Fedez accusato di calunnia dal Codacons: il pm chiede non luogo a procedere

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Young people pass a voting information sign on the campus of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in October 2022. | Elijah Nouvelage/AFP It’s not what you think. Long before the Israel-Hamas war broke out, young Americans were already souring on President Joe Biden. That discontent has only picked up in the last few months — registering in polls as increased support for Donald Trump and third-party candidates, and defections from the president, but not necessarily from his party. The reasons for why this is happening have become one of the defining questions of the 2024 election so far. But what if this horse race is missing the point? A new poll of young voters shared exclusively with Vox provides an important corrective: Young voters aren’t all that mystical; they’re a lot like the average American, concerned first and foremost with the state of the economy. “People tend to have a skewed perception of what young voters prioritize,” Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint, which conducted this polling, told me. “A large part of that is because there are ways politically that young voters are very different and very distinct in what they care about. But the places that they’re different shouldn’t be confused with the places that they care the most about.” This tracks with what my election reporting has turned up this year: Economic and affordability issues are far and away the top concern for all young voters in Blueprint’s latest poll. Progressive priorities, like climate change, student loans, and even the Israel-Palestine conflict, rank far below kitchen table issues. Notably, the poll does not ask about a match-up between Biden and Trump, or about 2024 vote preferences. Those horse-race topics are the primary way that public debates and the discourse around young voters have been conducted this year, leading to foundational and epistemic questions over how much we can trust polling and whether we’re reading too much into the crosstabs or methodology of polls. So what does this poll tell us? A lot. Here are the top four takeaways. It’s the economy — and health care Blueprint surveyed 943 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 30, recruited from an online panel from April 27 to April 29. The margin of error is 5.8 percentage points. Those participants were asked how important a variety of issues were to them, and able to choose multiple priorities. Across every kind of young voter asked — Democratic, independent, or Republican; Black or Latino or white; college-educated or not — some variation of an economic concern was a top electoral issue. As a whole, inflation and the economy were the most frequently prioritized issues, chosen by 73 percent and 70 percent of young voters, respectively. Health care was the only rival issue — cited frequently by Democrats, Black and white voters, women, and those making more than $75,000 a year — and chosen 71 percent of the time by all young voters as a top priority. The top priority for young voters is also the one where they trust Biden least When young people talk about the economy, they overwhelmingly mean lowering prices on food, gas, and services — not creating more jobs, lowering interest rates, or even earning higher wages (though that’s the second most important thing). That dynamic is nearly the inverse of the way the president has been talking about his economic record and about his plans for a second term. For most of his presidency and the campaign so far, he’s primarily talked about wage growth, cutting junk fees, and the historically low unemployment rate. And young voters see this: there’s a 37-point gap between how much they want Biden to prioritize lowering prices, and how much they think he is. Trump, meanwhile, is seen as focusing on prices. And this is the crucial conclusion: Trump is trusted more than Biden on the single most important issue: 52 percent say they trust Trump over Biden to reduce prices. “Young voters trust Joe Biden more than Donald Trump on just about everything — except lowering prices. That’s a real problem,” Roth Smith told me. “If your only bright spot is the one that matters, that’s something that worries me, as a Democrat.” The issues we associate with young voters aren’t very salient When talking about young voters today, it seems like most politicians and the journalists covering the nation seem to default to a handful of progressive priorities: climate change, student loan cancellation, identity politics, and the war in Gaza. But at least according to this poll, those don’t tend to be the issues that young voters are prioritizing the most. Among the lowest-priority issues in this survey are LGBTQ issues, student loans (both chosen 38 percent of the time), while climate change, Israel and Palestine, democracy, and race relations were chosen just about half the time. And they don’t necessarily want Biden to make a major change on some of these topics. A good chunk of young voters actually say that Biden is closer to their views on student loans (43 percent say this), and about 42 percent of independent voters say Biden is close to their views on abortion, student loans, and immigration and the border. Which leads us to… Young voters are idiosyncratic; they aren’t the progressive saviors some people want them to be As I’ve written before, the youth aren’t necessarily going to save us. “At a moment when people are sitting at home, watching campus protests or climate protests, and go ‘Wow, this new generation has totally different priorities,’ really, when you start to survey everyone, you find out that the kids are just like us,” Roth Smith said. They are almost an even ideological mix of moderate, liberal, and conservative — something many other surveys have found — but many still think Trump is not moderate enough. For example, while about half of young voters see Biden as liberal, 74 percent say that Trump is conservative. They are more divided over how much more liberal or more conservative Biden should become; 37 percent would prefer he move to the left, 31 percent would prefer he move to the right, and 32 percent prefer he stay where he is. “The difference for Trump is just about everyone who wants him to move wants him to move left,” Roth Smith said. While 39 percent want him to stay where he is, 45 percent want him to be less conservative. It’s possible to draw out one more conclusion from this state of play: though young voters are upset, these conditions and feelings about Trump don’t seem to point toward a massive shift of young Americans toward Trump. They do point to plenty of problems: the top concern for a second Biden term is that he would be too old to do the job, followed by continued price increases, and being too pro-Israel. The top Trump concerns are more personal: that he would cut funding for Social Security and Medicare and cut taxes for the rich but not the working and middle class. All this suggests there are plenty of opportunities for Biden to shore up his support, for his campaign to improve its messaging and targeting of voters, and for direct attacks on Trump that go beyond “Dobbs and Democracy.” But it would be a mistake to assume that young voters are drastically different creatures. We’re essentially normies. We’re just young. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.A weird thing is happening to me this week: I am turning 60.I enter a seventh decade with no small amount of apprehension. This decade proved lethal to my father, and many people whom I admire have written about reaching this milestone with distaste. “I just swallowed it down to my hiatal hernia where it stayed, like a golf ball of peanut butter,” wrote the legendary sportswriter Robert Lipsyte about his 60th birthday. Or as my colleague Caitlin Flanagan noted in The Atlantic as she entered her 60s, “I feel vaguely embarrassed about it, like I’ve somehow let myself go, like I’ve been bingeing on decades and wound up in this unappealing condition.”Turning 60, of course, is not a uniquely grim anniversary—marking our birthdays negatively is a commonplace of growing older. The experience can even be seen in pathological terms. The website Medical News Today lists symptoms of “birthday depression” that sound like a bad drug trip: paranoia, obsessive thinking, and avoiding contact with people.Even youth itself is not immune from the condition: You might be half my age and still feeling plenty of discomfort about turning 30. In fact, I remember my 30th very well—it doesn’t seem so long ago. I was a professional musician in those days, and although my birthday depression did not lead me to act like a paranoid recluse, I was worrying about whether the best days of my performing career were behind me and whether I was going bald. They were, and I was.What I should have been doing on my 30th birthday was looking ahead with hope and setting specific, positive goals. And that’s the way I intend to spend my 60th. Here’s how you can look forward, too, no matter what your age.[Joe Pinsker: The strange origins of American birthday celebrations]People pay a lot of attention to landmark birthdays because many of us tend to endow round numbers with special psychological significance. In 2011, two psychologists showed this in the cases of baseball batting averages and SAT scores. In the former instance, they demonstrated that baseball players on their last plate appearance of the season were more likely to get a base hit if their batting average was .298 or .299 than if it was .300 or .301. In the latter example, they showed that students were more likely to retake the SATs if their previous score was just short of a round number.In baseball and SAT scores, we see being able to round up as a positive, motivating goal. But the significance of closing in on a round number can also be negative, as in the case of milestone birthdays. One way to understand this is by looking at how people behave in the run-up to a big anniversary—the so-called 9-enders (29, 59, etc.). One study from 2014 found that 9-enders tend to be preoccupied by the vicissitudes of aging and a sense of meaningfulness, and may make dramatic changes to their lives in a seeming effort to disrupt an unsatisfactory status quo before reaching the milestone. For example, although the chance that they will embrace a positive aspiration, such as running a marathon, rises significantly in this last year, they are also more likely to act in a drastic, self-destructive way—like dying by suicide or seeking an extramarital affair.Health issues become markedly more salient at milestone birthdays. Researchers in 2015 found a higher correlation between overall health and life satisfaction at the turn of each decade, whereas simply feeling good at the moment was more important to people on ordinary birthdays.[Arthur C. Brooks: The happy art of grandparenting]In an Atlantic article that arguably anticipated this finding a century ago, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edward Bok wrote an essay on turning 50 with an ominous title: “The Worst Birthday in a Man’s Life.” The predicament of entering his sixth decade led him to undertake strange exercise regimes in which he had to “kick in various directions or to fan the air wildly with your arms,” and adopt some drastic changes to his diet. The unfortunate faced with such a midlife crisis would, Bok went on, “cry either that you are ‘springing new-fangled notions’ on him, that the doctor is ‘a nut,’ or that his wife is starving him.”Even doctors themselves treat us differently on birthdays—and not just by dispensing “nutty” advice to eat more healthfully. A 2022 study in the journal Health Economics showed that, when faced with new patients, Israeli primary-care physicians scheduled more diagnostic tests for those who had just attained a decadal birthday than for those who were merely approaching one. Even doctors’ own performance is correlated with their birthday: Scholars in 2020 found that the likelihood of a patient dying in the 30 days after a surgery is 1.3 percent higher if the operation occurs on the surgeon’s birthday than if it occurs on another day. (You might especially want to avoid surgery on your surgeon’s 60th birthday.)[Read: Making aging positive]The key to a good milestone birthday is to change the experience from being an affliction to an opportunity, using the “fresh start” effect. Scholars have demonstrated that people are more likely to undertake a self-improvement goal (such as losing weight or exercising) on days they endow with a special significance. Thus, milestone birthdays are opportunities to make desired changes to your life. But you do have to pick the right goals. Researchers have found that happiness is highest when your objectives have two characteristics: They are intrinsic and positive, as opposed to extrinsic and negative.First, intrinsic goals are those in which the rewards come from within, not from the outside world. Typical extrinsic goals include money, recognition, and beauty, whereas intrinsic goals valorize relationship quality and spiritual depth. To underline this priority, scholars have shown that, unlike intrinsic goals, extrinsic ones are actually correlated with lower well-being over time. In my own research, I have found that such external rewards are inherently unsatisfying, despite their seemingly intuitive appeal. (I always think of the famous cartoon of an old man on his deathbed confessing, “I should have bought more crap.”)Second, the best goals have “approach” rather than “avoidance” motivations. In the first bucket are objectives such as “Spend more time enjoying nature on long walks” or “Practice loving-kindness meditation.” The second bucket would include such goals as “Quit my crummy job” or “Stop complaining all the time.” The avoidant goals are not necessarily useless or silly, but they are interestingly associated with poorer health in the long run—so, for that reason, they don’t work as good milestone aspirations to make the future happier.In sum, as you approach a landmark birthday, take time to envision how you would like your life to look at the next milestone. Then, create a list of five to 10 goals that are both positive and intrinsic. Finally, spend some time thinking about how you can practically achieve these aims—the small and medium-size changes to your habits that you can adopt, starting the morning of your birthday. Making this simple resolution has the power to turn dread about the passing of time into excitement for all you can do in the future.[Beth Nguyen: I grew up not knowing my birthday]One productive way to think about a decadal birthday is to consider your next stage as a novel of which you are the author. Fictions typically start in the middle of their characters’ story. You may get some backstory, but the action is nearly always about what happens after that point in time. The novelist cooks up a compelling series of events and then has her characters navigate their way through them. The script may change in the writing, but the shape of events broadly follows the writer’s vision.So, on your next major birthday, think of your life as an autobiographical novel that starts that day. You get to write the story. Take this imaginative exercise seriously and make your plot about hope and opportunity.Here goes: Once upon a time, a bald former French horn player was turning 60. That’s when the real adventure began.

I am a member of a strange club that nobody wants to belong to, but whose numbers are steadily growing: innocent people convicted in Iran of espionage for what Iranian officials call the “tyrannical Zionist entity” (in other words, Israel). Many among us are foreigners—businesspeople, journalists, tourists, and academics like myself, who traveled to Iran for what they thought would be a brief visit, only to find themselves thrown in prison on dubious charges.The European Union diplomat Johan Floderus, a Swedish citizen, is but the latest high-profile victim of Iranian hysteria over Israeli spies on its territory. Currently awaiting sentencing from a revolutionary court in Tehran, Floderus faces allegations of “very extensive intelligence cooperation with the Zionist occupation regime” and a charge of “corruption on earth,” which carries the death penalty. Sweden’s foreign minister has stated publicly that the accusations against Floderus are “completely baseless and false,” and the head of the EU foreign service has labeled him “illegally detained.”I was convicted of espionage for Israel under similarly spurious pretenses in 2019. I had been invited to an academic conference in Iran as the guest of a local university, and was arrested by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini airport as I was about to fly home to Australia. I was handed a 10-year prison sentence, of which I served more than two years at the mercy of the IRGC before I was freed in a prisoner swap.[Read: I was a hostage in Iran. The deals are part of the problem.]During my time in the Iranian prison system, I learned Farsi and used every opportunity possible to study my captors. In addition to IRGC interrogators and prison guards, I encountered a number of influential regime figures, including the head of IRGC intelligence, the deputy foreign minister, and even Iran’s current chief nuclear negotiator. At various junctures, these men came to the prison to meet and speak with me, or agreed to do so while visiting for seemingly other purposes.The fact that someone who had been convicted of espionage, however unjustly, was given access to such people is testament to the chaotic way in which intelligence work is conducted in the Islamic Republic. Indeed, although Iran’s authorities talk tough and cast an extremely wide net in their quest to capture the Mossad agents they believe are in their midst, a prevailing lack of competence has meant that very few actual spies ever seem to get caught.Not only does the Islamic Republic arrest a large number of innocent people domestically, but the agents of its two intelligence bodies, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the IRGC’s intelligence unit, have a long history of bungling operations overseas. Many operatives get caught: Just last month, a suspected member of the IRGC Quds Force was arrested in Peru for plotting to kill Israelis living in the country. Indeed the three IRGC members who were released in exchange for me had been convicted in Thailand of targeting Israeli diplomats in a failed bomb plot. Rather than making final preparations in the days before their operation, these hapless agents had been photographed drinking alcohol and partying with local prostitutes. In the course of resisting arrest, one of them had even blown off his own leg with the bombs they’d assembled.Of course, not every overseas Iranian-intelligence operation fails, and the consequences are devastating when they do not. In 1994, 85 people were killed at a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, in a bombing that Argentine courts later ruled was carried out on the orders of the Islamic Republic. Just last week, Argentina issued an Interpol red notice for Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, accusing him of having been behind the attack. The Islamic Republic is also apparently implicated in a string of assassinations and kidnappings of dissidents across Europe and the Middle East, as well as plots targeting Iranian opposition journalists in London and New York.[Read: Iran’s deadly message to journalists abroad]The incompetence and lack of professionalism of much of the Iranian intelligence apparatus stands in stark contrast to the efficiency of Israel’s, which is alleged to have carried out sophisticated sabotage and assassination plots on Iranian territory. Beginning in 2007, Israel is thought to have targeted scientists working on Iran’s nuclear program for assassination. At least six have been killed inside the country. In 2022 alone, seven officials affiliated with Iran’s missile or drone programs died under suspicious circumstances. Israel is also thought to have been behind two mysterious blasts at the Natanz nuclear facility, as well the theft of an enormous archive of documents relating to the nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran. In 2023, Mossad even announced that it had kidnapped an IRGC hit man inside Iran; the Israeli agency released footage from his interrogation outside the country.Somewhat bizarrely, my exchange for three blundering IRGC operatives wasn’t the only connection between my wrongful imprisonment and the high-stakes war of espionage that has long been playing out between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Less than 48 hours after I was freed from prison—and likely not unrelated to the deal that freed me—Israel carried out one of its most audacious missions on Iranian soil.Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was an IRGC commander and the shadowy mastermind of Iran’s covert nuclear-weapons program. While the regime was busy welcoming the three convicted terrorists home with garlands of flowers and sleek propaganda reels, agents acting for Israel parked a blue Nissan pickup truck on a highway intersection near the hamlet of Absard, north of Tehran. Hidden on the truck bed beneath a tarpaulin was a remote-controlled, AI-programmed machine gun. As Fakhrizadeh’s motorcade crossed the intersection, the sniper, watching via satellite from thousands of kilometers away, opened fire. Fakhrizadeh was killed in a hail of bullets. The truck then blew itself up.The Israelis had clearly been surveilling Fakhrizadeh for months, if not years, prior to the attack. Yet they held their fire until after I had departed Iranian airspace, a move that was much to my benefit, as such a brazen operation would undoubtedly have scuppered the deal for my release. That the attack so closely coincided with my prisoner swap, however, was unlikely to be an accident, and had less to do with me than with the three IRGC terrorists exchanged for my freedom. Australia probably had to secure Israel’s consent for trading them, as they had been caught targeting Israeli diplomats. The IRGC, of course, would have known that. And so the Israelis opted to send Tehran a message by allowing the deal to go through but killing Fakhrizadeh at nearly the same time: They would go after a bigger target, and on Iranian soil besides. Unlike the IRGC’s three amateurish agents in Thailand, they didn’t fail.The Iranian regime has shown itself to be supremely adept at surveilling, arresting, and interrogating political dissidents, social-media activists, members of armed separatist groups, and even underground terror cells from organizations such as the MEK. As the unprecedented crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom demonstrations shows, the regime retains a fierce grip on the country and runs it like a police state. All of which leaves one to wonder: Why does Iran do such a poor job of countering Israel’s operations inside its territory?One clue lies in the fact that many, if not most, of the assassinations and other plots attributed to Israel, including the killing of Fakhrizadeh, are conducted with the participation of local Iranian recruits. Interestingly, the quadcopter drones thought to have been used in Israel’s April 19 attack on a military facility in Isfahan province were also most likely assembled and launched from inside Iran.The Islamic Republic’s security apparatus has long assumed that Israel is sending foreign tourists and other visitors to Iran to spy on its behalf. But this supposition seems more and more like a costly distraction from the real issue at hand: A not-insignificant number of Iranian citizens inside Iran appear willing to risk torture, imprisonment, and execution in order to assist enemies of their own government.Iranian security agencies have had little success in thwarting Israeli activities inside their country in part because authoritarian regimes prioritize loyalty over competence. IRGC intelligence officials tend to owe their positions to either ideological conformity or to strong family or personal ties within the organization. If you weren’t a true believer (or at least good at pretending to be one) and didn’t have other IRGC members to vouch for you, you didn’t have a hope of becoming even a lowly prison official in a Revolutionary Guard detention facility. As one guard boasted to me, “Our positions aren’t advertised.” In such a system, aptitude, skill, and even security training are much lower priorities. The least suitable people can attain high ranks, while better-qualified candidates who are deemed insufficiently ideologically committed miss out.The result is a lack of professionalism, which I observed firsthand during the 804 days I spent in IRGC custody. For example, I was once able to text the Australian embassy in the middle of an interrogation, because my interrogator had made the rookie error of leaving my confiscated phone in the room after he stepped out. On another occasion, I was able to trick one of my captors into revealing details of the diplomatic negotiations surrounding my release. And although I’m unable to go into specifics, female prisoners are routinely able to take advantage of the IRGC guards’ squeamishness about women’s bodies to smuggle information outside the prison.Selected for ideological orthodoxy, the Revolutionary Guards I interacted with bought into all manner of conspiracy theories, which undoubtedly distorted their understanding of geopolitics and hamstrung their ability to interrogate suspects. I was regularly forced to listen to lengthy tirades about secretive Zionists pulling the levers of the global economy, or Israeli plots to poison the sperm counts of Muslim men in a scheme to achieve demographic supremacy. My handlers admitted to watching spy shows involving the Middle East, such as Fauda, Tehran, and Homeland. These seemed to reinforce their tendency to see the hand of Mossad behind every calamity that befell Iran, man-made or otherwise. Such paranoia helps explain the shockingly high numbers of innocent people, most of them Iranian, imprisoned on charges of working for Israel. Sadly, many of these people make false confessions under duress, which in turn gives the authorities the impression that they are catching real spies.Institutional incompetence is not the sole reason Iran’s agencies have been losing the shadow intelligence war with Israel. Like all brutal authoritarian regimes, the Islamic Republic knows no language other than intimidation and the threat of violence. It has proved unable to offer positive incentives or rewards to those who might be in a position to assist it. The population, including the Islamic Republic’s traditional religious constituency, broadly loathes the regime; even the most disinterested and self-serving opportunist is reluctant to gather information on its behalf. The IRGC in turn distrusts the people it rules over and believes that cooperation can only be forcibly coerced.[Read: How fake spies ruin real intelligence]I experienced this approach myself in Evin Prison. Before I was put on trial, Revolutionary Guard interrogators accosted me with an offer of recruitment. Would I agree to travel to London to collect information on the Iranian dissident community? Would I use my status as an academic to visit Israel, effectively as an Iranian agent? Then, after the trial, they used the absurd 10-year sentence I was dealt as a lever of blackmail. The IRGC would only enter into negotiations over my freedom, I was told, if I agreed to work for them; if I did agree, I would be beholden to them in every way once freed.“How do you know I won’t just run away after I’m allowed to leave Iran?” I asked the recruiters.The answer was sobering. The IRGC had operatives on Australian soil, they told me, just as they did in Europe and North America. If I reneged, they would kill me. For more than 18 months, I resisted this pressure. It relented only after I leaked to the international press that I was a recruitment target.The IRGC are better placed to blackmail Iranian or dual-national prisoners than they were with me. Anyone who has family members living in Iran faces an impossible choice: Agree to spy for the regime, or see your loved ones jailed and tortured alongside you. And because unwilling recruits can’t be fully trusted, they are then subjected to near-constant surveillance and threats to prevent them from escaping. During the years I spent in IRGC custody, I encountered several such people, three of whom were ultimately sent abroad on behalf of the IRGC.Iran’s heavy-handed approach contrasts sharply with the methods that Israel is rumored to employ inside Iran. In prison I met several Iranian Muslims convicted of activities that linked them to Israel, and I heard stories of numerous others. Some were shown to have been calling Israel over Skype, or chatting with Israelis in internet message forums. Of course, many such people are innocent of any crime, and were likely just curious about a neighboring country whose name they had been encouraged to curse since primary school. There appeared to be slightly more substance to the allegations against a small number of others.From what I came to understand, Israel has been able to capitalize on the Islamic Republic’s record of poor governance, economic mismanagement, poverty, and political repression to offer would-be collaborators valuable ways out. These could take the form of bundles of cash or offers of permanent residency, not only for Iranians who assist their operations, but for their family members as well. In this respect as in many others, the Islamic Republic has become its own greatest adversary: Having shown itself over the decades to be impervious to ideological moderation or reform from within, it has become so hated that its own people—its biggest victims—are willing to embrace the possibility that the enemy of their enemy is their friend. I lost track of the number of Iranians in prison who advocated for heavier economic sanctions and openly welcomed American or Israeli air strikes on Iran.These sentiments have translated into robust support for Israel on social media, including from inside Iran, much of it making no reference to the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza. Some Iranians condemned the IRGC’s April 13 missile and drone attacks on Israel and cheered on Israel’s retaliation. Somewhat embarrassingly, the regime was forced to issue an official notice threatening to arrest anyone expressing these sentiments online. It followed through by arresting Mobina Rostami, a member of the national volleyball team, after she posted on social media: “As an Iranian, I am truly ashamed of the authorities’ attack on Israel, but you need to know that the people in Iran love Israel and hate the Islamic Republic.”Israel and Iran’s tit-for-tat military strikes on each other’s territory will likely lead to a further intensification of their long-standing clandestine activities. As a result, Iran will likely throw more innocent people in prison; it will bungle more overseas operations; and ultra-hard-liners in its security establishment will double down on repressing a population that despises them. Such authoritarian tactics have already benefited Iran’s enemies and will continue to do so, offering Israel the upper hand in the covert war of espionage within Iran’s borders and abroad.

Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” | Courtesy of Focus Features Thanks to this new movie about Amy Winehouse, the bar for movies about musicians remains in hell. Since the first stills of actress Marisa Abela sporting winged eyeliner and a matted beehive emerged online, the new Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black has been met with mockery, if not total dread, from fans of the late British singer. It wasn’t just that Abela bears little resemblance to Winehouse, dressed in what looks like a last-minute Halloween costume. Given the amount of shoddy musical biopics that are being released ad nauseam, it seemed like an inadequate medium to explore the musician, who died of alcohol poisoning at 27 in 2011. Since its initial release in the UK, several critics have already affirmed these hesitations. Making a biopic is always a delicate art form. By nature, these films are primed to be over-dissected and picked apart for historical inaccuracies, flawed impressions, and limited perspectives. In the case of Back to Black, though, the depiction of Winehouse rings both false and strikingly convenient for the people who were involved in her life. As Jason P. Frank and Rebecca Alter write in Vulture, the film spends too much time “trying to reclaim her as wholesome,” against the tabloids’ vilifying coverage. More significantly though, it fails to address the ways the UK’s sexist media and the people around her contributed to her demise. As a result, director Sam Taylor-Johnson and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh end up placing most of the responsibility for Winehouse’s downfall on her fragile shoulders. Needless to say, any attempt to dramatize Amy Winehouse’s life was going to generate polarizing opinions. But Back to Black, along with a recent slew of biopics, makes one curious as to what extent viewers must suspend their expectations and fan knowledge to enjoy a film based on true events. Biopics can never fully encapsulate a person’s life. But Back to Black is an attempt to erase history. Courtesy of Focus Features Marisa Abela singing as Amy Winehouse in the 2024 film “Back to Black.” Winehouse’s career — hampered by addiction and bulimia — is hardly the stuff of a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie. Her story never stood a chance within the confines of the genre. Biopics, particularly from major studios, have to shrink a person’s life into a palatable enough story that will attract the largest audience and generate the most money possible. Even with its R rating and a melodramatic flair, Back to Black is shockingly sanitized, neglecting to capture just how ugly and violent her experience actually was. In Back to Black, Winehouse is strangely isolated from the media blitz that surrounded her life. Beginning with her early songwriting days as a teen, the script remains focused on the intimate familial and romantic dynamics that would make the biggest impact on her as an artist — specifically, her relationships with her grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), her father Mitch (Eddie Marsan), and, most of all, her ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil, who would serve as the muse for her hit album, Back to Black. Somehow, her most notable musical collaborators, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, are merely footnotes in this story. The movie isn’t really interested in Winehouse’s creative process or inspiration either, aside from name-dropping some of her favorite soul artists. Even at the height of her visibility, Winehouse spends almost all of the movie in London, specifically Camden Town, visiting loved ones, performing for small crowds in pubs, and stumbling drunkenly through the street. Aside from a notably disastrous performance at the Glastonbury Festival, you wouldn’t know that Winehouse performed shows and made public appearances outside of the UK and had many friends, including other British celebrities and musicians. Needless to say, zooming out and portraying Winehouse as a public person would require addressing the intrusive, predatory treatment she faced from the media. At the height of her insobriety — which spawned multiple drunken live performances, arrests, and paparazzi photos of her looking bloodied and disheveled or openly doing drugs — she became not just a punchline, but practically a meal ticket for journalists and paparazzi. Tabloids mocked her body without any consideration of what appeared to be an eating disorder. Meanwhile, other outlets and comedians counted down her remaining days alive. Even after her death, she continued to be a punchline. Controversially, actor Neil Patrick Harris hosted a Halloween party a few months after her death with a meat platter labeled with her name and resembling a rotting corpse. In Back to Black, though, moments of Winehouse being chased by paparazzi or publicly mocked are fleeting, or else noticeably absent from the storyline. Audio of comedian George Lopez announcing her Grammy nominations in 2008 is played in the film but cuts out before he makes a joke about her addiction struggles to the audience’s chuckles. Additionally, her rare encounters with the paparazzi in the film don’t totally represent what an invasive presence they were in her life, particularly as she began to publicly spiral. In fact, the most devastating interaction she has with the press is at the end of the film when a paparazzo provokes the recently sober singer by asking about Fielder-Civil’s newborn child with his new girlfriend. The movie is rather ham-fisted in conveying Winehouse’s unfulfilled desires to be a mother, as if it’s a compelling sign of virtue for the troubled singer. That said, she immediately becomes heartbroken at the mere mention of her ex’s offspring — so much so that the film frames the moment as the cause of her relapse, prompting her death. The men in Winehouse’s life are strangely given a pass. Another problem comes along in the film with the inaccurate portrayal of the men who had the biggest impact on Winehouse’s life — her father, Mitch, and her ex-husband, Fielder-Civil. After more than a decade of tasteless interviews and attempts to profit off Winehouse’s memory, it’s hard to view either of these men in a favorable light. Still, the movie positions them as collateral damage in Winehouse’s path of destruction. As Back to Black tells it, these men were simply trying to oblige her irrational needs, not purposely enable them. Not only do these characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics — for example, Fielder-Civil has been accused of selling details of his and Winehouse’s love story to the tabloids — their soft depictions, in comparison to hers, feel like an extension of the same sexism she experienced in the press. For instance, Winehouse’s relationship with Fielder-Civil in the film lacks some much-needed nuance regarding the troubling amount of power he held over her life. While Fielder-Civil has a large presence in the film, his contribution to her ruin — he admitted that he introduced her to heroin, crack cocaine, and self-harming — and the ways he seemed to prey on her weakness are glaringly understated. For the most part, he’s framed as an earnest and charming bad boy who dabbles in hard substances, which Winehouse just happened to fall into alongside him. Furthermore, as Little White Lies writer Rogan Graham notes, it’s questionable that Taylor-Johnson “goes out of her way to depict Amy’s first time trying hard drugs as an occasion when she’s alone.” These characterizations feel funky to anyone who’s familiar with their public antics Back to Black doesn’t have much to say about the role of her father in Winehouse’s downfall either. Despite Mitch walking out on her family as a child, Amy shared a strong bond with her father, which she commemorated with a “Daddy’s Girl” tattoo on her left arm. In the film, he’s portrayed as the biggest advocate of her singing career, protective against the other men in her life and excessively doting. While he may have been these things at certain points in her life, the 2015 documentary Amy illustrates a more complicated portrait of their relationship. In the Oscar-winning film, directed by Asif Kapadia, Winehouse’s friends recount her father rebuffing their pleas to send Winehouse to rehab. (This moment isn’t portrayed with much reflection in Back to Black, rather just an anecdote leading up to her hit single “Rehab.”) Amy also revisits the time Mitch bombarded his daughter with a camera crew while in St. Lucia, where she fled from the public eye after getting sober in 2008. The footage was for a 2010 Channel 4 documentary called My Daughter Amy, where he, in part, expressed his own frustrations and regrets in dealing with his daughter’s addiction. After the film aired, Winehouse tweeted that the documentary was “embarrassing.” Considering that Winehouse’s family didn’t authorize or have any say in Back to Black, according to Taylor-Johnson — although, they have endorsed it — it’s even more shameful that the film spares him from any sort of skepticism regarding the way he maneuvered in his daughter’s life. Instead, perfunctory scenes of Mitch inquiring about her weight and rushing her to a rehab facility (after he initially said no) feel like concerted PR. Will musical biopics ever make us happy? With all of its missteps and murky intentions, Back to Black might just be the tipping point in a prevalent conversation about the function of musical biopics and what we should demand from them. As early as 1946, when Cary Grant played legendary composer Cole Porter in Night and Day, musical biopics have been a huge profit generator for both the film and music industries. Following the Oscar-winning and box-office-breaking success of the 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, Hollywood — and musical artists looking to hike up their streaming numbers — have co-signed a sudden stream of lackluster or, in the case of Back to Black, utterly egregious biopics. In the past five years alone, movies offering conservative portrayals of Bob Marley, Elton John, Judy Garland, Whitney Houston, and Aretha Franklin have left much to be desired. As with comic-book movies as of late, it’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt. This barrage of big-studio biopics is emblematic of a formula that’s proven to be commercially successful and easy to replicate. The expected melodramatic flourishes and rousing moments that make up these movies have become so obvious that they’ve inspired a subgenre of biopic parodies, like This Is Spinal Tap, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping. When the projects transcend their conventions, they’re often the experimental work of arthouse directors, like Todd Haynes, who telegraphed Karen Capenter’s anorexia with Barbie dolls in The Karen Carpenter Story: Superstar and portrayed Bob Dylan with multiple actors in I’m Not There. (There’s also his equally good fake rock biopic, Velvet Goldmine.) Other times, they’re elevated by dynamic performances, like Jessica Chastain and Michael Shannon playing Tammy Wynette and George Jones in Showtime miniseries George and Tammy. In general, though, there’s a seemingly impossible problem in having actors embody musical giants — like Winehouse — who we connect to because of their unique talent, personalities, and overall flair, which simply can’t be replicated. It’s hard to engage with these films as much more than cash grabs coming down Hollywood’s IP conveyor belt In a post-Me Too Hollywood, there did feel like a more obvious lane for a Winehouse biopic to occupy that would’ve at least made it feel more truthful. Many recent biographical projects outside of the musical subgenre have served the specific purpose of redeeming women from harmful public narratives and providing empathy for their experiences in the limelight. One could argue that the Marilyn Monroe biopic Blonde was a (very poor) attempt to make audiences sympathize with an actress whose life was ridden with turmoil — although, the lurid fabrications in the film complicate this. The Pablo Larrain film Spencer, a similarly experimental take on Princess Diana, shed light on her eating disorder and feelings of imprisonment as a member of the royal family. Another arthouse film, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, offers a more meditative counterpiece to Baz Luhrmann’s technicolored extravaganza Elvis, which neglected to address the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll’s abusive treatment of his then-wife, Priscilla Presley. At this point, maybe it would’ve been reductive if Back to Black was mostly about Winehouse’s victimization. Amy already does a decent job of laying that out. Plus, these cultural reappraisals have become formulaic in their own way. However, illuminating the patriarchal forces that helped derail her life would at least provide some context for her fragility, rather than positioning her as an inevitable trainwreck destined to happen. One could easily imagine a more compelling film interested in exploring the way Winehouse’s bulimia and the insecurity she dealt with affected her life and relationships. Instead, Back to Black adds up to nothing more than Daily Mail headlines.

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