What should it benefit the world if it should gain a talented jazz singer with an old soul, perfect pitch and a deep affinity with Ella and Monk but then lose her to a charismatic snaggle-toothed junkie in one of those goddamned mini-fedoras? Maybe we'd have been better off not to gain her at all, this daughter of ours, if it means watching her squander her gifts and leap into the first thresher that rolls past? The pain of our loss is so great there's only three things can stop it: crack, heroin, and of course booze. The things that make our fear of death bearable are the same things that kill us. Poison numbs the misery of being poisoned--this is the slow relentless clockwork coiling of the strangling python of addiction.
The pain of AMY, Asif Kapadia's chilling documentary about Amy Winehouse--Britain's Janis Joplin--lies in this. Watching her amply videotaped life from innocent young Southgate Jewish girl with loyal friends and the voice of a 40 year-old diva with pipes of gold to straggly bulimic loping after some gross K-Fed-ish skeever, we shrink in horror, the recognition that perhaps glommers like him are the natural parasites of famous alcoholics. Even Lee Marvin had them, like lice, so tough guy stance has nothing to do with it. When you're drunk and stoned all the time there's not much you can do about it when a fast talking charmer locks in on you. Addiction has already taught you that the best way to live with yourself while slowly dying from your own lifestyle is to convince yourself you want to die in the first place, that life's grim absurdity has all but demanded it. And the nature of co-dependence is in that, here's someone who wants you to be wasted. They come along like instruction booklets and warranties in the packaging of addiction, never wanted, never asked for, but you don't throw them out since you may need them one day, when the shit don't work anymore, even to numb the pain of it's not working. They'll mix your drinks for you, even lift them to your lips, even inject you with speedballs while you're already passed out (i.e. Belushi). They'll never say a word about your 'problem' because they're part of it. And when you're famous enough that passers by feel you owe them a picture of you smiling next to them, and the paparazzi blind you with epileptic seizure inducing flash bulbs every time you peek your head out the door, what you want is someone who's going to keep you well insulated, warm and toasty in the twin orbit of narcissist neurosis. Someone who's a 'cross-section of the American public' like Susan Foster Kane, or Joe Gillis.
I've championed a lot of messed-up artists (Lindsay Lohan especially) over the decades, or at any right they're right to make mistakes and revel in their time without the pooh-poohing of the stern Puritanical popular press. Enabling is second nature to me. It comes from growing up with a heavy drinking dad whose rages always made me feel very very calm, as if I could counterbalance him through Zen stillness. So it's easy to see why I feel so relaxed and calm when in the striking radius of insane hotties, but at the same time I shudder to see them lost in self-immolating frenzy, powerlessly, for it's far easier to forget the brutal cost of our enabling pop cultural blind eye and schadenfreude than to make a bad blood-boiling fuss and of course the near impossibility of holding onto your self integrity while surrounded by hunger mouths, flashing and flashing like the cannibal boys in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER or the living dead. AMY may indirectly damn the British tabloid press's insatiable demand for complaints against its insatiable demands, may with the wry guidance of indirect directions show how such a feeding frenzy creates the death and tragedy it craves, sneering and mocking as a 23 year-old pop star devolved into a bulimic walking corpse, but it offers no alternative. In a way, it itself is part of the problem. Film corrupts and films about corruption are not somehow double negative immune.
It's all there in her hit song based on an attempt to get into rehab kaboshed by her enabling moocher dad, "They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no no no" - he was the one who told her she didn't need to go, that she was fine (which, I admit is what my mom would have said in similar circumstances), that she had to do tour after tour - another who was largely absent until lo she became big money and fame and he realized he needed to take care of her, we learn in the film, to the point of crashing her drying out facility with a camera crew and ragging on her for not taking care of her public, and flying her --while unconscious from the night before-- to frickin' Eastern Europe for a show she didn't want to do. But she picked them for her entourage. And I know that feeling too well, because when soooo wasted you can barely walk, you don't know who your friends are, so you just have to trust the ones who seem to know you, from somewhere...But it's not the dirtbags, jonesers, and moochers fault. Slithering beneath it all, right down in our chromosomes, that's the enemy. The sensitive gene is the same one that falls prey to drugs, eating disorders, in other words, our own chemical imbalances, genetic addiction, depression, it's as tied up in the wheels of the celebrity death cult as anything. You can always tell the hacks from the real artists because the hacks have no drug problems. AMY delivers this global socio-historical truth in such a clear and concise way that it makes me kind of ashamed, even singleness of purpose sober as long as I've been... of advocating self-destruction on this site. Though hey I've never stood up for cocaine, heroin, meth or their myriad derivatives. For these un-psychedelic drugs bleed all over the psychedelic warrior's noble shoes by association. Me, I'm a drunk too, and if I vow I won't drink again until Hell freezes over, well, believe me, I'll find a way to freeze it.
All in all, AMY is a hell of a harrowing portrait of what alcohol, cocaine, and fame can do to a sensitive artist, the toll it can take on her friends, her real friends, the ones she had before all that stuff came along. It has less effective tricks, too, like the decision to show the lyrics of her songs as subtitles--every single song--for they aren't especially detail-oriented, or so I'd tell her if she was in my creative writing class, if I had one, and she was in it. Without them, maybe her raw bluesy chutzpah could shine better, for this alcoholic, maybe not. I didn't like Whitney Houston either for the same reasons. It's like hey, pick a note and stay there, all that single breath octave climbing gives me a headache. Give me Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson for the blues, and Dylan for the lyrics. Give me an old rocking chair and a song like "In the Gloaming," and Stumpy can take the bottle away.
In case you can't tell, that last sentence was a pip: NIAGRA and RIO BRAVO references. May you find them, the distance twixt the two locales on DVD. And for all the still sick and suffering in and out of the rooms--see you in Hell. I'll be the guy riding the Zamboni. A vow is a vow. And Heaven Hill needs ice. Or so I remember. Shit's nigh undrinkable straight. Stick with Ten High. Watching a poor girl disappear down the chute of bulimia and alcohol addiction isn't the kind of thing one should be sober for. Amen. It works if you work it so work it, so work it, you're broken, mossy with dirtbag jonesers. The record skips. The needle's dusted. The charm's unwound. But you can always flip to side B.
Baby, the dirtbag was me.