I recently saw the new documentary about Amy Winehouse, entitled “Amy.” It is from the same team that did “Senna,” another gripping doc about Formula 1 champion Ayrton Senna, killed during a race in 1994. It's directed by Asif Kapadia. His team seems to excel in tragic figures, people who are cut short in their prime. The key difference is while Senna was an abrupt, shocking accident few saw coming, Amy’s demise was a slow, obvious downward spiral that surprised only the oblivious or the blindly optimistic.
The documentary is also an interesting portrait of celebrity. It had elements of the classic rise to sudden fame, the paparazzi feeding-frenzy, the exploitation of reality TV and the internet age of immediate reaction all converging on this woman from North London who wanted to be a jazz singer.
Let’s start with one point made apparent to me early in the documentary: Amy Winehouse’s parents (as portrayed by the documentarians) are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Neither seems very intelligent and they both seem like half-assed parents. Amy talks of misbehaving as a girl to no consequences whatsoever, which bothered her. She wanted to know her parents cared enough to stop her, cared enough to put in rules and enforce them and she didn’t seem to get much of that. The rest of her life seemed to be about pushing those boundaries of behavior and waiting for a slap on the wrist that never came.
This is not to say this was all their fault. Amy’s talent (which is undeniable) proceeds to enable and sponsor a barrage of bad decisions, starting with men. Amy was a partier from the beginning, but a series of boyfriends (and particularly one that keeps coming in and out of her life like a bad penny) are more than happy to jump off the cliff of common sense with her and dive straight into debauchery.
She also seemed unable (and more likely unwilling) to put the brakes on her own career in a constructive way. A point is made in the movie that a jazz singer doesn’t like being in front of 50,000 people. They prefer the smoky nightclub setting, a more intimate stage. Amy’s management wanted her to be the biggest pop star in the world, and being in arenas and on festival stages made her uncomfortable and agitated. Yet little is done by her or anyone else to redirect her career. There are many instances of artists pushing back, but Amy never does. If she had, they certainly would have gone along with it. Many times it is mentioned no one ever said no to her. But Amy herself never seemed to say no to what she claimed she did not want to do.
In fact there are a few times Amy mentions she would rather not be famous. Here is the problem with that, though. Like her career trajectory, her actions do not fall in line with those words. At one point she goes to rehab (way too late), goes through the motions and then goes on a bender immediately upon going back to London. Then she stumbles out of her flat into the waiting clutches of the cameras. To say she is a victim here is a stretch. Amy stumbling out of her flat drugged out, boozed up and completely a mess was not an isolated incident, it was a regular occurrence. This was not a hostage situation. No one held a gun to Amy’s head and told her to stagger into the street. She did it and did it frequently. If she did not want to be famous, she had more than enough money to vanish to a country where no one had ever heard of her…but she didn’t. She stayed in London, the one place where she was the biggest star she could possibly have been. She kept using and drinking, and she kept rolling out in public that way. She intentionally fed that machine and I am convinced a large part of her enjoyed playing her part in that psycho drama.
The one time she does leave, she heads to an alcohol-laden island retreat with a few friends and her father, Mitch, who seems to have decided a career change to reality TV star was in order for him at this time and has a film crew in tow. There is nothing about it that looks like a woman making a real attempt to get her life together.
In the end, that is the key. She did not want to get better. The most telling moment of the documentary comes at a time when she should have been at her peak. She receives the Record of the Year Grammy and one of the presenters was Tony Bennett, her hero. The look of anticipation on her (at the time clean) face was the most moving part of the entire film. That moment should have been the trigger. She was clean, she was successful, she was alert, she was surrounded by her friends and family. It should have shown her that was the correct path. It lasted maybe a few minutes. In the end, she didn't want to be clean. She didn’t want to be healthy. She was doomed.
I was not a fan of Amy Winehouse before seeing the documentary. I was ambivalent about her music and disliked her as a person before she died. Nothing I saw in this documentary changed my feelings. But the documentary is definitely worth seeing.
She was a flawed women looking for attention. She had it as a singer, but her own bad decisions and her childlike desire to see how far she could go before being told “no” drove her over the edge into becoming a substance-abusing media clown. Most people out-grow that phase and figure out how to live. Amy did not. We are left with two albums and a lot of “what-ifs.” While the people around her did her few favors, I’m left with the thought that you simply can’t help someone who does not want to help themselves.
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