Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me paints portrait of poisonous fame [Apple TV+ review]

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Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me★★★
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me shows the private side of a public life
Photo: Apple TV+

TV+ ReviewIn new Apple TV+ documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, we take a trip into the center of the pop star’s world to discover her journey has been nothing but hardship surrounded by impossible highs, which makes coping with her fame something like a near-impossibility.

Narrated by Gomez herself and directed by Alek Keshishian (Madonna: Truth or Dare), this revealing, well-intentioned and often quite beautiful documentary gets us inside of her turmoil and the whirlwind of both her fame and her illness. It’s important for people to know that being America’s sweetheart is no picnic, and that the machinery of fame is parasitic and unyielding. Hopefully, someone, somewhere will pull the brakes on throwing kids into the show business maelstrom.

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me review

When we meet Gomez in 2019, she’s depressed. She’s tired, burned out and has done everything she ever wanted to do. Which of course leaves the large, unanswerable question: What next?

Gomez had been famous since 2003, when she was barely 10. That’ll mess with you, as we learned in the last Apple TV+ pop star documentary, Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. Flashback to 2016: Gomez is beginning to (or at least as far as we can see) question whether she’s really the performer and woman she’d hoped to be by now, worried about her body and weight. She can’t see that she’s talented, she can’t rest on her laurels, and she believes she’s only as good as her collaborators.

Health problems, including but not limited to extreme exhaustion, lupus and depression, caused Gomez to cancel a sold-out tour, which pointed an unflattering light on her management and her lifestyle. She checked into a hospital for her mental health issues and regrouped, reflecting on her treatment of the people closest to her.

Over the course of the next little while, she got back in touch with the people and places who helped her along her journey: her old school, the house she grew up in, her old neighbors, relatives and friends. She speaks at a gala for a hospital she checked into during her illness and then checks in with the many people who were in the same boat. It’s very affecting.

She writes the song “Lose You to Love Me” to describe where she is, between the worst of her feelings and the high of discovering who she is and reclaiming her image, as best she can.

Fame, LA and the poisonous spotlight

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me review: The new Apple TV+ documentary takes us on a trip to the center of Selena Gomez's world.
A new Apple TV+ documentary takes us on a trip to the center of Selena Gomez’s world.
Photo: Apple TV+

This doc has the same issues as any documentary about famous people, especially people who’ve become LA royalty. Los Angeles is a terrible place. It might as well be the dimension of pain from Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart. Normal people can’t imagine what goes on there.

When people come up to Gomez to give her gifts backstage or encourage her, knowing the cameras are rolling, some bizarre rehearsed and bowdlerized version of integrity slithers out instead. You want to scream and claw your eyes out. All this, however, serves an important function. It makes Gomez seem like a real person and not a creation of a PR machine that bows and scrapes and falls over itself trying to prop up its cash cow.

It is to Gomez’s eternal credit that after 20 long years in the spotlight, she still seems like a normal human being. Gomez is someone known to me, not by her extraordinarily popular music but by her eclectic filmography. (I confess I’m pop music blind. I don’t know who’s singing what on the radio. It all kind of bleeds together, which isn’t to say it’s bad. I just can’t form a relationship to most of it).

Selena Gomez takes chances on-screen

From Harmony Korine’s sensual, reactionary tract Spring Breakers to the very canceled James Franco’s John Steinbeck adaptation In Dubious Battle to lately her appearance in Jim Jarmusch’s marvelous zombie comedy The Dead Don’t DieGomez impressed me with her choices — none of them safe, none of them ordinary.

She seemed like someone very tapped into what was happening in the art world, and willing to take risks to add to that continuing legacy as she was herself helping change the face of popular music.

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me metes out that hypothesis (sweet vindication!) because she sat still not just for the extensive fly-on-the-wall documentary portions of the movie but also the expressionistic interludes where she reads her diaries over footage of her in purgatorial spaces in stylish dress and makeup next to strangely made-up backgrounds.

A documentary about mental health

The documentary is even more of a compromise than Eilish’s doc. But for that reason (and for its centralizing Gomez’s mental health), it’s much more focused. This is ultimately a movie about mental health; the mental health of a pop star, which is quite the specific set of perimeters.

As such, it’s imperfect. The definitive mental health docs, Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Allan King’s Warrendale, don’t have a personality to contend with, so can get down to business a little more easily, so to speak.

However, it is revealing. As much as someone like Gomez can let down her guard and be honest, she does. And I commend the ways in which she worked with the director to get out something between a cry for help and an advertisement for honesty, no matter how high the stakes.

Watchable, sad and worthwhile

This stands as a very watchable, very sad, very compelling documentary focused on someone most people on earth already formed an opinion about. Humanizing people who seem untouchable by virtue of their fame is a good idea when it raises awareness that fame doesn’t make you immune to disease (indeed it can make it worse because you feel like you can’t be honest about it) and that everyone suffers in their own way.

Selena Gomez doesn’t just unload her trauma, either. She listens to her fans, and engages in a frank dialogue about self-harm and depression. Of all the things to do with worldwide fame, this is right up there with the best of them.

★★★

Watch Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me on Apple TV+

Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me premiered Friday on Apple TV+.

Rated: R

Watch on: Apple TV+

Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.

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