Johnny Depp and Cancel Culture: Why America Should be a Little More French

Separating the artist from the art

Johnny Depp’s legal fight may be over, but his remains an active case in the court of public opinion. And it reveals a transcontinental fissure: When an artist like Johnny Depp is accused of bad behavior, should we react like the U.S. or France? 

In 2020, Johnny Depp lost his British libel case when a judge ruled that The Sun headline that referred to him as a “wife beater” was “substantially true.” Then last year the Pirates of the Caribbean star won a higher degree of difficulty case in the US against his ex-wife Amber Heard, who, in a Washington Post op-ed, implied that Depp beat her. 

Not only did Depp have to prove to a jury that he never assaulted Heard, he had to show that her article defamed him and that she had done so knowing the claim was false. 

Amber Melville-Brown, head of the US media and reputation team at the international law firm Withers, summed it up: “For Heard the verdict is absolutely damning, but for Depp it’s reputation restoration.” 

Yet Depp’s reputation was hardly restored in Hollywood. Film studios shunned him, and these days it’s inconceivable that a top-tier US film festival like Sundance would celebrate Depp. But across the pond, it’s a different story. 

In France his new film Jeanne du Barry premiered at the posh Cannes Film Festival. There audience members, who are known to applaud with the stamina of Soviet officials after a Stalin speech, gave Depp’s period piece a seven-minute standing ovation. 

That’s two minutes longer than they gave Harrison Ford who has not been embroiled in a public abuse scandal, and who, at age 81, was bidding adieu to his iconic character Indiana Jones. 

The Depp love extended beyond the festival.

In Paris, Depp’s mug adorned billboards, buses, and metro stations. And Dior recently signed him to a record $20 million deal to continue to be the face of its men’s fragrance, Dior Sauvage.

That tops the previous record held by Robert Pattinson ($12 million to serve as spokesperson for Dior Homme), and dwarfs Brad Pitt’s $7 million pact to promote Chanel No. 5.

The Depp reaction is not a binary tale of love and hate. Plenty of people protested Depp in France and plenty rallied behind him in the U.S. But elite opinion, such as the CEOs and studio heads who will determine Depp’s career prospects, revealed a rather stark split. 

So what should the rest of us do about Johnny? 

Consider consumers. Should they watch his films or not? Consider companies. Should they sign him or not? 

Of course, the issue is much larger than Depp. What about Roman Polanski? He admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl and then skipped town. 

What about David Bowie or Michael Jackson?

And let’s not overlook women. 

Claire Dederer wrote the book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma to dig deeper into the question she first posed in a Paris Review essay: “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?” 

She addressed the likes of Polanski and Bowie, but also women like Doris Lessing, who abandoned two of her children in South Africa when she moved to England to write. 

Dederer notes that Sylvia Plath’s suicide traumatized her son and daughter who slept in the next room as she took her life. 

Should professors pull Plath’s works from their syllabuses? 

A jury in Virginia found that Heard defamed Depp. Does that warrant further public punishment? 

It’s difficult to adjudicate such cases on our own and outsourcing the job to Twitter or the media often means replacing mob justice with actual justice. 

So how about this? Let’s be a little more French. 

Not so French that we celebrate the likes of Polanski, but French enough that we lean toward separating the artist from the art. 

If you’ve ever connected with a character in a work of art that acted nobly in the face of hardship, you’ve seen how good art can improve flawed people like us. 

If we insist that good art must also come from good people, we will shrink the total amount of good art—probably by a lot. By insisting our artists be angels we might end up producing more devils. 

Even targeting some “good enough” level below angel status proves tricky. 

There are obvious cases, like Polanksi, who deserve public shaming—he admitted to the crime, but fled instead of doing the time.  

But what to do about Depp and Heard? 

Their ugly saga seems like so many bar fights, where each party takes turns ratcheting up the aggression. Then when the cops show up, each tells a black-and-white story about how the other guy started it. 

It’s unreasonable for moviegoers to research every chaotic Hollywood relationship before deciding what to watch on Netflix. And the practice of fusing artists to their art could unravel society in profound ways. 

If we insist that the people who make art be good people, then why not apply the same rule to people who made sensible laws, created brilliant philosophical works or founded great nations?

We can uphold the “good person creating the good work” as the ideal, while still being realistic that, given humanity’s fallen nature, we’re lucky to get one or the other.

 

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.