Amber and Johnny Forever
Call me a hopeless optimist if you must, but I naively assumed that at some point the long national nightmare that is the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial would end.
How could I have been so naive? While it is true that, technically speaking, the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial HAS ended, the nightmare is still far from over.
I am on the society-destroying website Facebook WAY too often. It’s the home of my group Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin, which never gains new members no matter how often I mention it.
That’s a shame on one level, as I’d love for the community to grow but I also appreciate that it, like this labor of love website, is still small enough for me to feel like I still have control and ownership.
On Facebook I passively consumed countless reels deriving malicious sport of Amber Heard’s testimony, Amber Heard’s facial expressions, Amber Heard’s acting, Amber Heard’s tears and basically everything about Amber Heard.
On one level I get it. Heard is an unusually unlikable young woman who specializes in playing unusually unlikable young women. She clearly had a toxic, deeply unhealthy relationship with Depp.
And of course there is the fierce, vitriolic hatred we have always directed towards women who are aggressive and unapologetic in their sexuality. The Heard-Depp defamation trial gave women-haters of the world an invaluable gift by giving them, in Heard, a villain they could focus all of their ferocious misogynistic energy on.
The international hatred of Heard is so strong and so intense that it transcends the defamation hearings and the famously disastrous end of Heard and Depp’s marriage.
I’m still seeing LOTS of reels making fun of Heard on Facebook. There aren’t quite as many as there were when the trial was still ongoing but mocking Heard through memes and TikTok now regrettably appears to be a permanent component of the alternately society-enhancing and society-destroying monster known as the internet.
It’s here to stay, regrettably. Heard has the misfortune to personify the ugly backlash to #MeToo in its purest, most vitriolic form. She will forever be held up by misogynists as the scheming liar who illustrated the folly of believing all women, or any women or women at all.
This awful cultural moment will define Depp in a different way. It now seems like there will be four stages, at least, to Depp’s career. There are the teenybopper years, of course, when Depp rocketed to stardom thanks to 21 Jump Street and Nightmare on Elm Street.
This was followed by the period in which Depp ruled as one of the most acclaimed, daring and important actors of his generation, a true virtuoso who gave unforgettable, Oscar-worthy performances in masterpieces like Ed Wood, Dead Man, Donnie Brasco and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
This led inevitably to the sad, bloated superstar phase of Depp’s career, when he pivoted to giant blockbusters with massive budgets and plastic souls.
Depp got lazy. He got greedy. He became a sad caricature of a decadent, deluded superstar.
We’re getting an ugly taste of the fourth stage of Depp’s career now. He’s now a hero to some of the worst people in the world, many of whom are Republicans. A man who aspired to be Marlon Brando and Hunter S. Thompson simultaneously is now as famous for his messy personal life and bad habits as his increasingly irrelevant career as an actor.
The Amber and Johnny Show tragically will never end. It won’t end when they’re alive. It won’t even end with their deaths because even then people are going to debate what this all meant and who the heroes and villains ultimately were.
That’s the thing: there are no heroes in this story but a whole lot of villains. They include us sleazy rubberneckers in the audience, who apparently can’t get enough of this ugly story, and are intent on extending it into eternity and beyond.
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