The primary time it occurred, she mentioned, she thought it was a joke. On the stand in her defamation trial just a few weeks in the past, the actor Amber Heard shared her account of the primary time her now-ex-husband, Johnny Depp, allegedly hit her. She’d requested him about one among his tattoos: the one on his bicep (the one he’d famously had edited) that to her appeared like a muddle of black ink. The tattoo spelled out wino, she mentioned he advised her. Considering he was kidding—Depp had publicly struggled with substance abuse, and Heard claimed he’d been consuming that night time—she laughed. After which, she alleged: “He slapped me throughout the face.” Her response, she testified, was to chuckle some extra. “I didn’t know what else to do. I assumed, This have to be a joke. This have to be a joke. As a result of I didn’t know what was occurring.”
Depp has denied ever hitting or assaulting Heard. And the trial shouldn’t be straight ligitating whether or not he did so. As a substitute, the proceedings heart on a Washington Submit op-ed that Heard wrote in 2018 in regards to the wrath survivors of sexual violence face in a tradition that prefers them to remain silent. Heard didn’t identify Depp within the article, as a substitute calling herself “a public determine representing home abuse”; nonetheless, Depp sued Heard for $50 million, claiming that the article harmed his popularity and consequently his incomes potential. (She coutersued him for $100 million.)
The trial, in some methods a repetition of Depp’s failed libel go well with towards a U.Okay. newspaper, has been onerous and unhappy to look at. Each events have made claims of violence and psychological abuse towards the opposite, and have described their allegations in bleak and sometimes graphic phrases. Watching the testimonies can really feel like rubbernecking previous the wreckage of individuals’s lives. So it has been putting how typically laughter has been a half of the proceedings, each within the courtroom and within the flurry of public dialog that the trial has provoked. Heard’s description of her response to that first alleged act of violence was prophetic: Many individuals, taking within the trial, have contended with its dismal complexities by insisting that this have to be a joke.
One of many first and most consequential selections that the choose, Penney Azcarate, made within the case was to permit the trial to be broadcast in actual time. It has aired on TV and on livestreams, which generally have accompanying chat capabilities: a authorized continuing with a feedback part. And it has been handled, by many, as a TV present: half cleaning soap opera, half true-crime procedural, half sporting occasion, half sitcom. Whereas cross-examining Depp final month, one among Heard’s legal professionals learn a textual content message that the actor had despatched about his former spouse: “Hopefully that cunt’s rotting corpse is decomposing within the fucking trunk of a Honda Civic,” it mentioned. A YouTube livestream erupted in digitized laughter. “LOL Honda Civic,” somebody mentioned.
Customary stuff, sure, for such a discussion board: an nameless person laughing violent language away. However the logic of the feedback part, cool and merciless, has labored its means into the broader dialogue of the trial as effectively. A preferred pattern on TikTok has discovered folks repurposing Heard’s tearful testimonies, changing her allegations into playful memes. ’NSync’s Lance Bass, in a since-deleted publish, mugged melodramatically to the audio of one among Heard’s abuse allegations. (“Lance Bass may need a profession in Hollywood forward of him,” went the New York Submit’s approving assessment of the efficiency.) One other TikTok person provided an analogous mash-up, this one superimposing Saturday Night time Dwell footage of Kim Kardashian outfitted in a choose’s gown over video of Heard’s testimony: “Ew, that is so cringe,” the fake jurist pronounces. “Responsible.” The video presently has almost 6 million likes.
This trial has include amusing observe, and that has given approach to a paradox: For all the eye it has garnered, the Heard-Depp trial has been, finally, a research in apathy. Jokes make mild of issues in each sense. They provide levity, sure, however they’ll additionally provide tacit permission to ignore different folks’s ache. Jokes are, successfully, motions to dismiss. And that’s exactly how they’ve been used because the trial has aired allegations of abuse. What are the info of the case? What has Heard been saying on the stand? What has Depp been saying? How would possibly contextual data—about the best way trauma can affect reminiscences; about the best way alleged abusers can undermine their victims—have an effect on their claims? Jokes make these questions irrelevant. They make proof itself irrelevant. The style of this trial is comedy, they insist, and comedy’s obligations start and finish with laughter. LOL Honda Civic.
That pressure of callousness—lol nothing issues, utilized to a authorized case during which issues very a lot matter—has been a function of popular culture’s therapy of the trial as effectively. Two weeks in the past, Saturday Night time Dwell devoted its chilly open to an tried satire of the case. It begins with Kate McKinnon as a reporter introducing protection of what a chyron calls the “Depp v. Heard Cuckoo Trial”: “With all the issues on the earth,” she says, “isn’t it good to have a information story we are able to all collectively watch and say, ‘Ooh, glad it ain’t me?’” The sketch goes on to mock the trial’s circus-like ambiance. (“I’ll enable it,” SNL’s Azcarate, performed by Cecily Sturdy, says at one level, “as a result of it does sound enjoyable, and this trial is for enjoyable.”)
The present, ostensibly, was criticizing the best way the trial’s tragedies have been repackaged as spectacles. However its jokes merely furthered all of the nihilism. SNL took care to focus on two of the trial’s most sensational parts: a contested incident involving fecal matter left in a mattress that the couple shared, and Depp’s declare that Heard threw a vodka bottle at him in a fashion that finally severed the tip of his finger (she denies this, and a medical professional solid doubt on the declare within the trial). What the sketch glossed over, nonetheless, was one other factor of Heard’s testimony: She alleged that Depp had threatened to “carve up” her face with a damaged bottle—and that he had sexually assaulted her with a bottle throughout a combat. “I didn’t know if the bottle that he had inside me was damaged,” she mentioned on the stand. (Depp has denied that he ever hit or assaulted Heard.) Heard additionally testified, “I’ve by no means been so scared in my life.”
That SNL would course of a present occasion as comedy—or that its try wouldn’t be humorous—shouldn’t be outstanding. What’s notable, although, is all that the present needed to ignore in its effort to show alleged home violence right into a joke. SNL, in its sketch, was doing roughly the identical factor that web audiences have completed as they’ve claimed the trial for their very own amusement: It utilized the assumptions of stagecraft to a authorized continuing. It handled Heard and Depp as characters, and professional witnesses as visitor stars, in an ongoing present. On Tuesday, the psychiatrist Richard Shaw took the stand. As he launched his credentials in a British-inflected accent, the chat that flows subsequent to one of many trial’s livestreams exploded. “Likable man! Brits are the perfect!!” one remark mentioned. “I simply really feel like this man is so trustworthy,” declared one other. “I belief him,” mentioned one other. Quickly, the constructive critiques of the efficiency that had but to happen took a flip towards the comparative. “johnny depp’s witnesses look trustworthy and honest whereas amber’s appeared like a bunch of liars,” one introduced. One other: “Nobody on Amber’s facet is respectable.”
Little surprise that conspiracy theories about Heard have flourished because the trial has gone on: Good plots require their villains. And fan service is sweet enterprise. Final week, Vice reported that The Day by day Wire, the right-wing media outlet, spent tens of hundreds of {dollars} on Fb and Instagram advertisements that largely “promote one-sided articles and movies with a transparent bias towards Heard.” The trial, in that means, has taken the scale of a political marketing campaign: propaganda, picture administration, onerous proof subsumed into imprecise partisanship. The case, the information and evaluation website Puck’s Matthew Belloni suggests, is a bellwether. With it, on prime of all the pieces else, “the darkish arts of media manipulation for political achieve have come to Hollywood disputes, and there’s no going again.”
The jokes have served that manipulation. They’ve demeaned not simply Amber Heard, but additionally those that see within the trial’s allegations shades of their very own experiences. Survivors watch and be taught. They see the emoji that cackle throughout the livestreams. They see the memes. They register the lols. They watch as a tradition that may’t inform the distinction between horror and humor has, and makes, its enjoyable. The trial will quickly come to its conclusion. However its final result, in a technique, is already clear. When allegations of abuse grow to be fodder for nationwide comedy, that’s its personal proof—and its personal verdict.
