HEARING the closing arguments of the Johnny Depp trial and seeing the mostly pro-Depp comments online, I—(Scarriet (2009—) was moved to comment. Keep reading. If you care about art and culture, you won’t be disappointed.
IN a trial of essentially Hollywood hearsay, why not err on the side of defending the woman?
WHO are these millions of losers (a great deal of them women) defending a powerful husband in a deeply screwed-up marriage—from its very beginnings?
WHY are Pirate fans passionately sure they know the important evidence, when everyone can clearly see the story of the marriage in question is murky and inscrutable?
DEPP himself doesn’t remember things he did—and for which (in writing that passes as evidence) he passionately apologized to Heard for. Yet you feel you can occupy Amber Heard’s head and know everything that happened? Never mind that you don’t know these two individuals in every aspect of their secret existence. Yet you seriously believe you know everything that happened? Really?
WE don’t know enough to defend Depp—even if in our gut we want to like him, or want to believe him, or, just in general, based on our own experience, we want the world to understand “women can be bad, too.”
SHOULD one believe the spouse who was less discrete, simply because they recorded more stuff, or had more sycophants willing to testify for them? Both were violent, both threw things, both used humiliating revenge tactics to get even, both practiced psychological abuse—and no outsider can possibly be sure of which tally of abuses within the marriage favors the other. What is the reason, then, for strenuously believing the more famous spouse and his sycophants—unless one is a sycophant (or a misogynist) oneself? Why humiliate yourself by telling the world you belong to “Team Depp?” Have you no self-respect?
TAKING Johnny’s side in this trial might feel to the exceedingly moral akin to the rhetoric of men who are pro-choice—for the wrong reasons. Even the most controversial debates can be stopped in their tracks when confronted with the spiritual simplicity of the saint: why did you pick this person to love—and not love them? The saint will occasionally wander into online mob battles, but when, these days, has this ever had an effect?
HOWEVER, this is not really the larger point worth making. There is a much more important aspect to the Depp trial, which I will get to in a second.
JOINING in the real-time, online, discussion—where one is inclined to make brief, witty, remarks–this dispassionate reporter and Scarriet editor felt adrenaline, road-rage, excitement—and guiltily blurted out comments like the following:
Johhny’s hot, dark-haired, lawyer, trashing his blonde ex! Oh this is good! A new entertainment genre! LOL
Confused people think he’s the victim. How sad.
Hollywood hearsay. Depp’s tanking career blamed on his wife. Just pathetic, Johnny.
No one forced you to marry her, Johnny! It was your choice. Own it. If you were a bad husband…that’s on you.
I joined the mob.
Was that me?
I have to own it. It was.
I don’t feel too bad about it. It was temporary.
I noticed how thrilling it felt; how it interfered with my usual calm demeanor. I didn’t like this.
I’M happy I was self-aware enough to take stock of this.
I also understood much of my anti-Johhny animus was born from my perception that Amber had less defenders—my sense of chivalry had been awoken; I am not strictly, necessarily, pro-Amber or anti-Johhny.
I also realized my allegiance could swiftly change if it suited my argumentative powers, and, again, this was a good thing to notice about myself.
THE fine arts once served this purpose—capturing humiliating gossip impulses we all have, and enlarging them and transforming them into more reasonable discourses. The arts need not fear lowbrow events (such as the Johnny Depp trial)—all that matters is our response to them. Great art traditionally uses popular subjects as its food.
BY moving away, at rapid speed, from history painting towards abstract painting, early 20th century Modernism revealed its reactionary nature. High-brows may protest all they want, but artists like Kandinsky and Schoenberg represent cultural lobotomy—of course such impulses always attract many; killing brain cells is associated with the pleasure (and even the mob-like ecstasy) of drunkenness. Evil is abstractly and physically pleasurable; it is a wonder that good ever wins.
THE last, and most important thing to notice: the very genre itself of online commenting induces one to be aggressive and one-sided. Mob mentality is real.
THE essay format finds me (as you may have noticed) in a calmer state. A lengthier medium encourages a thoughtful person to argue against herself. This is very important.
REFLECTION itself is inhibited in the briefer, mob-communication, medium.
EDGAR Allan Poe, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” asserts that the duration of an ideal poem is crucial.
TOO-obvious points, which the learned overlook on account of their overly proud and sophisticated nature, was the learned and popular Poe’s specialty.
TOO short, the poem is unable to make a proper impression; too lengthy, the poem wearies us. Poe settled on 100 lines as a good length for a poem to win over both the popular and the critical taste. “The Raven” is 108 lines. With diminished modern attention spans, with the increase of academic importance per the muse, who knows what the ideal length of a poem is now? “The Waste Land” is about 400 lines. The “Red Wheelbarrow” is almost without lines, and can be measured more in characters, like a Twitter post.
POE is a pebble thrown into the pond of living literature; the “Poe-effect” we currently live in features the reactive landscape of high-brows offended by Poe’s learned simplicity: the “Wheelbarrow” is considered learned out of spite, as is the mediocrity of so many loose, modern, poets like WC Williams.
THE Depp trial was lengthy—and has attracted mobs of “learned experts” who can boast in great detail their allegiance—but the Twitter-length post is generally how these “experts” express themselves. Even though the trial is long, the medium of expression about the trial is short.
ART CRITICISM is valuable to the appreciation of poetry, or anything, really; it is the length of response which makes us civilized, or not.
POE was right.
DOES this mean we should censor brief reactions to anything?
WHAT an interesting idea!
IMAGINE an online platform that allows not posts of a certain minimum length, like Twitter (the realm of mob behavior) but only allows posts which meet an upper limit of lengthy (therefore thoughtful) response?
TRUE, “brevity is the soul of wit,” and empty heads will prattle on at length. So there’s that.
HOWEVER, brevity is also the soul of rudeness and stupidity—and the stupid cannot possibly fire up a mob if they are forced to lay out their “reasoning” for any reasonable length of time.
LET us have an online platform guided by the Poe rule. Let us be legislated by genius rather than mobocracy.
ONLINE chat must be “Raven”-length.
Civilization will return.