She started off the year with the celebration of her daughter’s first birthday. Next came singing the National Anthem at the Presidential Inauguration. Then the week after that, she performed the halftime show during the Super Bowl, creating a supposed “power outage.” On top of all of that, she added another Grammy to her collection the next week. At this point it’s only halfway through February and with this many accomplishments one would think, what’s next? By now I’m sure you all know that I am talking about the beloved Beyoncé aka Bey aka Queen Bey, but that’s not all for her!
This past Saturday, February 16th, the queen herself unveiled her own documentary on HBO called “Life Is But a Dream.” I must say I was counting down the days until this aired because to me, I’m the biggest Beyoncé fan in the world. Once it aired I couldn’t stop watching it; in fact I watched it 8 times the next day. Hence, my plans to get a bunch of work done this past weekend went down the drain as my weekend became overwhelmed with emotion as I laughed, cried, sang, danced, and smiled throughout the entire film. Before this documentary aired, Beyoncé was incredibly good at keeping her personal life under wraps. This film shows us the true Beyoncé and inside stories to her personal secrets, triumphs, struggles, and intense work ethic.
Beyoncé kept this documentary quiet for the three of four years it took to plan and film it. It includes everything from home videos from when she was a child to her own “diary” videos in which she talks to her computer as a form of therapy to get all of her feelings out. These short parts in the film are the star’s most personal interactions with her viewers, particularly as she lies in bed and shows us her belly at 20 weeks pregnant.
The film talks of Beyoncé’s struggles, one of the first of which was her goal of independence in her life. She says, “Life is unpredictable, but I feel like I had to move on and not work with my dad, and I don’t care if I don’t sell one record. It’s bigger than the record, it’s bigger than my career.” It was Beyoncé starting the process of dealing with herself and finding out exactly what she wanted with her life. She is the ruler and she had to become the one to make the decisions. Beyoncé also talks of how hard it was to break away from her father and tells the viewers that she truly never got her father back. ”I’m feeling very empty because of my relationship with my dad. And I’m so fragile at this point and I feel like my soul has been tarnished.” Although the relationship with her father has degraded she shows how her father taught her that in the world of business you can’t always be polite. He also taught her about drive and work ethic, two things that many people admire her for due to her intense amount of practice and hours that she puts into her performances and career in general.
A second struggle that Beyoncé speaks of in this documentary is her miscarriage, which not very many people knew about before the film was aired. She says, “I think people have an idea in their heads about celebrities. I think they feel like their lives are so perfect, and it’s really hard to go through painful experiences when you are in the public eye because it’s so hard to have closure.” About two years ago, she was pregnant with her first child. One day out of the blue during a check-up, the heartbeat was no longer there. This dominates a large part of the documentary in which she talks of how she had to deal with her emotions about the situation while still continuing to work. Even though we don’t like to admit it, Beyoncé, along with other celebrities, are real people, and she wants her fans to know that. She doesn’t always have it together all of the time. She cries and gets hurt like everyone else in the world. She follows that up by saying, “I am a human being. I cry. I get scared. I get nervous just like everyone else.”
This documentary also shows how Beyoncé likes to run her music the old-fashioned way, in which she produces albums instead of a continuous stream of singles that eventually die out. Her way of working is making a body of work in which one can appreciate the voice of the person instead of paying attention to what the artist is wearing or who they are dating; it’s all about loving the artist for who they are and their talents. She loves to sing from the heart, and her songs and albums are heartfelt, honest, and soulful in which she sings of love and life.
Another large part of the documentary discusses the important people in Beyoncé’s life. Not only does she sing of love and life throughout this film, but she also talks about the love of her life: Jay Z. She expresses how much she truly loves her husband and how he has taught her to be a woman, a friend, and how to live overall. A big surprise comes when she unveils Blue Ivy’s face to the camera and shows a gathering of her family and friends, in which she expresses so much love for everyone in her life. They have all taught her to fight for what she believes in and helped her to set the standards in her life that helped her to become the Beyoncé that we all know and love.
Overall, Beyoncé truly is living the dream and this documentary shows it. This also shows us how much of a loving and caring person she is in her life to her family and friends and to her career in the music industry. The take-home point is that Beyoncé lives a normal life just like everyone else. She believes that life is beautiful and amazing and says, “The best thing is looking back and realizing how incredible life is. If you don’t take the time to think about it and analyze your life, you’ll never realize all the dots that are connected.” She closes the film with a powerful line about goals and decisions: “There is no drumroll or trumpet that goes off when you make the biggest decisions of your life. Sometimes you don’t even know that you made them.”
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