| Amy Winehouse Poster by T.A. |
Never underestimate the appetite
Hadley Freeman
THE GUARDIAN
Wednesday 24 June 2015 19.50 BST
A new film about the singer’s desperately short life shows how her tragic story became a spectator sport – and death has done nothing to end the voyeurism
ow many times do you want to watch Amy Winehouse die? Five? Twenty? Is there a point at which you will feel sated by the sensation of watching a talented woman waste away in front of the world?
During her brief time in the hottest of spotlights – and it was so brief, a mere five years between the release of Back to Black and her death – Winehouse became a spectator sport. There was never any mystery to Winehouse: part of her appeal to her fans was that she told her life through her music; a major part of her appeal to the media was that she wore her pain on her person, from her scrawny body to her bloodied ballet pumps. Such is the voyeuristic and visual nature of the press, this has made her the ideal subject to be exhumed. Since her death her well-known story has been told and retold, with a pleasure verging on the necrophiliac.