It’s an ugly documentary - not just in its content but in its aesthetic. There’s little original footage, just some extreme close-ups of faces staring at phones (#meaningful), the rest is courtroom footage, clips from online commentators’ live streams and archive footage of Depp and Heard. It feels salacious, like the 2023 equivalent of reading the worst 90s tabloid magazines. No one is getting to the “truth” of anything with this documentary because it doesn’t exist. Whatever happened is now so deeply buried under how it was retold in the courtroom and then how that was retold again through social media channels that it has likely obscured the two parties’ own perceptions of their relationship as much as everyone else’s.
Of course, the point of the documentary isn’t to uncover the truth, it’s to examine the cultural phenomenon that was the first celebrity court case to go viral on TikTok. Careers were built and buckets of money were made off these two and their desire to publicly shame each other.
But in doing so, we’re put back inside this relationship, deciding whether we believe a smarmy-looking drug addict or a woman whose story doesn’t always add up.
It’s complicated. Heard deserves some redress of balance after she was publicly humiliated but reliving this ghastly trial doesn’t really serve anyone. There was only one winner: not Depp, not Heard, not women, not men and certainly not the world at large. The winner was, and is, the AI in our pocket that tells us what to think … more successfully than most of us would care to believe. It’s probably time to throw those rectangular witches into the river and see who floats.
HE SAW
It’s easy to believe that a documentary like this more or less makes itself. The courtroom testimony from the two central characters is so intense and so dramatic, and the stakes so high that it would have been easy to edit it all together in such a way as to maximise the emotional pitch for optimum audience engagement, throw in some talking heads and send it straight to Netflix. But, for better or worse, that is not what the film-makers have chosen to do.
If you followed the trial and its key plot points – the s*** on the bed, the megapints of wine, the opiate addiction, the photos of Depp unconscious and covered in icecream, the accusations of sexual assault and domestic violence – it’s difficult to believe this movie could make it look any bleaker than it was - but it does and the way it does is by turning the lens on us and reflecting back at us our slavering, gratuitous, parasitic desire to feed and nourish ourselves on the misery of others.
Its way of doing this is by interspersing the horrific courtroom testimony with a series of videos made by largely awful influencers and posted contemporaneously with the trial, showing their excitement and joy at the impact every miserable revelation will have on their subscriber numbers. It provides the most powerful imaginable testimony that humanity is an organism determined and destined to destroy itself.
It is a tough watch, and the idea at its centre about the toxicity of social media is hardly a new one, but it’s important to reflect on enormous cultural moments like this one – and there have been none bigger in recent years – and to ask what we can learn from them, and what we might do better next time.
As the movie goes on, we become increasingly familiar with the dreadful influencers and their exploitative videos and the movie’s climax comes when one of the most prominent pro-Depp YouTubers gets to meet his hero and they have an awkward on-camera exchange. As Depp thanks him for his support, the YouTuber grins ferociously, no doubt imagining the massive engagement his video of the event will generate. If he has any concern about all the human suffering and cruelty that has led to this moment, he doesn’t show it.
Depp v Heard is streaming now on Netflix.
