The One Summer Movie I WON'T See

And what I watched instead

It was the summer between high school and college when I really heard Amy Winehouse for the first time. Sure, I knew her hit “Rehab” and such. But for whatever reason, it was only at this uniquely reflective inflection point in my adolescence that I came to appreciate what she was conveying in songs like “Tears Dry on Their Own.”

The way she spoke from a place of true vulnerability as she turned the pain of her life into poetry struck a chord deep within me. She stuck a finger in her wounds because she knew that was the fastest route to reach her soul. In displaying her heartbreak, she permitted listeners to process their own.

That was June 2011. She’d be dead a month later.

I’ve spent a good amount of time wrestling with what, exactly, the relationship between artist and audience should be in the wake of her death. We tend to conceive of it as akin to a one-way street, yet the tragedy of Amy Winehouse exposes fans’ responsibility in their consumption. The very thing we loved about her work was the thing that plunged her into darkness. We devoured the art and left a human carcass that had bled and suffered for our entertainment and catharsis.

I was skeptical of the announcement of the Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black, out in theaters starting today, from the get-go. Because her estate authorized the film, it required approval from her father, Mitch Winehouse. As one of the chief architects of her decline, he had a vested interest in putting out a sanitized corrective to the popular narrative of his culpability.

According to my critical compatriots who have seen the movie, it appears my worst fears about the depiction of my favorite musical artist came true. You’ll have to take their word for it because I have no interest in wasting my time with the victim-blaming peddled by Back to Black. “Basically paints her as a friendless mess who died because she didn’t have a baby,” texted one friend. “All it made me think about was how badly she was treated and how young women are ripped apart by the media. The film is part of the problem.”

If you have any inkling of engaging deeper with Amy Winehouse’s life and music, I implore you to watch Asif Kapadia’s Oscar-winning biographical documentary Amy (available on Max) instead. Below is my (lightly edited) 2015 review of the film, which is the rare piece of writing from nearly a decade ago that doesn’t make me want to pull my hair out. Following that, I’ve curated a playlist of my favorite Amy Winehouse live performances that showcase the depth of her talent — as well as the hole she’s left in the world.

Since our shallow society can scarcely handle complexity, a rather traditional narrative gets slapped onto the life and death of Amy Winehouse. Unfortunately, her membership to the “27 Club” alongside Joplin, Hendrix, and Morrison lent itself to vast overgeneralization. People tend to cast her as a talented but troubled artist haunted by personal demons, substance addictions, and public pressure.

Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy, pieced together solely from personal videos and archival performance footage of the singer/songwriter, reclaims the story for two hours to correct mistaken notions and fill in a few holes of knowledge. In many ways, public perception of Winehouse’s downward-spiraling trajectory was spot-on. But thanks to Kapadia, the familiarity of her struggle does not make her journey conventional. It makes the tale even more tragic.

Be it a jazzy rendition of “Happy Birthday” at 14, a record label sitting room in her late teens, or packed outdoor arenas in the UK by her early twenties, Amy Winehouse knew how to captivate any audience with her singing voice and fiery personality. She began writing songs because there was, as she put it, “nothing new that represented me.” Winehouse’s words and melodies come from a place of authenticity, informed by the real pain of traumatic childhood events like a divorce and a diagnosis of depression.

For many years, people like me were content to consume Amy Winehouse’s albums while merely considering her as a figure, not a person. She had to face her fair share of issues to produce music that resonated on such a personal level through confronting inner darkness. Throughout Amy, Kapadia weaves the songs naturally into the storyline, a brilliant editorial choice since the words flowed so directly from her life. He usually opts to superimpose the words over Winehouse singing live, allowing an appreciation of her talents as both a lyricist and a performer.

Kapadia does his due diligence in documenting the travails of an ailing addict. Winehouse possessed a compulsive personality long before the media spotlight fixated firmly on her, struggling with afflictions like bulimia and alcohol abuse from her mid-teens. That same impulse drew her into a destructive relationship with a sleazy club promoter Blake Fielder-Civil. He turned her on to some of the harder drugs, such as crack cocaine and heroin, which required years of work to kick. (Most people assume she died from an overdose of narcotics, but Winehouse’s end came from alcohol poisoning in her fragile, vulnerable frame.)

But Amy does not just blame the victim for self-destructing. Instead, it spreads responsibility for not preventing a predictable ending. No one – and I mean no one – gets off the hook in the documentary.

Everyone looks like they could have done more to see the writing on the wall, although such prognostications are easy to make with the benefit of hindsight. Especially around the release of her album “Back to Black,” whose meteoric success shot Winehouse to instant superstardom, certain people stood to benefit personally from her fame. This includes her second manager Raye Cosbert, who had a vested interest in keeping her on the road since he also served as her promoter. Controversially, Kapadia also indicts her father Mitch, who took a video crew to record the interactions with his daughter when she was in a particularly vulnerable state.

Perhaps most scathingly, though, Amy obliterates the abrasive, invasive tabloid paparazzi who were happy to peddle Winehouse’s pain for profit. In a film that does not shy away from the harrowing truths of addiction, it says something that the most nightmarish sight is the flashing bulbs of the omnipresent photographers who tailed Winehouse closer than her own shadow. Kapadia slows down their footage to a phantasmagoric effect, forcing us to really analyze the content that was previously offered up for our lazy consumption and judgment. Had these sensationalists truly seen the human on the other end of their lens, they might have noticed a sight that would really capture attention: a vulnerable child terrified of the notoriety that unwittingly dovetailed her tremendous talent.

But these exploitative images would not exist without a captive audience, which far too many people were happy to provide. When the documentary cross-cuts Winehouse trying to hide from the chroniclers of her misery with jokes from late-night hosts (who were similarly happy to let her perform on their stage), the sinking sensation of our own push-and-pull with her is nothing short of devastating. Those who failed to speak up on her behalf have some culpability in her demise.

To feel complicit in the death of an icon by celebrating the torment in her lyrics while turning a blind eye to the torture of her life is not particularly easy or fun. Knowing that songs were her form of therapy, the world collectively served as a shrink that offered no constructive steps for repair. If we want the next troubled talent to live past 27, we all must learn from the lessons of Amy Winehouse’s death. Anyone who sees Amy ought to leave more attuned to the desperate cries for help from public figures, even if they do not always register obviously. (We might have done too little for Britney Spears, but at least it was not too late.)

At the very least, Kapadia implores everyone who leaves the film to respond with sympathy and understanding to the plight of others rather than ridiculing them with a mocking sneer. This simple task is so necessary. Do it for music. For Amy. For humanity.

And now, in memory of Amy Winehouse, I present my ten favorite live performances worth your time and attention…

“Wake Up Alone,” Glastonbury Festival, 2007

I have listened to/watched this a thousand times, and each time the crowd swells at 1:30 around the lyric “That silent sense of content / that everyone gets / just disappears / soon as the sun sets,” I get chills. It’s clear that she feeds off their energy, and it unlocks this deeper register that grabs my soul. I don’t believe in magic, just Amy Winehouse.

Paid subscribers can continue for 9 of my other favorite non-album Amy Winehouse performances, listed alphabetically: