For what you’ve heard about Depp

What’s it about a movie-star couple, exposing their sickness in public, that drew everyone towards a TikTok trial?

Isn’t everyone, without an exception, an expert on (romantic) relationships? Especially if they’re not in one? And while all heteronormative relationships stay happy the same way—do they swerve towards unhappiness, similarly, too?

Starting with being in love, with the ideal of love, first. Assuming traces of it in a person, instead. Looking at them, therefore, with glasses so rose-tinted that you can never tell the colour of the flag waving at you! 

What follows is mild disappointment, hence criticism, blown to eventual contempt. In between lie stonewalling/silent-treatment, verbal aggression, manipulation, gaslighting…

With expectations, perhaps inevitable, being the mother of all screw-ups. Only once the novelty of two new people, impressing each other, at their best, wears off, obviously.

There’s also possession as the flip-side of that love, naturally descending to low-grade hate. Because if you became resolutely indifferent, once the relationship is over, you weren’t that much into each other, no? 

Okay, I will stop with the cynical psychology. But do you somewhat see above a familiar story of the breakdown of relationships—if not your own, certainly many you know? Was there the same pattern with the vastly public divorce and defamation trial between American movie-stars, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard? Yes.

And, hell, no! Sitting half the planet away, and hardly much of a gossip trawler/scroller, what did I know about the 2022 Depp-Heard trial? Triggered by a Washington Post column that Heard wrote in 2018, calling herself, “public figure representing domestic abuse.” Alluding to her ex-husband, Depp, who filed a lawsuit, claiming $50 million in damages, against Heard who, in turn, made a counter-claim of $100 million?

Frankly, my dear, in this part of the world, I don’t give a damn. Only the ears perked up a li’l, hearing about human turd/tatti that Heard had left behind on Depp’s bed, after they’d had a fight, and he exited the apartment, one night.

Outside of that, you knew that every mouse-potato, with a microphone/podcast/handle, was an expert on this marital nightmare—‘begani shaadi mein deewana Abdullas’—name-calling, slut-shaming, spinning conspiracy theories (euphemism for plain lies), in perhaps the most live-tweeted, live-streamed, TikTok trial, ever. 

“Over the course of the trial, millions of dollars were generated by content creators,” as Emma Cooper’s three-part documentary series, Depp v Heard, recently dropped on Netflix, points out. 

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A sobering documentary, made with some distance of time, is the safest antidote to noise, getting passed off as news, given “the misinformation was truly unprecedented in the case,” as per a commentator in Cooper’s series. Which does its precious job well. So, now we know how it happened; who said what (online, in court). Even if I’m unsure why (but on that, in a bit). 

What could Depp v Heard remind Indians of? Aftermath of actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s death, around the same time. Wherein the ‘court of public opinion’, including Internet bots talking to bots, decided on a culprit, a young girl (among random others), who had nowhere to escape relentless personal attacks by a mad mob. 

If, indeed, this becomes the norm, with high-profile cases, Americans will be better off, because at least its legacy press, more so mainstream TV, isn’t half as unhinged as social media, or as equally prone to blatant propaganda/falsehoods. In India, the aggrieved go quiet, because defamation laws get selectively implemented, when overburdened courts have way more important cases to knock back. 

Indians will be better off, because we discontinued the system of ‘jury trials’ (after the 1959 Nanavati case). Wherein a group of regular citizens decide on a case. 

The jury’s verdict in Depp v Heard bafflingly went against Heard. It’s impossible, as Cooper’s series also mentions, that they weren’t impassioned/swayed by social media’s unanimous support for Depp. He’d lost a libel case against UK tabloid, The Sun, that called him “wife beater”, already. 

Was this a male, American backlash against #MeToo? Depp and Heard had first met at work, for a film, that he cast her in, and they fell in love. She deemed him demonic, while walking away with $7 million in divorce settlement.

Depp’s own history with substance-abuse since childhood is undeniable—in India, the NCB would’ve booked him for that confession alone! But Depp is adamant he never raised his hand on Heard. 

It’s actually clearer that she did. Are the two the same thing? Also, is physical the only kinda domestic abuse—especially since he’s accused of flipping a mental switch, when he went down on drugs? But did he? Did she?

That’s the immense beauty of the case, hence the series. I can see why America, and the globe, were glued to the trial—live on air, with personal testimonies, scurrilous text-messages, audio-video recordings from either phone—watching it like sport. As it is, we live inside a documentary film. 

Such a conversation starter, this, then—about love, relationships, how celeb-lives are like ours (or so not!). First World problems are the rest of the world’s entertainment. Surely, both Depp and Heard are fine. And Pirates of the Caribbean 6 will soon be on its way!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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