In Homecoming, Beyoncé Is Closer and More Unknowable Than Ever

In Homecoming, Beyoncé Is Closer and More Unknowable Than Ever - Vanity Fair

Posted: 17 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT

She was forced to have an emergency C-section. Which meant that in order to become Beyoncé as we all know her again, she had to make sacrifices. "I had to rebuild my body from cut muscles," she says in Homecoming. We see images of her rehearsing, a little bigger, a little slower, frustrated. She details her diet, or, rather, her non-diet: "No bread, no carbs, no sugar, no dairy, no meat, no fish, no alcohol." Struggling through rehearsals about 100 days out from the show, she misses her kids. She misses her old body. "There were days that I thought, you know, I'd never be the same," she says, in a voice that at times sounds far away. "I'd never be the same physically. My strength and endurance would never be the same."

She notes, accordingly, that the choreography of this show was more about feeling than about technique. Viewers of Beychella may not have even noticed that her choreography is slightly less difficult, compared to past performances. That's what's most fascinating about these brief glimpses into the private life of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter: she genuinely seems to have one—a life full of marriage complications, birth complications, family struggles, and performance anxiety that exist far from the public eye.

But being a fan of Beyoncé the star—and Beyoncé the person—means accepting the push-pull of sudden disclosures like the ones we get in Homecoming, rare exceptions to her well-known propensity for a very carefully controlled public image. That care, that curation, is still very much a hallmark of Homecoming, almost to its detriment. Even as the artist brings us close—even as she deploys aesthetics of intimacy, with grainy images like something out of an 8-mm family archive and confessions that sound delivered to us personally, as if over a late-night call with a dear friend—we can only get so close.

Just look at the ellipses in how Beyoncé narrates the design of the show itself. She tells us that she knew, chose, every detail: every dancer, every lighting cue, the dimensions of the pyramid (which is currently back on display at Coachella this year). "Every tiny detail had an intention," she says. Yet the film never explores those intentions. I wish it had; Homecoming made me long for more of the boring procedural stuff—the meetings, the decision-making, insight into how Beyoncé thinks and feels that's distinct from how she narrates the story of herself and her intentions. Her sense of control is part of what her admirers so value about her—yet her decisions themselves are all silent montage, bits of narration.

Disclosure is ultimately the point of Homecoming, but only part of the point. Like so many up-close-and-personal looks at Beyoncé, this new special is better at signifying genius than at letting us come close to the real thing.

To be clear: Beyoncé's genius, her singular stature as the best all-around pop performer of her generation, needs little additional evidence. And artists don't really owe us a glimpse of their creative processes and lives. But when they offer what is touted as a close look, one craves genuine closeness. Homecoming is, in most ways, beautiful, emotional, and honest. But for all its intimacy, by the end, I still felt like I was craning my neck from the cheap seats while being told I had been given a view up front.