Documentary is an indictment of society rather than of Amy Winehouse’s life

DOCUMENTARIES don’t tend to sell out by the lunchtime of their cinema opening night, or elicit prolonged emotional applause at the end — but the new film about Amy Winehouse was never going to be ordinary. And we all know the ending.

There are no individual villains in Asif Kapadia’s mesmerising, moving docu-collage. Just a heroine — a funny, gobby, clever, common girl brimming over with a volcano of talent, but who only ever wanted to be a jazz singer, writing songs about heartbreak for small audiences in darkened jazz clubs. She never, ever wanted fame.

The villains are not her father — bumbling, foolish, caught up in it all — or her husband — egotistical, ill-equipped, addicted — as we have always been told. No, the primary villain in the Amy Winehouse story is addiction, and how it is dealt with by the media when it engulfs someone in the public eye.

When someone is seriously ill with, say, cancer, you generally don’t have marauding paparazzi chasing them down the street exploding flashbulbs in their face. We would consider such behaviour reprehensible, even by paparazzi standards.

We would not refer to a very ill person as “like a campaign poster for neglected horses,” as did Frankie Boyle, or as Graham Norton called Amy, “a mad person.”

Yet this is exactly what she was — mad and self-neglected — because she was suffering from a fatal illness we still broadly consider a lifestyle choice. She became tabloid catnip, a Halloween costume.

Just as we look back in horror at how we used to treat mentally ill people in the past, locking them up in places like Bedlam, future generations will look back in equal horror at how we still treat our addicts.

What is most absurd is how we criminalise some substances while heavily promoting the sale of others; one day we will look back on this as a kind of mass insanity, to which we currently turn a massive blind eye. We continue to fall for the drugs bad / alcohol good narrative.

All the fuss around Amy focused on her drug addiction, yet her primary addiction was legal and everyday as a cup of tea. She didn’t die from crack or heroin, but from drink.

Just saw Amy Winehouse doc.. So so heartbreaking & touching. Go see it

— Yuck (@Yuckband) July 5, 2015

Watching addiction in action via this vivid, lucid splicing of Amy Winehouse’s life in film clips and the heartbreaking recall of her old friends will one day make for a socio-cultural museum piece on how the early 21st century viewed the addict. How lacking in awareness we were. Addiction is a progressive condition, mostly predetermined by your DNA, and knows no boundaries. It doesn’t care that vodka is legal but heroin is not. It just wants you dead.

Our legislation around drugs, alcohol and addiction is outdated and ignorant. One drug is heavily promoted at sporting events, while the others get you thrown in jail. Our attitudes are more incoherent than the late, amazing Amy staggering around a stage in. We need to evolve. We need to wake up.