BEHIND HER GUISE
Lovato confesses all in a revelatory, startlingly powerful documentary
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil Debuts Tuesday, Youtube
Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, a four-episode series made for Youtube, ends up making a case that behind the simple smile lays a complex torment, with a bluntness that feels outright shocking. It's hard to recall another recent celebrity who's been as open about as much personal upheaval as has Lovato, who emerged as a big-voiced child performer and whose pop music career has closely tracked the evolution of her emotional and physical wellness.
Onscreen titles inform us that the in-control, tactically charismatic entertainer we see at first was filmed for a planned concert documentary in 2018, shortly before Lovato was hospitalized for a life-threatening drug overdose.
We are told first about the nature of her 2018 relapse, that Lovato, after openly beginning to drink again, had been concealing hard drug use on the road even from intimates, and brought on by the pressures of the road and those within herself.
As we collectively re-evaluate our society's treatment of young female entertainers, there's something especially painful about Lovato's weary tone as she, for instance, describes the aftermath of a rape she alleges happened in her teen years. Lovato speaks about her alleged date rape this way: “We were hooking up but I said — hey, this is not going any farther, I'm a virgin, and I don't want to lose it this way. And that didn't matter to them, they did it anyways. And I internalized it and I told myself it was my fault because I still went in the room with him.”
After the incident, “I had to see this person all the time,” and Lovato coped through self-harm, including cutting and bulimia. Her appeals to authority for help resolving the situation, she says, went unnoticed.
“My #Metoo story,” she tells us now, “is me telling somebody that someone did this to me and they never got in trouble for it. They never got taken out of the movie they were in. But I've just kept it quiet because I've always had something to say, and I'm tired of opening my mouth, so there's the tea.”
The tragic element of Lovato's story is twofold: There were things she wanted to say about which she wasn't heard, and things she might rather have left unsaid that she was compelled to address over and over. The pain of private struggle was amplified by having to perform the crisis in public. In 2018, she was not just a singer but a person visibly committed to clean living, a role as poster child that, as Lovato's sister tells us, Lovato didn't necessarily want to assume. Fluctuations in her body shape, monitored by a team that served her frosted watermelon in place of cake on her birthday, forced an endless conversation that left her feeling uneasy and unprotected.
We're told Lovato is once again using substances in supervised moderation; that she believes her diagnosis of bipolar disorder was imposed upon her; that she takes injections to blunt the potential effect of opioids; and that, after a broken engagement, she considers herself “too queer to marry a man in my life right now.”
It's this last shift in Lovato's life — during quarantine, she began and ended an engagement — that suggests just how much even a voluble celebrity avoids sharing. Post-breakup, the camera crew reminds Lovato she had only recently told them “I got engaged ... It was just the best day of my life. I felt like I was floating.”
Given time to reflect, Lovato says “I think I rushed into something that I thought was what I was supposed to do.”
That these shifts in feelings happened over four or five months is deeply human. And that she'd previously been so effusive to the camera about this relationship raises questions of what else she's doing because she thinks she's supposed to, what else she's said here that may evolve later.
Another topic of contention is the concept of moderation as a means of recovery, which the documentary advises in a warning before the fourth episode “may not be right for everyone.” Elton John, brought in as a character witness for Lovato's artistry, tells the camera it simply doesn't work. Lovato's manager, Scooter Braun, as executive producer, has more of a hand in this project's final form than Lovato, as suggested by the segment in which Lovato is asked to tell us why, exactly, his guidance has been important to her.
He says, as if to convey to his client a message within a project bearing her name in the title, that he does not “truly agree” with Lovato's decision to use alcohol and marijuana. “What I can do,” he says, “is be a friend and hope that she's right.”