preparing for her headlining Coachella set, or when she calls him, concerned he drove himself home whilst drunk or when she relays that he’s in the hospital after punching a wall and breaking his hand. That sheen of young, teenage love, from her perspective feels incredibly raw, as many young women can understand the compulsion to look after a young man who they love as they (sometimes violently) struggle through their own mental health in different ways. Her strength, however, comes from the constant love and support her parents offer her. They are a constant, outside and adult voice that looks to protect Billie as only her parents can do. It is heartening to see how they’re there to hold her up as she navigates this bizarre time in her life.

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It is a beautiful thing, throughout the documentary, to see the frenzy of fans following her, waiting for a glimpse of her, pressed up against some god awful chain link fence or throwing their hands out when she opens a window to talk to them as they leave a venue or a hotel. You’ve saved my life, one girl told her, crying. There is a lot of crying, overwhelmed teenagers swaying in a crowd with their friends through her emotional ballads, staring up at her and completely in love with that moment. It sounds like a cliche, but it took me right back to being sixteen and standing in a sweaty crowd in some dingy basement with my best friend, crying because it was overwhelming to be so presently in that moment and your favourite band who knew exactly how you felt in all those confusing emotions are singing that song just for you. I cried watching those teenage girls feel that connection to her, so intimately that, after Billie’s breakup, she too starts crying in the middle of the song, suspended on a bed beside her brother playing his guitar. In a world where we can hardly fathom ever standing close to someone in a shop anymore, I was struck so intensely with remembering what that felt like, when that experience is one that is shared.

And then there’s Billie’s meeting with Justin Bieber, which I’m not above admitting also set me off again. It was such a pure moment where she became one of those girls, like that girl sticking her hand to reach her, to tell her how much she meant to her. They hugged for a long time before she began to cry in his arms and he just stoically held her. He has been where she now is. The most incredible part about Billie’s entrance into this world is that there is this community of people who became famous so incredibly young who are there, reaching out to her and looking out for her. Her meeting with Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom is equally as touching and lighter when she does not immediately recognise the now middle-aged Orlando Bloom from my personal first celebrity crush as Will Turner in Pirates of the Carribean. She has those who have gone through the hard bit - growing up and figuring out who you are - to come out relatively stable on the other side and it is undoubtedly heartwarming.

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Though Billie’s parents and her relationship with her brother are the loveliest part about the documentary, I came away feeling that as much as her parents are trying to protect her and, though they manage to do a lot for her, it is ultimately this industry that always ends up exploiting the teenagers it works through the machine. Billie, because of her age, has obviously been compared to other child stars who were put through the same destructive industry and didn’t come out in one piece in their twenties. We inevitably have done the same with this week’s episode comparing the two very different and yet similar experiences of Billie Eilish and Jojo Siwa going through this now, compared to the child stars of our time, with the Olsen twins or Britney Spears. The public watches and waits, inevitably, for the same thing to happen over and over again, ready to blame the child for not living up to impossible expectations, instead of turning our eyes to the executives pushing the deadlines and the endless, world-wide tours that inevitably wear an artist down through their physicality and the mental exhaustion of the meet and greets.

And we see this in the documentary, when one person becomes a commodity of the record label and the pressure becomes too much. For Billie, when she walks away and says she cannot cope anymore with people shouting her name and asking her for a picture when she doesn’t have the energy for it, we are with her. What some reviews have labelled her as sulking, I see as a teenager reacting in the only way she knows how, because who, at any age, could navigate this string of meetings and fast-paced moving around and performing every night and not feel burnt out and used?

We then must look at the machine of the industry. Of course, because it is backed by capitalist investors, the artist becomes the product and works to that demand, touring the following year straight after the album’s release to maximise hype and profit. This is the root of the evil for the child stars who are, on the promise that this is their big break, worked to the bone for years. We’ve seen it with Demi Lovato, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears among hundreds of others. And this is not to advocate that it should be completely stopped, only allowing artists to rise to their fame once their adults. What Billie has absolutely shown is that what her and her brother Finneas can produce in his childhood bedroom together is massively commercially successful and resonate with such a huge swathe of society, both pop lovers and non alike. The fans will still be there, we know we can wait patiently, for the hope of music and content we love if it means risking the artists’ mental health. Fans are waiting for a hypothetical Rihanna album that may never be (fans of the show will know that Hannah’s still waiting for a part two to Telephone from Lady Gaga and Beyonce). We can let Billie recuperate, do her own thing, make the music she wants and maybe do things differently, tour just America for one section of the year and spread it out. Capitalism tries to convince us that we need to race to the end, to buy that thing instantly before we’re distracted by something else. And this is what becomes unmanageable for the children under this spotlight, under this pressure, shaking hands with rich executives when they want to be with their friends, or asleep like every teenager.

For fans of Billie Eilish, it is an incredible insight into the girl behind the polished, eloquent Vanity Fair articles and her public persona into the person who is still growing up and figuring out who she is. It is long at two hours and twenty minutes, but for all the full length songs from concert footage, it is worth it to get lost in her world, a world that doesn’t belong to us even before the pandemic but is still fascinating to observe. As Billie Eilish’s adopted mums on the podcast, we will always be rooting for her and hope the industry adapts to who she is and does not try to break her down to fit their broken mould.