Listen to Me Marlon (2015)
Amy (2015)
I don’t know what to make of our celebrity culture anymore. Having recently seen the documentaries, Amy, Listen to Me Marlon and Soaked in Bleach, I can’t help but border on the idea that there is a real life conspiracy in the world to make some people seem crazier than they really are. In Listen to Me Marlon, Marlon Brando comes off as lucid and thoughtful, unlike the boorish, self-absorbed maniac that so many others portrayed him as.
In Amy we don’t see a girl who was a wreck and destroying herself, we see a slightly troubled girl of a slight emotional impairment ravaged on all sides by deceitful members of her family, and a media that are nothing short of vultures. In Soaked in Bleach we meet a Courtney Love that is not too much unlike the public persona, only slightly more human and filled with guilt and regret that she papers over with booze and drugs the way any other guilt-ridden person might use to cover their shame.
We’ve become trained to not see celebrities as fellow human beings, to not feel compassion for them because they are privileged. We’ve allowed ourselves the excuse of that privilege as giving us the right to pry into their lives for little details that we can then use to create versions of these celebrities that we can love or hate or project whatever feelings of inadequacy we have onto them.
It’s terrifying the lengths that we allow ourselves to go in order to create a more relatable or outsized version of these people to satisfy our needs. We harden opinions based on conjecture from people who make a living by inventing stories about these people for us to consume. It’s a demonstration of the ugliest sides of us.
These documentaries, especially Amy and Listen to Me Marlon, are more than just films, they are signposts of our cultural ruin and must be seen so that we can all take stock of who we’ve become and why and maybe find a way to strike a balance in our desire for these beautiful ciphers for our dreams and the reality that they live, love and hurt as much as we do, if not for many of the same reasons.
