Amy Reflection
Tattoos, tight jeans, beehive hair, dark-winged eyeliner, and addiction to drug and alcohol, all these form labels for Amy Winehouse and do nothing but emphasize her as a deviant and notorious female jazz singer. Are you a good girl, a temptress, a hot mess or what? Pick one – there is alway one that you can be categorized in, in media’s eyes. What makes difference between males and females is that men are able to choose from a broader spectrum. But do we? Do we have to put on the labels that media or the public endow to us and accept them as the epitomes of ourselves? If we take a close look at how people are introduced or portrayed by media, it is not hard to find that each of them is given a label, the fastest and most eye-catching way for audience to remember them. Such labels, once established, can hardly be taken off, and will be stuck around you however hard you try to get rid of it. Compared to the number of people who became famous because of the advantage of this digital age, those who are consumed and destroyed by media are even more: yet they fade out and are concealed by continuously updating news, which makes the loop forever circulating.
Media did bring Amy fame and fortune, but also pushed her to bottom lines, until finally withdrew the last straw from her. Perhaps for people like Amy, who are so sincere and unrestrained, this is not an age for them. This highly (overly) exposed world gives them no room to escape, especially when they are celebrities, the shooting target of aggressive media. As a matter of fact, Amy did not die from suicide; she was “murdered” by the media, and by her nearest who took advantage of Amy’s fame and became assistants in this crime. She was passively engulfed in this game of consuming and being consumed. What made me upset in the film is that as an outsider I saw her problems; I knew who are doing harms to her (perhaps she knew too but refused to wake up); I saw her struggling and endeavors to climb up from the fringe; and how she finally fell off. As Tony Bennett says in the end of the film, “To me, she should be treated like Ella Fitzgerald, like Billie Holiday. She had the complete gift. If she had lived, I would’ve said, ‘Slow down. You’re too important. Life teaches you really how to live it, if you could live long enough.'” Unfortunately, Amy has no chance to fix her mistakes and get all over again, giving up everything she owned for a life without paparazzi chasing after. An old soul in a young body is born to lose. Yet fortunately, her way doesn’t need to be blocked nor her eyes blinded by dizzy flashlights any more.
Photo credited to Charles Moriarty.
