The Depp v Heard trial tells us nothing about ourselves - and everything about fame

In the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial, it seems celebrity depravity and internet culture have reached all-time lows. Some of the least sordid allegations about the couple’s private life include revenge-poos, a severed finger, and graffiti written in blood (using severed finger as pen).

And internet culture? The trial will decide whether a 2019 article in which Heard identified herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse” is defamatory by implication (she did not name Depp). A similar question has already been litigated: in 2020 Depp lost a British libel suit against The Sun for a headline calling him a “wife-beater”, with the judge ruling that the headline was “substantially true”. But in the court of public (and online) opinion, we’re asking a totally different question: who’s the real victim here?

Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have nothing to teach men and women outside the celebrity bubble.Credit: AP

The constant interrogation of this question is just another example of our modern obsession with using celebrities to prove ideological points. We saw it when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars. The hot-takes flooded in: his actions were supposed to teach us something about race; ableism; toxic masculinity; you name it.

Far be it for an opinion piece – of all mediums – to bemoan the oversaturation of hot-takes about pop culture. Obviously, I think such analyses can be useful. Our attitudes towards celebrities often reveal our values. For example, I’m as depressed as the next person by the outpouring of support for Depp (the hashtag #justiceforjohnny has over 10 billion views on TikTok) and the enthusiasm for calling Heard a liar (just look at the Youtube comments on the trial’s livestream, if you dare). To me, the glee with which people discredit Heard reveals a disturbing undercurrent of misogyny.

But there is a difference between deriving ideological arguments from the way normal people respond to celebrities, and deriving them from actual celebrity behaviour. For those who are now holding up Depp as the poster-boy for men’s rights, I ask: if Depp is also a victim, does that really tell us anything about male-female relations generally?

We should stop looking to the way celebrities conduct themselves to derive ethical lessons about human behaviour. Heard is not an everywoman, and Depp (world-famous for over three decades) is certainly not an everyman.

The allure of celebrity is a cocktail of contradictions. On the one hand, they’re aspirational: stars shining above us, enjoying a glamour we can only dream of. On the other hand, they’re “just like us”. The spill-your-guts-out Oprah interview is a time-honoured PR stunt: the celebrity risking unpopularity goes all misty-eyed on the couch, and reveals that they, like us, are flawed.

With social media, “relatability” is becoming an increasingly dominant ingredient in star-power. There are, of course, the social media celebrities: the influencers and the TikTok stars, who are famous because they market their real lives. But even the more conventional celebrities provide ever-greater access to their private selves. Supermodels and actors don’t just exist in magazines or on screens: they show Vogue the contents of their handbags; they post data dumps and selfies like the rest of us.

Relatability is so core to modern celebrity that I worry we’re losing sight of an important distinction, between authenticity and the performance of authenticity for profit. In 2020, Will Smith said, “social media is … helping me find who I really am, different from who ‘Will Smith’ is supposed to be.” But he was quick to reject that “real” Smith after his Oscars slap. In the Instagram-equivalent of the Oprah couch, Smith wrote: “I’m a work in progress.” This is Hollywood authenticity: introspection without insight, forever rejecting the former self in favour of a newer, realer one.

An authenticity that’s curated for profit is not true authenticity: it’s a brand. And it sells. It’s now so common for influencers to take to social media to confess how bad social media is for their mental health, that there’s a term for it: vulnerability porn.

If we lose sight of the distinction between the brand “authenticity” and the genuine article, then we might start to believe that celebrities are, after all, just like us – that the way they treat each other can tell us something about human nature. Celebrities are not, and never will be, like us. Indeed, if we can learn anything from their behaviour, it’s about fame itself: the very abnormality of a life in the spotlight.

The Depp-Heard trial reveals what we have always known: fame and fortune are corrosive. Fame leaves you existentially alienated, seen by millions, never looked in the eye. And as for fortune, testimony reported that on one occasion Depp passed out, face-down, in the sands of his Bahamas island. There’s no more striking tableau for the spiritual shallowness of mega-wealth: unconscious, even in a private paradise.

And even if celebrities are profoundly unrelatable as individuals, we can still learn a lot by thinking of them as products of systems. We can see in Depp entitlement at its most extreme: what arises from an entire adult life of never being told “no”.

And maybe we can also learn a little about ourselves. We can think how (not in a performed way, but really, genuinely) vulnerable we all are: how a childish part of us is fascinated by – perhaps even yearning for – the things that we know are bad for us: fame, attention, the illusion of being seen.

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