Dead girls made great films: that’s the line. Blonde, an art (and snuff) movie about Marilyn Monroe, was up for an Academy Award for Best Actress (Ana de Armas) yesterday: fittingly, she lost to Michelle Yeoh. In 2019 Renée Zellweger won an Academy Award for playing Judy Garland in Judy. (Neither Monroe nor Garland were so honoured in life. They were beaten, in so many ways, by their myths). A new film about Amy Winehouse — named Back to Black, of course — starring Marisa Abela, is being shot in Camden Town, on the streets where she walked barefoot before she died at 27 of her addiction, the condition that killed them all. It’s the same awful story: if it bleeds, it leads.
I can’t speak to the quality of Back to Black, but I am not hopeful. Even the tabloids that stalked Winehouse packed up when she was, briefly, clean, and I doubt cinema will have a different emphasis. It will be two parts gift to three parts heroin at best. In Blonde and Judy the talent — Monroe and Garland were, respectively, the best comedienne and singer in films — is secondary to the condition: it is the condition that fascinates us. Not in any helpful way, you understand: our drugs policies are mad, and these films will keep them that way. They are, rather, cautionary tales for girls: an invitation to distrust themselves. A gift like this, you see, will kill you: watch and learn how.
