FILM REVIEW: Amy

When Asif Kapadia (Senna) announced he was making a documentary about the troubled life and tragic death of Amy Winehouse, my feelings were conflicted. While Kapadia’s work in sensitive, empathetic and embraces the nuances and complexities of complicated people, there was also a wariness that even he would be contributing to our culture’s voyeuristic obsession with troubled young women – an obsession that plagued Winehouse throughout her career, and – the film even acknowledges – made it that much more difficult for her to recover from her addictions and compulsions.
The film covers well-trodden ground; Winehouse’s fiery personality, her vulnerability, her broken home, her bulimia, her addiction to drugs and alcohol, and her toxic and enabling relationship with fellow addict Blake Fielder-Civil. In this sense, the film provides little new information about Winehouse’s life. However what it does beautifully manage is to depict the chronology of her troubles, how Winehouse addressed her own fears and feelings through her music, and how fame has a terrifying habit of making people simultaneously revere you as God-like while also treating you as less than human.
While Winehouse’s music was being worshipped by fans and demanded by record companies, her issues as a women came second to her usefulness as a product. Her attempts to rehabilitate are constantly dismissed by her father Mitch, who not only insists she’s well enough to complete another album, but arrives at her chosen sanctuary of St. Lucia with a camera crew in tow, ready to spin yet another story and make yet another pound from the singer.
Meanwhile, the media trailed Winehouse’s every move, zooming in with delight at evidence of drug use, and eagerly reporting on her on-stage breakdowns. This same media then had the audacity to act shocked by her death at age 27 – though the constant ogling, joking and judging during her life had done little to express any desire for the singer to become healthy and survive. After all, that would have made less headlines.
Society has always loved a tragic heroine. We worship them, hold them up as invincible; if not in plot, in legacy. Men have written the most tragic of heroines; Ophelia, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary. Suffering women who exist for and because of men, who fulfil male fantasies of a woman’s pain being beautiful, romantic, caused by facility and love and the mystical unknown of a woman’s mind. It’s a pain they conceive, construct and control, all the while posturing and prostrating at the alter of the uncontrollable women, and their uncontrollable pain that can only be solved by death. But thanks to constant media attention and paparazzi stalking, we don’t need our modern tragic women to be fictional; we can now project our desire to see women fail onto real human beings. Anna Nicole Smith, Courtney Love, Britney Spears, Amanda Bynes – we photograph their drunken falls, analyse their broken relationships, and are gleefully disgusted when they eschew our standards of feminine beauty and shave their heads,. We thrive in their failings, these warnings against narcissism, overt sexuality, female success.
We also romanticise them. We enjoy the tragedy of it all; enjoy examining the increasing frailty of their bodies, the obvious vulnerability of their illness. In Susan Sontag’s Illness As Metaphor, she explores this feverish fetish for female pain; how troubled women in many ways fulfil society’s construction of the weak, submissive female more than healthy women ever can.
“Sadness made one interesting,” writes Sontag. “It was a mark of refinement, of sensibility, to be sad. That is, to be powerless.” This appeal becomes more visceral when its effects become physical; when illness such as Winehouse’s bulimia and addiction mapped itself onto her body, so we no longer had to see her presence as real, but poetic. Metaphorical. A tragic, walking allegory. “The melancholy character was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart,” she writes. Sickness was “a becoming frailty … symbolised an appealing vulnerability, a superior sensitivity, [and] became more and more the ideal look for women.”
Kapadia’s work does highlight the objectification of Amy Winehouse, by both the media and the people around her – though it’s not immune to infantilising her, either. As Kapadia maps out Winehouse’s relationships with men and drugs, he shows how directly her life informed her songwriting, displaying the lyrics across the screen. It’s a simple but effective move, highlighting the complex emotional depth of her work, and Winehouse’s awareness of the toxicity around her. However, these lyrics are scrawled in girlish cursive; the writing of a little girl in a pink diary; not the nuanced feelings of grown woman.
What’s most striking about Amy is the difference in the nature of interviews between Winehouse’s famous friends and colleagues, and those with her childhood friends. While her unfamous friends are heartbreakingly emotional, frequently crying while recounting how Winehouse was rapidly self-destructing before their eyes; the famous contributors, from her managers, collaborators and showbiz friends are composed, unemotional. They’re used to giving soundbites, to reducing human lives to mere quotes. And they’re used to these lifestyles, these tragedies. They’ve seen it all before. They’re used to cocaine, to heroin, to alcohol, to mental distress. To death. They’ve seen this character before.
Actress Amber Tamblyn has recently released a book of poetry called Dark Sparkler, where every poem is named after and dedicated to Hollywood actresses who died before they were forty. Alongside screen icons like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield are younger, more modern starlets who never got the chance to achiever their potential, such as Brittany Murphy. But the most devastating and shocking page in the book is a blank one, with nothing on it but the title: Lindsay Lohan. The non-poem seems to act as a prophesy, a warning, a dark and even ill-willed anticipation – but Tamblyn is adamant that it’s the opposite – it’s instead a statement about the projections society puts on troubled young women.
“For me, I did not put that in there to say, ‘You’re next’”, says the actress and writer. “I put that in there to say, ‘I am not going to do you what everyone else does,’ which is write a poem about your life — which is not my life. I am not going to project onto your story. I am giving this back to you to write. This belongs to you. Your poem has not been written yet, and it belongs to you. It’s less a statement that she deserves to be grouped in with a bunch of dead women and more of a statement of she deserves to be in there because she is treated like those dead women already; she is treated like she is already dead.”
Maybe the real achievement of Kapadia’s film is showing how much of Amy Winehouse’s poem we had all collectively written.
Amy is in cinemas now.