[COLUMN] James Cameron and Billie Eilish's Hit Me Hard and Soft Is a Meditation on Mediation | by Darren Mooney

There is a really interesting moment around the halfway point in Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D). In one of the interview interludes between the performances, the young singer confesses to co-director James Cameron that, if she ever feels exhausted or worn down, she tries to connect with her fans. As a demonstration, she tours the concert venue and finds a tinted window looking out onto the concourse below, where fans have set up tents and sleeping bags.

Eilish snaps a photo of those fans through the darkened glass on her phone and posts it to her socials. In a single, unbroken shot, she and Cameron note – in real-time – the first of the fans below getting the notification. They immediately recognize themselves in it. They recognize the angle from which it was taken. They immediately realize that their idol is standing behind that tinted window. The fans begin to mass, staring up at the window, separated from Billie by a darkened screen.

Hard and Soft returns time and again to the image of the screen. Cameron and Eilish seem fascinated by the notion of celebrity as an image and projection, as a person compressed flat in two-dimensions. One of the most striking recurring images in Hard and Soft is the view from the stage of the fans in the darkened arena, the lights on their phones lifted high in the air, shining like fireflies in the night in the same way lighters would burn at old rock concerts. Those lighters never go out.

However, Cameron just as often flips the perspective, circling around to view the singer-songwriter from the vantage point of the fans. The audience aren’t just raising their phones to shine a light in the dark, they are recording the concert. Many are watching the concert on their phone screens. It is a fascinating spectacle. These fans in the same room as Billie Eilish, experiencing her music in the flesh, still instinctively compress the singer down to a two-dimensional image on a phone screen.

As a performer, working with her production team, Eilish seems to instinctively understand this. Throughout Hard and Soft, Eilish is treated as an image. Her performance is captured live and broadcast on two gigantic screens hanging over the arena. Displays at the back of the arena stream the concert live. At various points, her live image is projected onto the floor of the very stage on which she is performing.

At multiple points, Eilish picks up a camera while performing and sings into it. In some paradoxical way, this is perhaps more intimate than singing directly to the flesh-and-blood people in the room with her. Hard and Soft wants the audience to consider this constructed image. As the concert winds down, Cameron cuts from the camera that Eilish is holding to a shot of Eilish holding the camera, and then to a shot of the camera man shooting Eilish holding the camera.

Even in the rather perfunctory interview sequences, Cameron underscores this sense of Eilish as an object seen through screens. The co-director is rarely seen in the film without a camera over his shoulder, but his presence is always felt. It’s his voice asking fans questions as they speak into the camera. During his conversations with Eilish, the camera never leaves his shoulder. Cameron engages with his subject who is sitting two feet away through his camera’s viewfinder.

On paper, Cameron is perhaps a strange choice to direct a Billie Eilish concert film. Obviously, there is a long history of feature film directors collaborating with pop artists on these projects, from Jonathan Demme directing Stop Making Sense to Martin Scorse making Shine a Light. However, a concert film for a young pop star does feel like a strange departure from an auteur who has not made a feature film that wasn’t set on the fictional alien planet of Pandora in almost thirty years.

It isn’t that Eilish and Cameron had a pre-existing relationship. Cameron reached out to the musician through her mother. Hard and Soft was undoubtedly a less involved creative process for Cameron than making an Avatar film. Cameron shared directorial credit with Eilish, and within the film itself jokes that his name should appear in “teeny, tiny” letters. He has joked on the press circuit that he was “out of [his] depth on this one”, while taking care to credit Eilish for her work shaping the film.

As such, it would be tempting to dismiss Hard and Soft as a minor work from a major filmmaker. That is probably fair. It is highly unlikely that the concert film will merit serious critical consideration in the larger context of the Cameron canon. This is perhaps fair. At the same time, there are some clear interests carrying over from Cameron’s narrative features. The sequences of Eilish on stage, pinpricks of light in the darkness around her, cannot help but evoke the neon aesthetics of Eywa in Avatar.

Cameron remains one of the main proponents of 3D filmmaking in Hollywood, shooting both his Avatar films and Hard and Soft on proprietary technology. A large part of Cameron’s use of 3D in his Avatar films is about rendering an obviously fantastical fictional world in an immersive manner, blurring the boundaries between the material and the unreal in a manner that “challenges the audience's ability to differentiate between the real and the simulated.”

There is something similar at work in Hard and Soft. There are very few shots in the film that do not include a screen of some description. Eilish often uses the front-facing camera on a phone or a tablet in place of a mirror, the image becoming a reflection. At one point, a front-facing tablet is pinned in the middle of a mirror. There is obviously a pragmatic reason for this – digital cameras can freeze and zoom in ways that a mirror cannot – but it still feels vaguely uncanny.

Even on her drive back to the hotel after the concert – during which she rolls down the window, explaining that this was often the only time she got to breath fresh air on tour – a gigantic black screen reflects Eilish’s image back at her. During the concert, she duets with a pre-recorded video of Charli XCX, another modern pop star fascinated by the hyperreal, as demonstrated with her mockumentary The Moment.

Even the concert itself turns Eilish into a digital recording. At one point, she sits on the ground in the center of the stage and asks for a minute of silence from the audience as she performs a harmony into the microphone. That harmony is then sampled and looped in real time as she sings “when the party’s over” over it. Even live, Eilish becomes a digital ghost, a recording that can be remixed and replayed even in the presence of the artist herself.

While there is not anything particularly revealing of Eilish as a person in Hard and Soft, she comes across as a thoughtful subject. In conversation with Cameron, she returns repeatedly to the idea of image. She talks about how she wants to be perceived more often than she talks about her own perspective. When she talks about how she dresses, she argues that she wants to make girls feel comfortable about how they dress. She talks about wanting to be the kind of artist that she would be a fan of, modelling stardom for herself. She talks about staging a show she would want to see.

There is arguably nothing new here. Celebrity has always been about the compression of a human being into an easily digestible two-dimensional image. More often than not, a celebrity is the idea of a person rather than an actual person. There have been decades, if not centuries, of artists playing with the tension within that idea – deconstructing it and exploring it. However, in an era of social media where these personalities are always filtered through screens, that tension is heightened still.

As an artist, Eilish is engaged with this idea. Her songs often explore the blurred boundary between constructed image and actual personhood. In “TV”, she falls asleep on the couch watching Survivor, the simulation of “reality” through a television screen, to vicariously “watch somebody suffer.” Her Oscar-winning “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie is about the ultimate constructed image of a woman. In “Bad Guy”, she casts herself as the villain as if to deny the listener the opportunity.

This tension provides a point of intersection between Eilish and Cameron as storytellers, between Eilish’s songs and Hard and Soft as a film. As much as Eilish is self-aware and engaged with the idea of herself as a constructed and abstracted object, there is a strong recurring sense of the artist as driven by a desire to touch and to connect. She talks about how she reaches into the crowd at every concert, even showing the scratches on her arms, connecting artists and audience in the flesh.

There is a strong sense watching Hard and Soft that Cameron and Eilish are seeking to make the singer more real, more tangible and more tactile, to the audience watching in the cinema than she is even to crowds experiencing her concert through their phones at the concert itself. This is obvious in the small glimpses of Eilish backstage or recovering between songs, breaking character with a smile or a sigh. It’s also a very strong argument for Cameron’s decision to film the concert in 3D.

At various points in the film, Cameron pulls a neat trick. The camera presses in on one of the two-dimensional screens projecting Eilish’ image across the arena, an obviously flattened image. Then Cameron cuts to the actual shot itself, rendered in three dimensions. It is too much to say that it feels like the audience is there, but it is immersive. 3D has come in for a lot of (often deserved) criticism, but Cameron understands the format better than any living director.

As much as Hard and Soft is a concert film capturing a tour by a hot young artist, part of its charm is that it also feels like it has something more to say about this moment of celebrity and experience. It’s a film about how artists like Eilish are often perceived through screens, even by those sharing the same space with them. There is something endearingly ambitious in this, an attempt to make Eilish more real to audiences in Dublin or Sydney than those in the same arena as her.