Movies: Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me
Keshishian’s return to moviemaking marks a pivot point for celebrity films
I watched Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me by invitation with an interview afterwards. This 2022 Apple documentary—the Cupertino, California computer company’s making movies to promote its proprietary streaming—screened at American Cinematheque’s Aero theater in Santa Monica. I didn’t know much about the former child and pop artist, though I recalled that she’d had a breakdown after dating another former child and pop artist. The picture’s directed by Alek Keshishian, who directed a Madonna concert tour film in the Nineties. Keshishian, interviewed after the screening, dedicates the film to his late father, Kevork Keshishian.
Gomez is both pathetic and sympathetic. At a young age, the singer and TV actress—she was the leading player on a Disney Channel show as a girl—has experienced lupus, low self-esteem, manic depression (aka bi-polar), high blood pressure and mental health problems. She was suicidal at one point. Keshishian, who once filmed a music video for Gomez and shot this over six years, begins what’s best described as a mild celebrity film for seeking improved mental health, starting with backstage footage of Gomez talking about her vagina at a show in Las Vegas.
After 55 performances of her concert tour, the native Texan breaks down and returns to the Lone Star state. There, she visits a childhood mentor, Joyce, whom she remembers as “the cookie lady.” Afflicted with multiple sclerosis, Joyce, too, has suffered from pain and anguish. This is about when Gomez concocts her view that she seeks connection with her fans, her work and her life. The wealthy young celebrity declares: “It’s about who I am.”
Amid trips to Texas, Boston, where she faces the shallow press, still fixated on gossip about her affair with Justin Bieber, and a charity promotion in Africa, it becomes clear that troubled Selena Gomez spins out as she rambles, melts down and manages to reconcile herself to an approximation of proper self-care. It’s not fully convincing, but it’s also apparently sincere, though Gomez’s embrace of religion and altruism, however fleeting, do not bode well for the future.
Nevertheless, Gomez displays talent in sampled songs and performances. A childhood friend named Raquelle is the only one filmed to challenge Gomez with expressions of concern which she knows Selena Gomez might not want to hear. There are flimsy details about her parenting—nothing about her father, if she knows who he is—and little about her use of drugs. A scandal involving her pet African charity—implicating Canada’s discredited prime minister Justin Trudeau—is glossed over.
Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me showcases the singer on stage, in asinine interviews—one morning in London marks a turning point—and striving to align her life with her self-interest, making it easier to take an interest in her. Apple political dogma leaves a stain on the film with plugs for the Democrats and service to others. But this, like Amy, is an interesting film that shows the vacuous, tedious nature of today’s celebrity culture and the recklessness that’s left in its mindless and frenzied wrath.
Mr. Keshishian, despite being flanked by Apple minders, speaks his mind and makes a distinctive if simple comeback with Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me. In the question and answer period, the Lebanon native hinted that surviving the manic meltdown of making movies with Madonna, a figure he deftly references as a “friendship that nearly destroyed my life,” talked about wanting to make a new non-fiction pop movie that flips the narrative. His movie’s about Selena Gomez in crisis and the complicity this entails in a dumbed down culture of what he calls “butts, boobs and Kardashians,” adding that, in spite of today’s nihilism, he wants to make uplifting films. This picture’s a step in that direction.