The first look at Back to Black has prompted anger for depicting the late singer as a cartoonish mess. Is it possible to make a film about an abused artist without repeating history?
It’s only been a week since Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black began filming in London, but the backlash has already come thick and fast. Over the weekend, pictures of Marisa Abela and Eddie Marsan in character as Amy and her father, Mitch Winehouse, made their way on to Twitter. The reaction was one of pure vitriol, with one particularly viral tweet describing the images of Abela, looking cartoonishly distraught in a halloween costume-level approximation of Winehouse’s trademark beehive, as “fucking revolting”: 34,000 likes and 3,500 quote tweets seemed to agree with the sentiment.
It’s hard to judge a film before even a single frame has been officially released, but it’s understandable that the set photos touched a nerve. In recent years, Winehouse’s troubled life and entirely preventable death have become emblematic of the ways that the entertainment and media industries fail young stars. Winehouse was a hugely talented musician who seemed to be surrounded by people more intent on wringing money from her than protecting her mental or physical health; this July marks 12 years since she died, and in that time, it would seem that the music industry has hardly become a more hospitable place for female musicians. In recent years, many stars of Winehouse’s stature have disclosed similar struggles with drug abuse and disordered eating to those experienced by the singer during her lifetime. Much of her career was a media circus, with tabloids and commentators fixating on her weight, her substance abuse issues and her public meltdowns. The stark images of Abela on set feel like they play into the very same voyeuristic impulses that led to Winehouse’s decline. (Distressing, too, are Abela’s comments on her “really positive” experience of losing weight to play Winehouse, which include no mention of the singer’s bulimia.)
