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Dancing with the devil shows how stories can be filtered through images, and how we are so rarely offered a full picture.
Photo: YouTube Originals
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil opens in a state of disbelief. While Lovato’s friends and family have come together to set the record straight regarding Lovato’s rehabilitation and recovery from the life-threatening 2018 overdose, they don’t know how ready they are supposed to be. “So you just wanna know everything?” asks her former assistant, with some disbelief. “Are we talking about heroin, are we doing this?” asks one of her best friends as the documentary shifts to Lovato’s relapse. “Okay, I’m just going to tell you the real – I’m just going to give you the real.”
Lovato immediately recognizes why this candor is so important to her and to the four episodes of Dancing with the devil; she is down to earth about the overwhelming pressure that the cover-up issues have placed on her. She shows the 2018 footage from her Tell Me You Love Me tour embroidered in Dancing, during which she obscured her drug use at the time (which she also did in her 2011 documentary). After an overdose, the documentary and the 2018 tour were canceled. Now Lovato has a lot to get rid of his chest. And already, she’s making headlines for her unusually candid discussion of mental health, substance use and sexual assault.
But Dancing with the devil is not only a high level revealer. It’s a nifty demonstration of how narratives can be filtered through images, and how we so rarely get a full picture. Instead of just settling for an unearthed or updated documentary, Dancing with the devil provides a masterclass in real-time celebrity building.
One such myth-making is churning out celebrity documentary, an art in itself. As Sydney Urbanek writes about the plan presented by Beyoncé Life is anything but a dream, one can generally expect “the use of prophetic video footage from her childhood, staged ‘candid’ moments with loved ones, and an odd performance segment to break things up.” The point is not just to reiterate a narrative, but to selectively deepen it, putting the star in control even when she claims to be without intervention.
Although Lovato’s origin story has already been told in 2017 Simply complicated, Dancing with the devil always starts at the top. This time, however, her childhood is recounted with an emphasis on the difficulty of balancing in the public eye. In this tale, Lovato’s story revolves specifically around his strained relationship with his father, his mother’s issues with substances and eating disorders, and the “competitive” environments of beauty pageants and youth. celebrity.
These benchmarks are there to inform the documentary’s next step, which is its relapse in 2018. While Lovato’s focus with this series isn’t that far removed from most celebrity documentaries, these stories aren’t often as accessible. than those of Lovato. As she (along with her sister and friends) attest, being public about her issues has made her an icon of sobriety and mental health care – a pedestal that causes her more pain. conflicts than comfort. “Because I had been so open and honest about the things that I had dealt with, I felt like I had to be that perfect role model,” Lovato says in some of the interview footage from 2018. Now, even though she reveals more her inner life, she tells us that she is not sure what these labels mean to her.
Dancing with the devil underlines the weight of this examination, not only on Lovato but on those close to him. “5 Minutes From Death,” the second episode of the YouTube Originals documentary series, devotes the first eight minutes to the July 24 stories of those close to her: first, the assistant who found her incapacitated; then his head of security; and then her friends and family – many of whom learned she was OD through push alerts before she got a call from Lovato’s team. The narrative of the inner circle is certainly a selective framing to approach the question, but this segment of Dancing with the devil looks like atonement – it’s not just a close group, it’s a blast ray.
With fame comes life constantly in the public eye. For Lovato, being open about his journey was as much a tool of explanation as it was a shield for being simply human. In discussing his own sexual assault, Lovato cites watching Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna play in the press as an example of his fears of coming out publicly; she felt traumatized and unable to cope, and adding other people’s interpretations of her choices would make the situation worse. As Lovato details in “5 Minutes After Death,” one of her first questions to her mother when she woke up from her overdose was, “Is it over there?” Just weeks later, still recovering from three strokes, a heart attack, permanent brain damage, asphyxiation pneumonia and multiple organ failure, Lovato took to Instagram to address its audience. “What I have learned is that this disease is not something that goes away or goes away over time,” she wrote. “This is something that I have to continue to overcome and that I haven’t done yet.”
What is left out is just as crucial as what we see. There are no tearful excuses for scaring her team, no performative thanks, even to the assistant who felt she had to sneak up to call an ambulance (just in time, as Lovato says the doctors told her she had “five to ten minutes more”). It’s informative. As much as Lovato seems to disinfect with sunlight, you can still feel a (understandable) limit there; less exposure, more disclosure.
Many behind-the-scenes documentaries like to give the illusion of naturalism, as if the star is simply captured in their daily lives with entire film crews in their living room. Not so with Dancing with the devil, who often emphasizes intentional craftsmanship on Lovato’s part, as she cheers on her security manager, neurologist, and even Dani Vitale – her choreographer and close friend whom she attended at the birthday party on the night of overdose – to be more frank.
The third episode, released this week, practically opens with a direct address to correct the file. Although Vitale does not know the extent of Lovato’s relapse, fans have clung to her as facilitating the overdose, targeting her online; the narrative grip was so strong that Vitale says she lost her job. In the episode, Lovato tells his friend that nothing is off-limits, even hinting at other preparations they’ve made off-camera: “Like I said, erase your name. Don’t be afraid to say anything. And I just want the truth to be told, because you deserve it. Whether staged or not, Lovato’s pep talk speaks volumes about the purposefulness of the entire series; in the midst of the gasping edit, it’s a program driven by the artist’s goals, and she wants her audience (up to and including her aggressive stans) to be aware of her message.
It’s also part of the structure of the documentary. Director Michael D. Ratner (who also directed Justin Bieber Seasons for YouTube) anchors audiences in time whenever possible, featuring cellphone footage of her doing the “Level Up” dance with friends hours before her overdose. Lovato’s selfies on crack or heroine are suggestively entwined with tour footage, where she is gleefully disjointed as she drinks in an Amsterdam bar with her team.
It is certainly (and probably intentionally) not as simple as Coaching Britney, New York Times documentary that provided audiences with a line through the life of the pop star. The result is more like a social media journal – personal, organized, and stronger once you get a better feel for the story and its scope. Just because some of the moments in Lovato’s life were captured on JumboTrons, doesn’t mean we’ve seen his life. And once you start looking for it, such contextualization is all over the place. Dancing with the devil: The date on the clapperboard at the top of the setup tells us that Lovato shot one of his interviews in June, while Vitale shot his in November. The dates are superimposed on the interviews or the B-rolls to tell us where she is in her tour, her recovery, her quarantine. We get a feel for different Demi Lovatos – and, more importantly, different personal truths – depending on where we talk to her in her life.
While the editing of the documentary can often seem nervous, you can see from these choices how Dancing with the devil hopes to turn the audience’s heads. While respondents often broaden the scope by talking about “us” or pervasive addiction practices, the discussion still centers on Lovato. (A recovery like hers is only possible with the help of a pop star’s bank account.) It’s her music, her recovery, and her future.
So it’s no surprise that the series ends with the presentation of a controversial new sobriety plan (she now drinks and smokes weed in moderation) – or that we might come to doubt the success of the short story. strategy. We are told over and over again how Lovato hid her addiction in plain sight, how the past franchise hid her real world, how adept she is at lying even to those close to her about her habits. Even within the confines of this extremely honest project, she begins the first episode by speaking to the team behind the camera, “FYI, I’m just going to say everything, and then if we don’t want to use any, we can just do it. to take off.
We don’t know what was taken out, what truths about this moment might be recontextualized with new interviews later. As with any documentary, it’s up to us to decide what we think we learned – and what to do with it. After all, we’ll never really get the full picture.
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