Doc offers new narrative for singer Amy Winehouse

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/07/2015 (3741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Drugs, drink, sex and sudden, early death. In the music world, these are considered markers of emotional authenticity and creative genius.

Unless you’re a woman, in which case you’re a tragicomic train wreck, unstable and out of control, your talent destined to be overshadowed by your pathetic private life.

Molly Beauchemin recently wrote about “the gendering of martyrdom” for the online music publication Pitchfork. Looking at cultural reactions to musicians Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — both dead at age 27 and both the subjects of recent documentaries — she concludes that tortured, self-destructive men are revered, while tortured, self-destructive women are ridiculed.

(Neither approach to their suffering is particularly helpful, but the guys at least get some respect.)

Amy, an artful and deeply sad documentary-collage from filmmaker Asif Kapadia (Senna), attempts to reclaim the singer from the tawdry, misogynistic narrative that circled her in the last months of her life. The film, which opened this weekend in Winnipeg, goes after the tabloid media, both its producers and complicit consumers. With sequences that are hard to watch but hard to ignore, Amy asks the question: what is it about the trajectory of “the doomed female celebrity” that makes it such inevitable clickbait?

The media celebrated the sultry, seductive perfection of Winehouse’s 2006 Back to Black success. But when this rush of fame meant that her private problems were being played out in public, the tabloids and talk shows pounced on her scary skinniness (later revealed to be the result of bulimia), her drug use and her dysfunctional relationship with her waster boyfriend. Images of Winehouse lurching down London sidewalks with smeared makeup, ratty hair and blood-soaked ballet flats soon became pop-culture punchlines.

If Cobain’s struggles were taken as signs of grunge purity, a refusal to submit to the star-making machine, Winehouse’s troubles tended to be viewed as spectacular personal screw-ups.

Basically a jazz singer who seemed surprised to find herself a pop music phenom, Winehouse didn’t slot into any of the acceptable formats for female celebrity. As the documentary demonstrates, she remained gobby, rude and loud, rolling her eyes during inane interviews, being sarcastic about Justin Timberlake.

Watching Winehouse wander through the media gauntlet, an unfiltered, overexposed disaster, is disturbing but instructive. Her desperately raggedy edges make you realize the calculated, laminated nature of most music stars.

Taylor Swift is the relatable (but glamorous!) girl next door. Madonna is the mistress of mid-life control. Beyoncé is simply the queen. Even a supposed wild child such as Miley Cyrus is a prepackaged commodity, her provocations gauged to provide maximum media exposure and a few bursts of conservative pearl-clutching.

In contrast, Winehouse’s sailor-on-shore-leave heedlessness was genuinely unpredictable. Miley might look like a bad girl when she’s twerking in hot pants and nipple pasties, but think how much more radical it was for Winehouse to perform in a food-stained T-shirt, spilling her lager as she worked through the lacerating, self-aware irony of her hit song Rehab.

In a man, this kind of don’t-give-a-damn-ness might have been seen as anti-corporate cred, but Winehouse was branded a hot mess, caught in the unforgiving crux of female fame.

Winehouse’s fans craved outrageous rock-‘n’-roll behaviour but condemned it when the singer tipped out of control. They wanted “realness” but felt embarrassed when she exposed too much. Winehouse was just too naked and needy, her excesses too wretched and wrecked.

There are scenes in Amy that you feel you shouldn’t be watching, scenes that are too painful and unprotected. Winehouse’s utter lack of boundaries — all that mascara mixed with tears — made her the tragic test-case for the damaged female celebrity in the glare of the digital age.

As the film details, Winehouse grew up in the generation that started to compulsively document itself, and her career arc coincided with the new 24/7 tabloid media cycle, fuelled by YouTube videos and leaked iPhone pics and even a reality TV show starring her horrible hanger-on father.

Filmmaker Kapadia shows how this glut of visual material was used against Winehouse, turning her into a cautionary tale of doomed female fame. Kapadia also offers the most powerful retort to these sad and limited tropes, using extensive performance footage to remind us of the depth, range and sheer joyfulness of Winehouse’s musical powers.

Amy functions as a damning deconstruction of celebrity, but its central achievement is to put the music at the centre again, in a profoundly poignant reminder of why the singer and songwriter became famous in the first place.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca