The Johnny and Amber Show
Reality television and true crime have conditioned us to see everything as sordid entertainment, mindless spectacle to distract the masses from their problems.
The defamation trial of Johnny Depp and ex-wife Amber Heard was treated like the latest viral Netflix docuseries about life among the beautiful and criminally unstable.
We watched the train wreck in no small part through the prism of Depp and Heard’s public personas. Before his marriage to Heard Depp enjoyed a stellar reputation as a bad boy with a heart of gold, a consummate artist and peerless thespian who was passionate and loyal and deeply devoted to friends and heroes like Hunter S. Thompson.
We conflated and confused Depp with the characters he played. How could a man who played, in Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands, the two most beloved innocents in film history possibly be guilty of the horrible things he’s accused of?
but he’s a NICE vampire!
Even when Depp played bad boys in Cry Baby, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies he imbued them with an unmistakable sweetness.
Captain Jack Sparrow was a pirate you could bring home to mom, a lovable goof with mischief rather than malice in his soul.
Heard, in sharp contrast, was typecast as a femme fatale. She has made a modest career out of playing dangerous women, reckless women, women who use their bodies to manipulate and control men.
The Aquaman star is discovering just how fierce our double standards are, how we’ll look at Depp’s romantic history admiringly and see him as a Romeo and a Casanova who loves women and then see Heard’s high profile former partners as proof that she’s a sexually voracious black widow out to destroy the men and women unfortunate enough to cross her path.
Depp is seen as inherently likable despite the unforgivable things he is accused of while Heard is seen as a villain, an unstable vixen who destroyed a beloved icon’s life and career for her own selfish, malicious gain.
Chris Rock captured the feelings of much of the general public when he recently quipped, "Believe all women, believe all women except Amber Heard.”
Heard is also suffering from a fierce backlash against #MeToo partially attributable to deeply problematic figures like Heard, Asia Argento and Rose McGowan being some of the most prominent faces of the movement.
Depp’s Stans will never forgive Heard for not being a perfect victim despite the inconvenient fact that there are no perfect victims, male or female.
Depp’s career may be a sad shadow of what it once was but it feels like the troubled actor won big in the court of public approval as well as a court of law.
Depp benefitted tremendously from our culture’s deeply ingrained sexism, biphobia and hatred of strong/sexually assertive women and our love and deference towards the handsome straight white men who have entertained us in the past and might entertain us in the future as well.
Of course the Depp/Heard trial was not a reality show. It was reality. People were hurting and suffering while we indulged our most voyeuristic tendencies.
It was treated as a public spectacle when all it was, really, is sad. It’s sad for everyone involved but it also says some very sad things about who we are and how we see the world.
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