Cinema Therapy — Charlyne Gelt, Ph.D.

Amy Winehouse "Back to Black"

The film Back to Black is the story of Amy Winehouse (2024).' It follows this remarkable artist’s early rise to fame and her groundbreaking album, Back to Black. The film illustrates her success, her struggles and the personal lyrics behind that rise to fame that parallel alongside the tumultuous relationship at the center of one of the most legendary performers.

The passion Amy put into Back to Black was the passion she put into her abusive, co-dependent relationship with Blake. And that accounts for much of her destructive behavior. Typically, people get a rush of dopamine when they fall in love. With Amy and Blake, their addiction to drugs was a mirror to their addiction to each other which fueled their co-dependency.

Synopsis and Psychological Implications

As therapists, we treat the issues Amy lived with and died from: longtime struggles with depression, eating disorders (throwing up her food as a “diet”), rebellion, alcoholism, and her fatal drug addictions. She died of alcohol poisoning in 2011, at the age of 27. Regarding love relationships, Amy shared a common wound with Blake, her “bad boy” toxic romantic partner: a desperate longing for love. Six-time Grammy-winner Amy Winehouse was a musical genius. Her brassy voice and personal, brutally honest lyrics made her one of the most acclaimed female singers of the past decade. She wrote some of the best songs of all time, too, between “Back To Black,” “Valerie,” “Love Is A Losing Game” and “Tears Dry On Their Own.”

The irony and tragedy of addictions, hostility towards those trying to help, the refusal to go to rehab turned No no no, into one of her bestselling albums.

Amy was a young girl born to working-class Jewish parents living in London who shocked the world with her music. A child of sadness, inner poverty, though outward needs got met, she felt lonely, alienated, and confused over values. She lived out life in compulsive unconscious ways, eating and drinking too much, captured by moods. Music was her saving grace, “I don’t think I knew what depression was.” Amy brought her sadness, her depression, her heartbreaks, and her longing for a soul to life through song. With an awareness of her inner feelings and an introspective quest for inner wisdom, she expressed her feelings, and awakened to the intuitive side of her life, through song. Though outwardly successful, it misfired. She lived internally conflicted, on a tightrope between life and death, remaining hungry for relatedness to other human beings.

She admitted her worst vice is "Mainly that I'm quite reckless and always throw caution to the wind." What was the source of her pain?

She felt "helpless" while trying to understand and resist her own self-destructive compulsions. Yet no one helped Amy. No crisis-management was ever deployed to save one of the decade's most successful female vocalists. Blake, her husband, was one of her addictions, a toxic co-dependency. two broken young people find each other and call it love.

The film allows us to take a very surface look at her family dynamics. According to her father Mitch,” we have a strong family unit.” However, both her husband, and her father are shown to be in denial, somewhat insensitive, manipulative men so it is essential that we question the results of their input in her life. In this film, her father appears to refuse to see her problem, and is shown downplaying Amy's troubling behavior, brushing off the very apparent need for intervention. Her boyfriend, then spouse, who fed her addiction, or the many personal and professional contacts, looked the other way. By contrast, she records a duet of "Body and Soul," with fatherly idol Tony Bennett, who also announced her Grammy win back in 2008. Bennett is herd stating: "Life teaches you really how to live it, if you live long enough." Her family believes that the mid-2006 death of her grandmother, who was a stabilizing influence, set her off into addiction. During their break-up, she wrote an album on the state of her "relationship at the time with Blake [Fielder-Civil]" through themes of "grief, guilt, and heartache."

Although Blake introduced Amy to drugs, it seems as though Amy had an addictive personality early on as evidenced by her rebellion, depression, perfectionism and achievement and she used her creativity to lift her depression. When Blake introduced her to drugs it changed her. She craved more and more of the feeling of the high, physiological and psychological. We are hard wired to want pleasure. Loving relationships ad attachment figures activate the dopamine receptors and we are soothed but with drugs the brain gets less and less dopamine and requires more and more of the drugs. Initially, Blake was her drug of choice. Although, outwardly not worried about approval, inwardly she needed a strong male figure and Blake filled that bill for her. Stronger Than Me is the story of her search for that masculine male figure and in Blake she found her soul mate. She couldn’t live with him or without or without each other. No matter what he did, Amy always went back to Blake. In trying to numb the pain by adding alcohol to the drugs, she added to the self harm thinking she could control the addiction.

As a culture, few of us are at peace with ourselves, secure in our relationships, content in our lives, or at home in the world. We cry out for meaning in life, for values we can live by, for love and relationships. Her father’s biggest fear, “that she would die” became a reality on July 23, 2011.

If we are awake, we see that as a culture, we have inherited a sad world, out of balance, dominated by a power drive without the balancing energy of love, feelings and human values. We are Amy, we have her sadness, her challenges, and we awakened to a new consciousness and inner strength; and we have hope.

Charlyne Gelt, Ph.D. (PSY22909) is a clinical psychologist who practices in Encino. She leads Women's Empowerment Groups that help women learn the tools to move beyond self-destructive relationship patterns. She may be reached at 818.501.4123 or cgelt@earthlink.net. Her office address is 16055 Ventura Blvd. #1129 Encino, CA 91436. Her latest edition of Cinema Therapy Binders will be made available for sale on Amazon this month - stay tuned for link!