Amy Winehouse dies at age 27

She is dead and he's not.

Her last public appearances were disasters. He was always sober and never caused problems when shooting a movie.

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

That's a dumb oversimplification. You have no idea what kind of support Downey may have had at the right time that helped him that she might not have gotten. You don't know what reason Downey is still alive and she's dead. There could be any number of unknowns that contributed to his still being here/her death.

Some of it was most likely just plain luck. It's easy to say now she was weak and he was strong but that's just your own uninformed generalization.

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#31 on SC's Top 100 Mofos list!!

Yeah, we can't really work backwards from the outcomes to assume that they were completely different even as addicts. And if they were completely different, wouldn't that undermine using his example to criticize her, anyway?

My criticism is she never sought help, never tried to get better. Even wrote a song saying she wouldn't go to rehab. He tried and backslided, then finally turned his life around. Many addicts do make the decision to get better and do. They hit what they realize is bottom and turn it around. Her bottom was her death.

will, please stop talking.

thanks.

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letterboxd

I'm not talking, I am writing and you don't have to read it.

But i'll feel better knowing you've stopped.

That doesn't prove anything. The death has no meaning in it, nothing that sums her up as a person. Her actions in life up to that point defined her, yes, but for all you know one single variable you don't know about could have changed everything and she might have lived and went on to have a great career, and Downey could be the one dead instead.

He hit bottom, she hit bottom. If he had died and she had lived, it would have nothing to do with strength or weakness, and you would probably be talking about how weak Downey was to not get help in time. You're not proving anything about either of them by contrasting them. You're just guessing. You don't really know why Downey is alive and she is dead, however many times you try to compare them. You just don't know.

Don't bother trying to reason with him. He'll just toss it aside by restating the same thing again.

Er, she did go to rehab. She just relapsed multiple times.

I'm not defending her decisions. She has to be somewhat responsible for them, and I'm not going to go as far as to say that addiction is 100% something that happens to you. I believe there has to be a choice component, even if only initially. But we can't just compare her to some other celebrity and judge her based on that standard. No two addicts are alike.

All we know is that coming back from addiction appears, in general, to be possible. We don't know much of anything about how easy it is, let alone how easy it is for a specific person. I think by all accounts Downey Jr. was an addict, but not necessarily one with underlying mental health problems. I'm not sure we can say the same for Winehouse.

I sympathize with her family and friends. They lost someone very dear to them and that's always very painful, no matter how fvcked up that person was. They don't think of her in terms of 'talented addict', but in terms of 'daughter', 'niece' or 'friend'.

As for Amy herself, I can't say I was surprised. Frankly, I don't care about her death. Then again, I don't care much for anyone if I haven't directly or indirectly (and by this I mean family of a close friend, not knowing Amy through her vids and interviews) known them. Maybe it's my lack of empathy shining through there.

I always care more when it all seems so random. When I heard about the massacre in Norway, I was driving my car and I had to force myself to focus on the road, because my thoughts were elsewhere at that point. First thing I did when I got home, was message a Norwegian pal of mine to check if he and his family were ok. Same goes for the current famine that Somalia is being hit hard with. I've seen people on the news saying they had to walk for miles in search of water and food, losing many of their relatives along the way. They had to leave these people behind next to the 'road' they were walking on, because they had no time to bury them.

When I then hear about Amy Winehouse who had the world at her feet, but messed it all up, the question I ask myself is: why should I care?

Well, when Brodinski puts it all that way, then, yeah, to hell with Amy Winehouse.

Meh. I don't think anyone should have an obligation to care about this, but then again, i don't think anyone is obligated to care about what happened in Norway, either.

Is there some kind of assumption that posting in this thread means we care about her?

We are fascinated by her death.

&ob=av3e

Did I say we did?

No, but are you keeper of the thread?

Anyway, I used the word "assume" for a reason. I'm more interested in discussing cases like Amy instead of Amy herself because i think it's interesting.

Discuss away. You have my permission.

jesus please stop. Someone has died, you might not care but place yourself in the shoes of her family. How would you like your daughter/sister/friend discussed and their life picked over like this? unbelievable.

No one is saying that you should and no one is comparing the death of Amy Winehouse to the Oslo/Utøya massacre or famine in Somalia. It is possible to be affected on a personal level of all those things at the same time without one thing taking away any sympathy from the other - really. In fact, I would honestly welcome a thread about the famine on the African horn and what the western world should do about it. I think this is a terribly urgent matter that require more than coquettish posts in a thread devoted to the memory of Amy Winehouse.

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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".

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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.

I'm sorry to say this, Christine, but this is not the only place in the world that's harshly judging Amy Winehouse - and - she is a celebrity. A very famous celebrity who's on all the news channels, every magazine, you name it. This is not just some random woman who died. Amy Winehouse didn't want this kind of attention? She shouldn't have been famous and died this way. Her family deserves no say in what we choose to say about her here.