In the same season we’ve been presented with two different comprehensive documentaries of two of our most iconic and tragic, gone-too-soon figures in recent decades. Brett Morgan’s Montage of Heck depicts the slow unraveling of Kurt Cobain in the preamble to his suicide, Asif Kapadia’s Amy depicts a corollary narrative about Amy Winehouse’s life, and in the process sheds light on how unequal the treatment of male and female artists truly is, even in death.-=-=-=-

The two artists faced radically different cultural realities: Cobain’s death happened in the pre-TMZ era when the world wide web was in its infancy, and Winehouse rose to fame in the age of internet ubiquity. Still, the assumptions that belie public perception of each artist’s tragedy-- as seen through the two documentaries, which excerpt raw media as evidence-- obviate the unfortunate iniquities that now come as no surprise.

In the course of Amy, a newscaster reports on Winehouse’s infamous meltdown in Serbia by commenting that “she had the chance to make a big comeback and she totally BLEW it!” while laughing through a segment that dovetails with George Lopez announcing that Winehouse had won a Grammy by saying, "someone call and wake her up at 6 PM and let her know" before calling her “a drunk” with a derisive scoff. A slurry of ugly tabloid images fly across the screen and we see paparazzi preying upon her existential nadir-- meanwhile, Montage of Heck posits a cache of neat magazine covers that offer obsequious, reverential coverage of a man whose drug addiction was portrayed as incidental to his supreme talent. Even though both deaths were motivated by depression underscored by narcotics and celebrity, Montage depicts a context in which the public was willing Cobain to succeed, whereas Winehouse, when confronted with similar drug-addled obstacles, was met with ridicule and slander. If Amy proves anything about the life and times of Winehouse, it’s that newscasters, tabloids, and even respected media outlets reported on her shortcomings with enough thinly-veiled aggression to weaken what little resolve the drugs hadn’t already sapped. Cobain’s struggle with drugs, meanwhile, was all but an open secret while he was alive, whispered about or written around in order to maintain good graces and access to the superstar and his band.

The unequal treatment here is not new.

The way media dotes over its tortured male artists while undermining the personal struggles of women who suffer the same is nuanced, but a look into the archive suggests the phenomenon is well documented across race, genre, and generation. When Janis Joplin died on October 4, 1970 the New York Times called her a “misfit” whose “behavior was explosive” and remembers her as “drinking from a bottle at her concerts” and “screaming obscenities at a policeman in the audience”. Two weeks prior when Jimi Hendrix died-- also at the age of 27-- the same paper’s headline referred to him as a “Top of Music World Flamboyant Performer Noted for Sensuous Style” above an article that failed to highlight his fabled and widely-acknowledged affinity for mixing drugs with alcohol, even as new evidence emerged that he was wildly out of control during his final days. In many cases these kind of comparisons are sticky because Joplin was not Hendrix in the same way that Billie Holiday was not Keith Moon, and there are so many other factors affecting the way we remember these icons that it seems silly to compare them on the basis of their self-destruction alone-- but how we interpret an artist’s demise says a lot about how we view them in life.