he YouTube docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, which premiered at SXSW last week and is being released online over the coming month, is a four-episode punch of honesty, brutal both for the viewer and, seemingly, for Demi Lovato. While ostensibly a vehicle to address the headline-generating drug overdose that nearly killed her in 2018 on her terms (and promote her upcoming album), the former Disney star turned pop singer, 28, fluidly addresses a constellation of past traumas, from drug addiction to bulimia to sexual assault. In one of the most stomach-sinking parts of the series, directed by Michael Ratner, Lovato reflects on how the trauma of losing her virginity in a rape as a teenager refracted through her years as a famous entertainer, from self-harm to disordered eating as a means to regain control. In brightly lit sit-down interviews, she recalls the constraint she felt by the Disney Channel’s pure image in the late 2000s, how sex and consent were so un-normalized that she didn’t even recognize it as a rape, and believed it was her fault. She could not speak about it publicly, given her image as a wearer of purity rings, and when she brought it up privately, with an unnamed person presumably at Disney, nothing happened. It’s a hard-to-watch disclosure, all the more upsetting for the years of aftershocks it took Lovato to see what happened clearly, to understand how what she was taught made a teenage girl valuable – desirability, “goodness” – obscured and excused harm. That’s a haunting lesson many women learn, pop star or not; famous female stars, as objects of admiration and often envy, are often the public avatar of such personal and cultural reckonings. Dancing with the Devil was released, coincidentally, a month after The World’s a Little Blurry, Apple TV+’s remarkably grounded, verité-style documentary, directed by RJ Cutler, about Billie Eilish, the dark-pop phenom born 10 years after Lovato. It also arrives a week before hyper-pop artist Charli XCX’s fan-assisted quarantine project Alone Together, and on the heels of the New York Times’s documentary Framing Britney Spears, which simply and succinctly presented evidence of the singer’s frenzied stardom and triggered an outpouring of emotion over her media thrashing. The four films cover separate micro-generations and scopes of fame, from intimate Insta lives (Charli XCX) to mega-stardom (Spears), but all feel of a piece with a larger reconsideration of how female stars are discussed, hounded, anointed and denigrated – and thus how we judge and value women in public, how we consider ourselves. Lovato and Eilish’s films, in particular jolt the often-boilerplate pop star documentary formula of stage-managed access with mold-stretching transparency on mental health and the relentless scrutiny over women’s bodies as an indicator of worth. As Lovato’s story attests, the appearance of power under the impossible binds of marketable public womanhood, especially for young women – be sexy but sexless, confident but not threatening, empowered but desirable – is a ruse. But there is control over one’s story. From Katy Perry: Part of Me to Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two to Taylor Swift: Miss Americana, all of which are on Netflix, pop stars of the 2010s have used streaming documentaries as a way to exert narrative control – the kind stripped in hyper-dissection of female stars’ looks, love lives, likability – through the guise of unguarded authenticity. Since Madonna’s Truth or Dare in 1991, directed by Alek Keshishian, pop star documentaries have marketed an implicit viewer-star contract: the promise of unguarded, vulnerable revelations – a chance to glimpse the human person behind overwhelming ubiquity – in exchange for burnishing the star’s chosen narrative. This is, of course, a very white celebrity phenomenon; black performers have to contend with a thicket of gatekeeping, marginalization, and genre-boxing in the pop music industry. (Beyoncé and Rihanna, two of the biggest music stars on the planet, have often been pigeonholed, musically, into R&B or “urban contemporary” Grammy genres; somewhat relatedly, both rarely give interviews. Beyoncé’s 2013 documentary Life Is But a Dream is a collage of opacity; Rihanna’s long-gestating documentary, filmed by Peter Berg, is set to debut this summer after Covid delays.) An intentional, mediated impression doesn’t mean the footage therein isn’t sometimes genuinely raw, moving or demanding of empathy – the moment Katy Perry, in tears over the realization of her divorce, fixes her face seconds before hitting the stage in Part of Me; Taylor Swift chastising herself – “we don’t do that any more!” – when a paparazzi photo triggers old habits of food restriction. But they’re often more revealing in the moments where other motivations peek through – Gaga handing costume teeth to an unnamed assistant, the fact that Miss Americana prefigures the 2009 Kanye West VMA debacle as a foundational event. There’s a kind of dual reading: what’s intended and what’s observable. Dancing with the Devil has little interest in subtlety; the series, executive-produced by Lovato’s new manager, Scooter Braun (who also manages Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber), feels instead like a collective evidence drop – here’s the facts of addiction and trauma under the spotlight, synthesize as you will. The World’s a Little Blurry, meanwhile, is more oblique and generously watchful of Eilish’s fiercely protected adolescence – the excitement over her driver’s license, astoundingly homespun creative process with her producer/brother Finneas, and impassioned vertigo of fandom (that of her fans, and her still-paralyzing love for hero Justin Bieber). Cutler embedded with the O’Connell family off and on for two years, weaving in Eilish and her family’s own recordings. The World’s a Little Blurry thus plays less like a classic pop star documentary of authenticity bargaining and more like a nature documentary observing a teenager, albeit a prolifically talented one under immense spotlight and pressure, growing up. These films raise the bar for a sense of authenticity in pop-star documentaries – Lovato’s by going uncomfortably deep in the details, down to a sketched visualization of how her assistant found her the morning of her overdose, and a refreshingly candid description of how she would buy drugs. Charli XCX mostly films herself as she blisters through the making of her quarantine album How I’m Feeling Now, and cedes a good portion of the film to dispatches from several LGBTQ+ fans about their experience in isolation and genuine connection to her creative output. Eilish has an instinct for documentation so fluid the observations seem un-stage-managed while still remaining humane, respectful. Born in 2001, she’s a digital-native star; like her fans, she knows the idea of authenticity on and off screen is important for art but irrelevant for a personal life suffused with cameras, your own and others. But that doesn’t relieve the pressures of stardom – fascination with her body under her trademark style of loose clothing, pressure to be always amenable. Eilish’s unapologetic, trailblazing stardom has amended some of the expectations of a micro-generation before – “I think it was when Billie started wearing the baggy clothes, that was the first time I was like, I don’t have to be the super-sexy sexualized pop star,” Lovato told the New York Times last week. But the binds – the high-wire act of acceptability for women in public, especially teenage girls, and the hyper-focus on women’s behavior and appearance – have merely mutated. “I can’t have one moment where I’m like ‘I don’t wanna do this,’” Eilish says after a fan wrote on Instagram that she was rude during a meet-and-greet. “I have to keep smiling and if I don’t, they hate me and think I’m horrible.”