Chasing Amy Winehouse - Asif Kapadia's selective sympathy

I'll start with a declaration.  For me, Amy Winehouse is right up there with Nina Simone.  And since there's no one above Nina .... well, you get the picture.  If there is a more heart-breaking song than 'Love Is A Losing Game', or a more punch you in the chest, heart on sleeve epic than 'Back To Black', I want to hear them right now.  It was with some trepidation, then, that I took my seat at the cinema to watch Amy, Asif Kapadia's fly-on-the-wall documentary.  Splicing interviews, performances, home movie clips, and, perhaps most tellingly, the cameras that began to track her every external movement, the documentary charts Amy's incredible rise and tragic descent.   

"For you I was a flame...."

Amy Winehouse's death seems to really split people.  I guess much of it depends on what your views on addiction are.  If you see it as an illness, sympathy for Amy is abundant.  If you choose instead to see it as a weakness, then sympathy tends to be absent.  At the time of her death there didn't appear to be much in-between.  I recall articles in the press, discussions with friends, statuses and comments on social media – there appeared to be a real binary at work, and one that interestingly appeared to fall in step with what you thought of Amy as an artist.  If you loved the music, you sympathised; if you hated it, you didn't.  At the time this infuriated me, particularly those columnists who decided to contrast a woman who 'chose' to flirt with death against the 69 victims of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik - remember, that horrific massacre happened the day before.  The near-Dickensian idea of the 'undeserving dead' crossed my mind.

Yet after leaving the Camden cinema – nothing mawkish in that, it's convenient and cheap and I use it a lot – I found myself sitting on a bus and reflecting on something quite different.  The bus had been brought to a stand-still, as police dealt with an anti-gentrification protest outside the tube station that had turned nasty.  Sympathetic to the cause - I like Camden's shabby bohemian-lite vibe, even though I'm feeling a little too old for it nowadays, and I certainly do not want to see the district turned into a soulless 'Pret Starbucks Russian owned flats Tesco Metro Pret procession'.  Anyway, as the bus remained static I gradually began to get annoyed with all of the protesters who were keeping me from my bed.  In short my imagination failed me.  

"We only said goodbye with words ...."

However, the following morning my imagination, via a few peculiar wrong turns, managed to point itself in a less selfish direction.  Into my head popped the ludicrous notion that Blake Fielder-Civil - Amy's ex-husband, probable gateway to hard drugs, and definitely the main villain of the documentary - might well have been taking part in the protests, and if he was, would certainly have been one of the idiots throwing bottles.  Talk about a bizarre way of sourcing a scapegoat for both Amy Winehouse's death and my travails in getting home.

It was then that the penny dropped.  If I could extend my sympathy to Amy - indeed, insist that others do the same - why couldn't I do that for someone like Blake?  Wasn't he just as much a victim of addiction as Amy was?  Okay, he was charmless, and didn't have the voice of a North London soul queen – but still, I'd utterly failed in extending any form of compassion or sympathy towards him.  Instead, I'd let the media, the timeline, the photographs, and in particular, Asif Kapadia's documentary, dictate the tunnel-visioned terms of consequence and blame.

"I told you I was trouble..."

Reflecting further on the documentary, I honed in on a vague sense of unease that I’d had whenever Amy stepped out of a building or a car – often with Blake, and usually looking worse for wear – and into the pyrotechnical flash of cameras and baying paparazzi.  It wasn't hard to pin down what was making me uncomfortable.  There was always one other camera in those scenes, the one that we viewed the documentary through.  One scene in particular resonated:  a distraught Amy stepping out of a car at Pentonville Prison, making her way slowly towards the gate that will usher her inside to see her incarcerated husband, our camera unflinching as it follows every step she takes.   

Kapadia's ire is clearly directed at the 'paps' hounding Amy 'towards her death', bulbs flashing, shutters clicking, Daily Mail headlines being written.  But, as we sit in our comfy cinema seats, why aren't we questioning the lens that allows us to view this particular version of the tragedy?  What's the difference between those cameras and our camera?  At the time, very little.  Even now, four years on from Amy's death, less than we think, less than we would hope.

"I should just be my own best friend ... not fuck myself in the head with stupid men"

The narrative - as all narratives do - has its own agenda.  The victim is Amy; the villains are Blake, and Mitch Winehouse, a once absent father, now fame hungry 'protector', living his own ambitions vicariously.  The camera tells this story, and fans of Amy approve because we want unimpeachable reasons for the snuffing out of such an amazing talent; we want scapegoats, people to blame, a husband and a father.  How different is that to the Daily Mail's agenda?   Their own 'society going to hell in a handcart' scapegoating of the likes of Amy is indeed loathsome.  But when we don't extend our own sympathy to the likes of Blake, or Mitch for that matter, are we any better?

"Well, sometimes I go out by myself and I look across the water ..."

Amy's legacy lives on in her songs.  There were only two albums, but they are more than enough.  What Amy’s legacy does not need is a legion of fans - and as gripping and moving as the film was - documentary makers identifying scapegoats to vilify publicly and then throw to the lions. We are, hopefully, much better than that.