Amy Screening Reflection

Sincerity was something that was of upmost importance to Amy Winehouse and it is a concept that the documentary Amy upholds diligently, but only to a point. The beginning of the film relies heavily on home videos and pictures taken by Amy or her friends of themselves. These give a glimpse into the real life of Amy before fame and addiction consumed her. Just like Amy’s own voice recording of an interview upholds her constant desire to be sincere in her work and what she creates musically, these videos enable the film to give a real unfiltered depiction of Amy to the audience. However, these clips and pictures are also only possible because Amy was brought to fame right as the digital age was underway. While these clips give the audience a real life portrait of Amy they also foreshadow the ultimate demise to Amy, which was fame and the constant digital media knowledge surrounding her life.

While the home video clips seem to initially follow Amy’s ideology of always being sincerely herself they also become hypocritical as the film evolves to use more media coverage and paparazzi images to display Amy, a fake depiction that I do not believe she would not be okay with postmortem. This depiction of Amy becomes problematic because the film begins to portray Amy through the very same media that ultimately causes her to spiral out of control and die of an overdose. These images are no longer innocent depictions of the real Amy but harmful and harsh highly filtered and slanted reminders of the danger the media coverage of fame can cause. I believe the film ultimately unethically used these images to portray the story of Amy instead of using only home videos, voice mails, and photographs that would not have crossed over the ethically inappropriate line and created a much more realistic account of the life that Amy was desperately trying to live.