‘Whitney’ Crafts Faustian Drama From Singer’s Life, Addictions And Sexual Abuse

“There are times when I’d look up to God and I’d go ‘Why is this happening to me?’…I would have these dreams about being on a bridge and the bridge going back and forth and swaying, there’s a big storm coming. I’m always running from this giant…this big man…My mother always says, ‘You know, that’s the Devil…He just wants your soul.’ And in a sense it’s true. There’s been several times the Devil has tried to get me. But he never gets me. And it’s funny when I wake up, I’m always exhausted from running.”

Whitney Houston tells this story at the beginning of the 2018 documentary Whitney, as footage from her early music videos flashes on screen. She is tall, thin and pretty in a classic American girl-next-door way. It is a wonder to think that such beauty was matched to the greatest voice of her generation and equally hard to fathom how her talent was squandered, her demise facilitated by those who claimed to love her the most. Currently streaming on Hulu, the film was directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) and seems a meditation on the Bible parable, “What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:26). 

Whitney is framed throughout the documentary by the times in which she lived. Images of her on the rise in the mid-1980s is intercut with Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” ad campaign and commercials for McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. These are contrasted with footage of the 1967 Newark Riots, which she witnessed as a child. “I grew up in the ghetto,” Whitney says. Though the family later moved to the genteel tree-lined streets of East Orange, New Jersey, brother Michael Houston tells us they were still just “20 blocks from Newark.”

Life in the Houston household was inspiring, loving and dysfunctional. Her mother Cissy was a professional singer who worked with everyone from Aretha to Elvis, while her father John was a wheeler dealer in Newark’s political machine. She also had a large extended family who loved her dearly but often failed her personally. Her brothers became drug buddies at an early age and they often lived with relatives while her mother was on tour. Among her cousins were the singers Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick, the latter of whom is accused of molesting both Whitney and her half-brother Gary Garland-Houston.

Having failed in her own solo career, Cissy Houston was determined her daughter would be a star. She taught Whitney how to sing from her “heart…mind…guts” and was a stern taskmaster. Footage from Whitney’s first national television appearance, before her album was even released, show she learned her lessons well, her range and emotion matched by her technique. She could sing any note on the scale, any way she wanted. She was a once in a generation talent, and her exact combination of skills make her one of the greatest vocalists of all-time. Wasn’t hard on the eyes either. And she could act. She didn’t have to wait long for a record deal.

Whitney’s ascent into super stardom happened fast. Though prim and proper in front of the camera, offstage she was “Nippy” – a family nickname – the Newark homegirl who her brother said, “wanted to be rough and tough.” While her sexual identity lay at the crux of 2017’s Houston documentary, Whitney: Can I Be Me, Whitney takes her bisexuality as a given. Friends say she was sexually attracted to both men and women but was discouraged from discussing it by her homophobic family and professional handlers. Her relationship and marriage to singer Bobby Brown is looked at more critically, with personal assistant Mary Jones saying the couple shared “a strange love.”

Houston’s star turn in 1992’s The Bodyguard brought about a new level of success. Unfortunately, it would be a plateau. For the rest of her life and career she would be plagued by money and drug troubles, exacerbated by her father’s mismanagement of her career. A daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, was born in 1993 but was raised on the road by two parents with crippling addiction issues she would eventually mimic. Though Houston attempted to get clean following her 2006 separation from Bobby Brown, she would struggle with sobriety up to her 2012 drowning death, her daughter dying a similar death three years later.

Macdonald doesn’t waste time covering information we already know and somehow makes the tale of Houston’s rise and fall new again. The most substantive interviews are with those whose profiles are not so precious that they can’t be honest about the singer’s failures and their own culpability in her tragic end. Throughout Whitney, the filmmaker tries to understand what trauma drove Houston’s self-destructiveness, but there is no simple answer. Asked by Diane Sawyer in a 2002 interview which of her addictions was “the biggest devil,” Whitney replies, “That would be me.”

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.

Where to stream Whitney