Just today while channel surfing, I refused to watch The Dark Knight beyond a few scenes even though it is marvellous cinematically, because as I tried to explain to my son..the idea of evil in the film is so dark and so overwhelming that it drains us of any belief in life as a meaningful experience. It makes us believe that no matter what we do or who we are, evil can strike like a joker with a painted smile and alter, scar or destroy us.

The film revived memories of Heath Ledger who was found dead shortly after shooting the film because either the diabolic darkness of the Joker or the shifting sands of fame claimed him too soon.  A reader’s recent comment on the Michael Jackson tribute this site carried, also set me thinking. Is it the nature of fame or some chink within hugely gifted people that expands and splits them into two and ultimately destroys them?

The other day, I watched Guru Dutt as he quietly and effectively anchored the haunting hysteria of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam with his underplayed Bhootnath. There was so much to this man. Such depth and such joy and such pain. Just in this film, his graph shows us a village simpleton who becomes the increasingly empathetic confidante of the neglected wife of an aristocrat and then finds his feet and his tongue to stand up to the fiesty young woman who is falling in love with him but constantly baits him with sarcasm. Such an effortless actor and a director with so much to give to the world and yet his deep sense of melancholy equated it all with  Kagaz Ke Phool. Paper flowers without any value.

He crafted such a staggering legacy as an actor, director, producer, the nurturer of new talent but a few failures in his personal and professional life took away the will to live. He ended his life while the other key protagonist of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, Meena Kumari drank herself to death. Hugely talented, with a matching appetite for life, an actor who could conjure with just a glance…emotions we can’t articulate even with a million words, Meena Kumari wrote poetry, sang, craved for babies, for love, for a man who would not use her to get ahead.

She could not find the energy to stop herself from self-destruction when her heart was broken again and again and the huge toll her alcohol abuse took on her health is visible in Pakeezah, shot sporadically through the years when she went from being an innocent, radiant young woman to  someone damaged visibly by life.

Van Gogh, ofcourse. The ulimate story of tragic waste where an artist denied validation and respect for work that was his life and passion, ended it all too soon in an outburst of madness. Darkness creeps in when all hope and light seep out. But also when you carry an immense joy within and find no answering echo in the world you live in. When you grow sunflowers in your soul and find no sunlight to bathe them in.

I think of RD Burman whose joy for life was so great and so immense that being abandoned by opportunity and by those he had given his best to, broke his heart, taking him away before he could taste his triumphant return to critical and commercial success.

 I think of Michael Jackson who was hounded by fame and its demands in life (and even after his death) and found some amount of solace in addictions that took him away just when he was ripe for a final hurrah. And Marilyn Monroe whose beauty brought her more pain than joy and who went in the prime of her life either because she was doomed by a dark force stronger than her or because she did not want any more to live.

 

And now Amy Winehouse. Just 27 with unspent years of music. I do not know too much about her music but have occasionally caught glimpses of her life and work on television. In her videos, she is this rivetting creature with a voice that can cut though a  forest with its raw energy. Totally in command of her craft. Unstoppable like a force of nature. Someone who was trying not be caged by celebritydom where talent is a media myth and success the result of  PR chicanery. You could see in that defiant mouth, those blazing eyes, a burning desire to be herself no matter what. But as Neil McCormick wrote in The Telegraph, “Amy had talent to burn. Instead, it burned her.”

That could be true of all the gifted people who are crushed by the weight of their gifts. People who create illusions of perfection in their work but have lives that are flawed, scarred by pain and a sense of foreboding.

Is excessive talent a liability because it unsparingly goads people to invest their heart and soul in what they create but does not guarantee anything in return? Maybe it brings them money and fame occasionally. But definitely no defense against heart break, betrayal and people who as Lisa Marie Presley famously described as ‘vampires.’ Users of wealth and abusers of trust.

The biggest lack ofcourse is the lack of self-worth whether you are a success or a failure. How frightening it must be to have everything but still  wake up everyday feeling empty and unworthy, surrounded by demons, real and imagined. To then find solace in damaging addictions and isolate yourself to a point where life is a distant din outside a closed window and death, an inevitable knock on the door.  Success alters reality for better and for worse. Failure debilitates joy. And it takes a very strong individual to say, “I am not going to be altered by this. I will never be played by this. I will survive the absence of what I want  tonight and wake up tomorrow and try again. I will live through this because I want to be alive when the morning comes.”

 But sadly in the case of Amy Winehouse and so many others before her, the journey was not towards morning but into the heart of darkness. ‘Back To Black,’ as Winehouse put it on her breakout album cover. One can only hope that where she is now, tears don’t have to dry on their own. And the music will not be cut short prematurely and will play on forever.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )