A year after the end of a defamation lawsuit in which Depp (the plaintiff) confronted Heard (the accused), the documentary reconstructs a spectacular lawsuit between two Hollywood ex-spouses and the lucrative parasitism of social platforms. To show us two things: how much our cult of Truth (in capital letters) distances us from the little truth worth defending, and how much it is necessary to stop living by proxy.
To recap the facts: December 2018 Amber Heard writes an intervention for speakers Washington Post in which a year after the explosion #Me too, considers herself guilty of not keeping silent about the domestic violence she was subjected to, and therefore, with her testimony, puts in herself the title of a fighter for the cause. In the text published by the newspaper, the name of the abusive ex-husband is omitted, but, in fact, it should not have been made explicit. After all, who does not know Johnny Depp And who ignores the fact that for fifteen months he shared a marriage bed with a lesser-known but still promising Heard, a colleague twenty-three years younger?
The actor does not want to be branded as an executioner or to have his reputation, built over thirty years of a career, be tarnished; he then takes his ex-wife to court, accusing her of slandering him: however, he does not hold her accountable. California (where they both live) in Washington state (where the Washington Post is located), but in Virginia. In fact, each US federal state has different laws, and the state of Virginia has more severe penalties for those found guilty of libel and defamation. Could Johnny Depp want to hold a trial there – documented by cameras requested by himself – for this reason, or because The Washington Post prints its copies in Virginia and has most of its presses there? May be. We already know how the story ended: a seven-member Fairfax jury (five men and two women) established the legitimacy of the charges and sentenced Amber Heard to pay compensation in the amount of $ 10.4 million to her ex-husband. husband.
Depp vs Heard: no one is saved between him and her. And they both always act
Aside from the judgment of guilt expressed if Amber Heard unfairly accused him, her ex-husband of physical and psychological abuse, in order to tone herself, relying on a good collective disposition to compensate, at least with a certain amount of compassion (and equally) who denounces abuse or tells the truth about a drunken marriage in which she turned out to be the weak and resentful part, it is impossible to know. Hurd and Depp in one criminal complicity which often makes it difficult to draw a clear line of demarcation between a sadistic partner and a masochistic partner, frustrations, addictions, projections of trauma, various urinary incontinence, narcissistic wounds, probably rebounded, for which the other had to compensate by reflecting the desired image, and not degraded, which is always follows the fall of idealization caused by the transient illusion of being in love.
Impression, less than half an hour after watching the first of the three episodes of the documentary series, how Emily Cooper distributed in Italy by Netflix is that both Heard and Depp can’t find any other way to exist in the world other than acting. This does not mean that both of them deliberately lied, and does not mean that only one of them did.. It doesn’t mean they lied advertising court: it’s just that they are – or so it seems – two people who find it difficult to leave a part so distressing that they find an approach to those who may find that they are outside of it.
Everything in their testimony, from tone of voice to selected words, to gestures and facial expressions, immediately seems so programmed, which is even more painful fortheatricality – do not know? – than the content of mutual accusations. Also for this reason, it is recommended to watch strictly in the original language in order to better understand the nuances performance. Comes to mind while watching Depp vs Heard pass Blonde From Andrew Dominik in which Marilyn Monroe – but perhaps it would be better to call her here Norm Jean – at the audition with the director, she shows that she has identified herself to the point of a tearful paroxysm with the character being played; director to her employees who call her “someone who looks like a psychiatric patient“, he answers: “These people are attracted to acting. An actor in his role always knows who he is.“. The ferocity of this joke, probably unfair if we think it is aimed at Marilyn, contains an intuition that can be extended to a Depp-Heard couple, safe only within the script, a handle not to get lost in the emptiness of their personality, in dizziness because I don’t know where to find it. It is no coincidence that during the filming of the film that made them famous (Rum Diary), he decided to break down the barriers between truth and fiction, kissing not her character through his own, but Amber Heard herself through her “role” of Johnny Depp, in a confusion between staged and unscripted that proved to be the forerunner of an invasion that both would eventually impose on intimate space of your partner. Intimate space – their own and, therefore, someone else’s – perhaps feared them in the first place.
Depp vs. Heard: assessment and conclusions
Depp vs Heard, in its proper neutrality, presents documentary material without interpreting it or going into painful detail. Although it soon gets stuck in its compilation structure, and the interest in the pair, divided and by judgment, follows the same slope, it is, above all, worthy of discourse on role social media and gods creator who bring them to life, often parasitizing well-known characters who manage to arouse interest in their personal and legal cases: the documentary returns how massive the participation in the Depp-Heard trial was of ordinary people, among those who camped “physically” outside the courthouse and presented by many virtual commentators on the platforms Social who have also profited economically from vivisection of every detail of history. It is amazing how exactly Amber Heard was the object of not only obsessive attention, but also parodies, insults, humiliations, more or less bizarre forms of insults.. Guilty of hacking into the cult of the eternal pirate star, she was subjected to the greatest spankings of sarcasm and the worst insults.
It would be more correct to divide them equally, because it is really difficult to assign moral primacy to one of the two members of the couple, who seems to have acted more driven by attraction and that part of the hatred that exists in every love. (and vice versa) than by other criteria, a more direct calculation of narcissistic redistribution or the desire to see the triumph of justice, understood in a legal sense. Certainly, Truth cannot be found, and the more we feed our fundamentalist obsession with it, the more we move away from it.: the story of these spouses, who the first time they met, spoke of the old blues and poetry, is a parable of the gradual degeneration of every absolute into its opposite precisely because of horror and aversion to chiaroscuro, to gray and moderate modulations daily. The horror experienced first by the two protagonists, and then by the idolater fans who later became fans, all shared the inability to support the small, temporary truth about the impossibility of restoring human feelings (and sometimes behavior) from more or less cumbersome than aggressiveness and, more moreover, the impossibility of combining a jury verdict with a moral verdict, with a more complex investigation of human duties and the inevitable imposition of guilt.
From Depp vs HeardMoreover, by relearning, we learn what we already knew deep down: we have long ago abruptly ceased to consider our life interesting and for this reason have completely given it up to dreams of tension, which we recognize as possible. , and indeed realizable / materialized, only in the existence of famous people. Those of us who remain on the other side, who are for some reason forbidden to live the way we think they live, are left to see if this is a “real” kiss, torn from the rule of non-erotic fiction, or feces set aside. on the edge of the bed, in spite of whom one can no longer love, except by despising him and reducing him to rejection.
Directing – 2.5
Scenario – 2
Photography – 2.5
Sound – 2
Emotion – 2