“If I could give it all back just to walk down the street with no hassle, I would,” Amy Winehouse says to her bodyguard, Andrew Morris, late into the 2015 documentary, Amy. Many of us have heard the devastating narrative tabloids and gossip columns put on her – a generational talent who quickly climbed to the pinnacle of stardom only to give it all away to drugs, alcohol and messy relationships. Filmmaker Asif Kapadia, who directed the project, makes this media assault clear with blinding camera flashes from paparazzi and numerous headlines like Rolling Stone’s “The Diva and Her Demons.” When announcing one of Winehouse’s Grammy nominations, comedian and actor George Lopez jokes, “Can somebody wake her up around 6 this afternoon and tell her,” before dismissing her as “a drunk.” This frenzy culminates in reporters jumping on Winehouse when she was at her most vulnerable, with one on CNN claiming “she totally blew it” after being forced to perform in a comeback tour before she was ready in what turned out to be her last-ever concert.
Then came the deflections. News outlets ran obituary pieces honoring her talent and retracing a romanticized timeline of tragic events. As one of the first celebrities scrutinized in the internet age, Winehouse experienced a further layer of commodification that went beyond gendered realities. Artists whose lives she was likened to such as Kurt Cobain, who also had a documentary of his life released in 2015, were actually incomparable. Cobain garnered media attention that offered a more favorable view, portraying him as a man whose addiction was separated from his artistry and identity. While his struggles were mentioned either in passing or not at all and the music industry largely continued to back him and Nirvana as the next big thing in alternative rock, there was a website created in 2007 that encouraged people to submit guesses on when Winehouse would die in order to win an iPod touch.
Although Kapadia ends his film in 2011, he uses the audience’s knowledge of the years that followed to ask, “How did we allow this to happen?” He sees Winehouse’s story as an example of exploitation, telling Variety in 2015 that “we shared videos, we clicked on stories, we paid to see someone just in case she was about to die. The movie ultimately becomes more about the media journalism machine and the audience for this stuff.” Amy received critical acclaim, earning Best Documentary Feature at the Academy Awards and its soundtrack leading to a posthumous nomination at the BRIT Awards for Winehouse. Kapadia had incredible access through interviews with Winehouse’s friends, family and colleagues as well as personal material like pages of handwritten lyrics, voicemail confessions and home videos. One of the documentary’s strongest aspects is its look into its subject’s experience with bulimia. In a culture that still normalizes disordered eating – especially among celebrities – to conform to societal body standards, the exploration of no one being able to help Winehouse deserves credit.
But for all the inside information Kapadia shares with us, we rarely see the real Winehouse – the interiority of the person that existed behind her celebrity identity. The documentary is more interested in perpetuating tabloid accounts, relating each disgrace with a set of tortured lines from one of the artist’s songs. Kapadia invades his subject’s most intimate moments to fit the same plot beats we have heard before. There are the same mustache-twirling villains, clueless fools and sacrificial lambs but just presented in a sleeker A24 fashion. In one of its most egregious moments, when Tony Bennett, one of Winehouse’s idols, announces her Grammy win, it cuts to a voiceover of a friend saying she felt sorry for Winehouse due to her excessive drug abuse. As an example of vulture filmmaking in its purest form, the documentary becomes exactly what it is condemning. Titling the project Amy and selling it as “the singer in her own words” suggests a more honest version of events. While there is a hint of Amy’s Amy in a moment where Winehouse records a duet with the aforementioned Bennett and gets upset at herself for “wasting his time” by not immediately feeling the music they’re making together, it’s not enough.
With a new Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, set to come out later this month already receiving backlash, the question becomes “How do we faithfully treat subjects who have had identities forced upon them through outside players?” Does every documentary have to be The Last Dance, where basketball star Michael Jordan had significant creative control over his own narrative? Well, this creates its own problems, tipping the scale in the opposite direction toward hagiography. Fast forward to 2024 and the situation has only grown, with streaming platforms competing to make the next hit documentary as quickly as possible, fine-tuning their storytelling to match viewer analytics, resulting in countless Making a Murderer copies and celebrity tell-all explorations. If we’re taking Kapadia at his word and thinking of this as more of an investigation into the “media journalism machine,” much like Winehouse, it’s an issue filmmakers will be left to solve on their own.
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