Films like Amy show we're obsessed with empathy and death

It seems that barely a week goes by without the media offering up a little invigorating shot of someone else’s personal pain, just to make us feel more alive. It might be a candid, behind-the-scenes account of cruelty to a child, or a fatal illness, or some particularly miserable and shocking death. We read or watch the story, experience a lurch of sadness, and then move on, our empathy levels topped up.

Last weekend provided a cracker. A matter of weeks after her son, Jack Landesman, hanged himself at the age of 29, Julie Burchill wrote about his desperately sad life and death in The Sunday Times. It was a brilliant, gut-wrenching piece – dry-eyed yet impassioned, defiantly frank and unsentimental. As fearless as ever, she recounted moments of family joy and humour during her son’s childhood, but most of the story was about the ghastly effects that depression, drugs and self-loathing had on him during his twenties. It was a brutally complete portrait.

She didn’t miss the boy that Jack became, Burchill concluded. Her mourning, she said, was joyous. “I am clarified by grief – vivified by grief. Some people want me to be distraught – misery loves company after all, and my reaction perplexes them... I am glad God gave him to me, and glad God took him home.”

She closes the piece imagining Jack’s reaction to it. “Did you have to show off so much when I died? Those prayers? That Facebook stuff? That Sunday Times Magazine piece? Cringe!”

People work through their grief in different ways. Cosmo Landesman, Jack’s father, paid tribute to his son in a moving funeral eulogy, which The Independent published on Tuesday. It may well be that, for Julie Burchill, writing a detailed and unflinching feature article helped the healing process. Her words might even have also brought some comfort to those, children and parents, going through similar misery by reminding them that they are not alone. A Facebook post by Burchill was reported to have prevented a bulimic girl in New Zealand from ending it all. Certainly it was a powerful piece of journalism.

All the same, I can’t help wondering whether Jack Landesman, in the reaction imagined by his mother, was on to something. There was an element of showing off here, as there is in all writing. The account of the dead boy – the version which will be the lasting portrait of him – was written at a time when all sorts of unprocessed feelings are seething below the surface. It may be rawer, more sensational, and almost certainly more compelling than a fairer, calmer version written later, but perhaps that is not quite justification enough.

And what of us, the eager readers? What is this fashion for wallowing in the misery of others doing for our shared sensibility?

It was there, repeatedly, during the recent tenth anniversary of the terrorist attack on London. On the news, in documentaries and in plays, our culture picked at the scab of intimate agony. How exactly did it feel to lose a daughter? How perfect was her life before 7 July 2005? How devastated have you been ever since? Don’t skimp on the details. Let it all out.

The anniversary of the First World War became another cue for vicarious grief. The event was remembered less as a global event, or a turning point in modern history, than in terms of many small, heart-wrenching stories of personal torment, each sadder than the last.

The problem with experiencing, at a safe remove, other people’s tragedies is that it can become addictive. The story of Amy Winehouse, recently revealed in the film Amy, shows what can happen when sympathy-junkies are looking for a bigger and better hit. It was not just the media who smelt blood as the young singer’s life spiralled downwards, but the rest of us – consumers of news, gossip, comedy and chat.

The film was a reminder, if any were needed, that feeling another’s pain does not, as is claimed, make us nicer or kinder people. We want to know and feel more, and we add to the anguish. There is a thin line between sympathy and voyeurism.

It used to be said that the British have a problem with death, treating it with embarrassment or even shame. We are now accelerating in the other direction, turning extremes of life and death into part of the entertainment culture.

Misery, as Burchill wrote, loves company. She also, many years ago, argued in a comment piece that the suicides of young men should be private tragedies not public concerns, and she was right. There is sometimes, unfashionably, a case for reticence, not only for the sake of those who are suffering, but also for those of us on the outside, the avid, unscrupulous consumers.

These stories do not always need to be told. They are reduced in words.