Billy Dunne has this version of himself that he wants to be, which is the version that stays clean and sober and is a good husband to Camila and a good father to Julia. Then Daisy Jones enters his life, first to sing harmony on one song and then as an official member of the band, and she brings out a lot of his insecurities and challenges him in ways that he isn’t used to being challenged. He expects her to just sing that first song, “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” as written. She rewrites it, and he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that it’s better her way. At her first live performance with the band, he tells her they’re singing the song fourth; she comes out after the first song, they do the song second, she never leaves the stage, and he hates that the fans don’t want her to. Basically, he hates, and has a hard time admitting, that he needs her more than she needs him professionally. There’s one point where he tries to threaten her that unless she does this or that, she’s not coming on tour, and she says, “There IS no tour without me, you stupid son of a bitch.” He really has a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that he’s not in control with her.
He also has it in his head that as long as he never actually crosses the line of sleeping with her, he’s not doing anything wrong as far as his marriage to Camila is concerned, even though Camila literally tells him otherwise right to his face. Literally. She straight up tells him, “I don’t have to know everything, but if you love her—” He interrupts her to tell her he doesn’t. She says that if he ever does, they’re over. Yet, when Camila is upset after seeing Billy and Daisy having what is clearly an intimate conversation, he is very insistent that all they’ve done is kiss once. He can’t get it through his head that she doesn’t care about that. With both Daisy and Camila, he has these clear ideas about how things are going to be without it ever even occurring to him that they never agreed to those terms or that they might have their own ideas about what they want and what is important to them.
This becomes clearest when, after leaving messages for Camila begging her to give him another chance and come to the fateful Soldier Field show that winds up being their last, a fan buys him a shot, and he takes it. He is drunk and high at the show that night, and he is different with Daisy than he ever has been before, joining her at her microphone, coming so close their lips almost touch and, at one point, putting his arms around her from behind as they sing. When they go backstage before the encore, he begins kissing her, and she responds at first. But she realizes he isn’t being himself and that he’s just reacting to Camila leaving him; he tells her this is who he is: broken. “Let’s be broken together,” he says. Essentially: I couldn’t live up to Camila, so I might as well live down to you. To Daisy’s credit, she doesn’t accept this for herself, and firmly tells him, “I don’t want to be broken.” Daisy told him early on, when they were writing songs for the album together, that he writes from the perspective of who he wants to be, not who he really is. Billy both loves and hates that Daisy sees who he really is, and loves, hates, and is scared of who he is with her.
Bottom line, he puts A LOT on both of the women in his life. But Camila isn’t perfect, and Daisy isn’t “broken.” They’re both real, human people with strengths and weaknesses, and I am really impressed that the show lets them both be that, even if Billy can’t always see them as anything but projections of what he does or doesn’t want to be. I think it’s a huge departure from a lot of music films. I love Walk the Line, for example, but in the context of that movie, June was there to save Johnny Cash, and his first wife, Vivian, was there to hold him back; that made sense in the context of that story, which was told from John’s perspective, and very well may have been how he saw things. Things get more complex when you start showing events from multiple people’s perspectives, though, which we get in Daisy Jones and the Six, where there are no heroes or villains, just a bunch of flawed people trying, and sometimes failing, to do their best; sometimes bringing out the best in each other, and sometimes bringing out the worst.
