Recently, millions of people have been live-streaming the ugly dissolution of a marriage. The defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard has been eagerly watched by many, as the two celebrities’ lives are completely laid open in a violent vivisection of their failures. This comes less than a month after Chris Rock made a joke about Will Smith’s wife during a live telecast of the Academy Awards, with 16 million watching live and countless millions watching clips online afterward in which Smith walks up the stage and hits Rock (with just two videos garnering 120 million views on YouTube).
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The Hollywood reaction to Smith slapping Rock had a slight bit of polarization, but the majority of people seemed to denounce Smith’s slap as shocking, sickening, or disturbing. Nonetheless, when Smith won Best Actor mere minutes after the fact, he received a standing ovation from the crowd of stars, cheering the tearful Smith on as he gave his acceptance speech. There was some understandable outcry over the seeming hypocrisy of the situation, with a group largely composed of supposedly more progressive and pacifistic people who denounce toxic masculinity ignoring the spectacle they’d just witnessed in order to celebrate one of their own. Everyone seemed complicit.
Social Media, Shaming, and Celebrities
Warner Bros. Pictures
Smith hasn’t been the only person to be denounced for his behavior recently, nor has he been the only who has feared “being fully canceled.” After writing his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, author Jon Ronson received a lot of hatred spewed at him online for attempting to see the humanity of certain people, no matter how stupid their jokes or mistakes were which subsequently ruined their lives. He later wrote for The Guardian, “On social media we’d had the chance to do everything better, but instead of curiosity we were constantly lurching towards instant cold judgment […] I was tired of us forever making damaged people our playthings.”
One thing that’s become increasingly certain over the years is that the idea of celebrities or stars as somehow separate from ’normies,’ and seemingly transcendent and beyond weakness, has been shattered, largely thanks to social media and the internet. There have always been tabloids, and celebrities have been hunted down and investigated ever since the days of Fatty Arbuckle, but the disturbing destruction of privacy from social media has exacerbated everything. Now, Twitter accounts can be combed through, and every single thing a person wrote (or even clicked on) over the course of a decade is available for amateur sleuths and invasive investigators.
Every bad joke, every meager mistake, and every dubious decision has become a tiny apocalypse. This isn’t even specifically targeted at celebrities either, with ‘doxing’ and Twitter outrage stalking anyone who dares stumble in life’s race toward the finish line. In his book, Ronson recounts the haunting story of a person whose life was ruined after an offcolor, terrible joke which was, like many jokes which attempt to satirically critique racism and stereotypes, fell victim to the very thing it parodied. In the aforementioned Guardian article, Ronson writes:
No Second Acts For Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, or Anyone
CBS
At his libel trial, Johnny Depp slowly but carefully muttered the words, “I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve had experiences in my life where one does stray from complete control over their emotions at times, and that is a very normal, primal thing to do.” Granted, the video and audio recordings from the trial shows some of these “experiences” to be heightened, frightening, and hyperbolic, with Depp slamming and throwing things, dipping his wounded finger into paint and writing on walls, and asking Heard to cut him with a knife. Whatever is ’normal’ is certainly debatable, but these instances are concerning at the least.
Additionally, Ezra Miller’s arrests stem from violent, unacceptable behavior, and slapping Chris Rock on live television is obviously assault, a dark shadow cast over what was supposed to be a celebration of great cinema and artists. These are terrible things, and there should undoubtedly be consequences. Nonetheless, if certain actions defined a human life, then F. Scott Fitzgerald would have been woefully correct when he wrote in The Last Tycoon, “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives.”
Ironically, the American Christian church has seen a slew of recent scandals as well, with prominent figures across the theological spectrum (from Ravi Zacharias to Bruxy Cavey) investigated for misdeeds and disavowed amidst religious controversy. Interestingly, the less judgmental forms of Christianity may have something constructive to offer even the liberal and progressive Hollywood establishment, with the faith’s emphasis on grace, mercy, and love — consequences and grace are not mutually exclusive, and forgiving doesn’t mean condoning. Discarding people because they’ve become inconvenient is a dangerous practice.
Chris Rock, Forgiveness, and the Common Monster
ABC
Humorously enough, Chris Rock quite literally displayed the “turn the other cheek” attitude on the live Oscars telecast, refusing to instigate Smith and disrupt the ceremony further. He even went a step further; Wanda Sykes, who co-hosted the Academy Awards, told Ellen DeGeneres:
Forgiveness is revolutionary and subversive. It disrupts the cycle of outrage, which is birthed by a terrible or stupid mistake and then fed and fueled by criticism, anger, accusations, and lawsuits. Instead of a stone-throwing party, forgiveness leads to a stone-dropping truce, at which point an actual conversation can begin. Rather than two sides (those in favor of supposed cancel culture, and those against) bickering, grace can calm storms. This is because everyone, every single person, has made mistakes and done stupid or awful things.
Film District
“Can you imagine what it would be like, honestly, to have a bunch of lawyers go through every one of your emails and texts for 10 years?” Paul Bettany asked The Independent, after his personal messages were subpoenaed and read in court during the Depp and Heard trial. Celebrities may have a paparazzi-lensed microscope under them at all times, but in the age of social media, everybody is exposed in a glass house. Instead of these houses being shattered by thrown stones, a productive virtue which could result from this is the acknowledgement that everyone is imperfect.
Everyone has failed to live up to the mythical ideal of a ‘good person,’ not just a few times, but most of the time. Yes, decrying someone else (some ‘other’) as a monster tends to make one feel like more of an angel; however, people who denounce and viciously attack someone for not being a ‘good person’ probably aren’t ones themselves.
Watching Depp and Amber Heard’s lawyers go back and forth, many people have sided with one or the other, accusing the remaining party as a heinous, lying monster. People have decried a conspiracy, assuming that either Heard or (usually) Depp is a misunderstood angel, and the other is a vindictive, bitter, manipulative ghoul. Ultimately, however, they have both done and said things they’re not proud of, and now every single person on the planet has an opportunity to view their most embarrassing, monstrous moments. The truth is, we’re all monsters masquerading as men and women, to some extent. Whether we choose to hide under the bed, or come out into the daylight and discover we’re just ghosts haunting ghosts, is up to each of us.
