They Are Not Human
By Ali Sahebalzamani
There are certain qualities of emotion that can only be expressed in a healthy way through sublimation into work. The article before you, dear reader, is precisely such a work, prompted by the author’s fury at the inexplicable redoubling of media coverage of the Depp v. Heard trial, about a month after its conclusion. I cannot help but see this as equivalent to digging up out of the backyard the remains of the family dog roughly a month after he was put to sleep to hand over the carcass to an understandably miffed taxidermist.
I must confess, I watched the trial with the same morbid fascination we all exhibit when driving past a horrendous car crash; as witnesses testified and lawyers sparred tediously, I felt a gap widening between myself and my peers as they seemed to truly, deeply care about the sordid horror unfolding between these two white millionaires. Even after actively trying to muster sympathy for these people I could only come up with fistfulls of antipathy. A Scottish saying comes to mind: “I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.”
At the risk of sounding like the psychologist I once thought I wanted to be, I saw hints of perverse voyeurism and hysteria in the reactionary commentary that was vomited onto the internet and occasionally straight into my ear. The trial itself was, of course, nothing but pointless, meaningless spectacle. To claim that it had any actual effect on the lives of real people is delusional. It is important, healthy even, to remind oneself at all times that celebrities do not occur naturally: they are not human. For the sake of context, I would like to use another celebrity-related spectacle that took place in parallel to the Depp v. Heard one. The rampage of once-beloved actor Ezra Miller in Hawaii—which has since been halted by the actor’s arrest, but which went on for quite a while—was a display of how a narcissistic sociopath “vacations” on an unsuspecting island, magnanimous of its natural warmth and beauty. One cannot help but be underwhelmed by the clichéd image of yet another white millionaire whose idea of “a good time” is terrorizing the inhabitants of a former colony. The only result of this sordid debacle, full of narcotics-fueled violence, has been that Warner Bros. has put Miller “on pause” in his role as The Flash in upcoming movies.
While Miller was busy making poor life decisions—as I’m sure their* lawyers would frame it—we were regaled with tales of how Amber Heard assaulted Johnny Depp, cut off the tip of one of his fingers, and shat in his bed. I feel we are owed an apology for having been subjected to this sordid information being unraveled like the unsolicited gift of a brain tumor. It’s not all bad though, this is precisely the sort of information we need to drive home exactly what kind of person it takes to attain celebrity, even during the most bitter of times, the worst divorce, or the most profound cocaine binge.
Perversely, I do believe our lives can be enriched by such events; how else could we ever get a chance to revel in the cynical laughter which permeates them? A bitter cackling similar to what leaves the beaks of carrion birds which booms through the vaulted, feces-stained ceilings of social media echo-chambers; laughter that was, in this case, partaken in by people who were, or seemed to be, emotionally invested in the trial. And these people were not few, as is evident from the trillions-fold reflections of the trial in all the myriad sublevels of the psychopathic hell that constitute our virtual lives. I would, humbly, divide the audience into three groups:
First, and largest, were those who followed the trial out of infatuation with the hidden lives of celebrities. In ancient Rome, the patricians gave bread and circus to the plebeians in tandem, but of course at a time such as ours, when bread is increasingly hard to come by for the majority of people, circus alone still has the desired effect. And the ragged masses of media-intoxicated people cannot be faulted for being enamored with the secrets of celebrity—it is, after all, one of the most highly advertised products in the demonic, many-tentacled form which the culture industry currently inhabits; it is why before every award ceremony they roll out that red carpet for us to ogle at the stars at something approaching equal footing; it is also why the paparazzi dog their every step, usually resulting in unsightly photos of some starlet shoving a hotdog into her surgically perfected face. While sharing these images with one another, the people get to say “See? They’re just like us!,” perpetuating the venomously optimistic myth of “with hard work, enough beauty products and just a bit of luck, I, too, could become a star.”
Second, were the people who saw this trial as an overly simplistic triumph of good over evil with Johnny Depp finally receiving what was owed him after the alleged injustice of his divorce trial. And this must have been true, it’s not as if he was giggling menacingly for the entirety of the trial, like some fearless prohibition-era gangster, sat behind his equally sinister, dead-eyed shark of a lawyer as she went about probing the broken mind tucked away behind the plastic frown that was plastered over the defendant’s features. Needless to say, this second group also had its ranks bolstered by the likes of men’s rights activists and all the other varieties of alt-right, anti-woman, neo-fascist special interest groups.
Third, and last, are the garden variety bourgeois, mostly white, so-called liberals who made their outrage heard—a lot of them, only after first subscribing whole-heartedly to the second group—that bringing a defamation suit against an allegedly abused woman for writing an article which does not explicitly name the ex-husband is setting a legal precedent that will render other abuse victims reluctant to name their abuser. To this last group I say: don’t worry about it, the majority of abused women cannot lay claim to a platform as massive as The New York Times. No, real people, in the real world, take their abuse and don’t even get a chance to defecate in their abuser’s bed or mutilate them for that matter.
I realize that to write an essay on a subject only to decry it as a banality, wholly irrelevant to life, is itself a banality. But the symptoms of a diseased culture in free-fall must be pointed out, at least for posterity’s sake. I would not presume to have a deeper or more enlightened understanding of any subject, however I believe a simple diagnosis can still help provide context for our frame of existence. It is crucial to see culture for what it is: the reflection of our civilization’s collective consciousness. In this paradigm, the internet and all the psychic sewage that it holds in its unholy bowels is our collective subconscious. In psychoanalytical terms, the subconscious is the slightly more accessible part of the unconscious which is, itself, the greater part of the psyche which is not under focal awareness, meaning that neither operates under moral principles as morality is the result of conscious, rational effort on our part. Therefore, the unconscious is the realm of the “pleasure principle,” the absolute desire towards the immediate attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort. Today, the pleasure principle is empowered more than ever by social media which, in turn, is orchestrated by myriad public relations firms tasked with controlling the image of institutions and people of note, and algorithms that project that image into our mass-psyche in ways that are calculated to have the most appealing and, therefore, addicting effect.
This is us, currently. Unable to tear our eyes away from the details of the lives of vacuous individuals who flicker momentarily against the backdrop of humanity’s psychic collapse, we call them stars. And just like stars hanging in the frozen, endless night of space, they give us the false impression that individuals can matter, if only they could “make it,” even as they are pulled inside out, like a sock, by their own gravity well and turned into black holes. And just as a black hole sucks the light out of the universe, celebrities, too, make the world a darker place. That gravity well represents, of course, the luxury which they have attained, their so-called lifestyle of perpetually being catered to and indulged. Luxury, however, is never meant to be attained, only aspired to, which results in anomalies that can be explained, at best, by neurosis. There are also the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have become celebrities only because of their wealth; men who have all the pleasures money can buy, right here, and are still intent on leaving the planet, which begs the rather redundant question: what crimes exactly have these men committed that they feel such an urgent need to flee the planet?
Celebrity culture becomes even more sinister when viewed against the backdrop of the ever-widening wealth gap; the increasingly authoritarian political landscape in the West; the simple, old-school, state-sponsored, brutality in the East; and, lest we forget, our impending climate disaster. Imagine, in the midst of all this, the gall it takes to tell the masses to idolize some Hollywood starlet because she took a trip on her private jet to a third-world country and adopted a child who was orphaned by weapons manufactured by the same company who made her private jet.
Having said all of this, I must confess, I am a fan of both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. As a couple, of course. Individually, I don’t really care for either of them. In my heart of hearts, I hope this essay reaches them so that, with the warm familiarity of a joint defamation lawsuit against this magazine, they can resuscitate their love and get back together.
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* Self-identified pronoun.
