When I heard that Johnny Depp had made a cameo appearance at last night’s VMAs, playing the role of MTV’s iconic “moon person,” I have to admit I was irritated.
Johnny’s scripted jokes, which centered around how much he needed work to make up for the lull after former wife Amber Heard publicly accused him of abuse, were flippant as well as unfunny; they seemed to be a callous insult to all women who have faced unwarranted skepticism and/or active abuse after coming forth with claims of abuse.
Then I watched the clips of Depp’s appearance, and I realized that this was no win for Depp. The alleged abuser, apparently dangling from the rafters in a space suit, joked that he was up for any sort of work — “birthdays, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs, weddings, wakes, any old thing you need” — in an attempt to show that he wasn’t afraid to make jokes at his own expense, generally seen as a necessary step for any disgraced celebrity looking to win back his audience. But his delivery was awkward, and he seemed barely committed to the bit.
Hell, he wasn’t even in the suit; the show’s producer simply projected a video of his face onto the “moon person’s” helmet. Notly that, but the segments were pre-recorded; some who were there are saying that the applause was simply edited in.
The Washington Post called this “the latest stop on [Depp’s] redemption tour;” his fans called it a “comeback.” A comeback to what? The ruins of a once impressive career? Look at the movies he’s been in over the past dozen years; it’s been one disaster after another. Amber Heard didn’t force him to be in The Tourist, or Transcendence, or Mortdecai, or The Professor, or Tusk, or Sherlock Gnomes. He did all that damage to himself. As Dustin Rowles put it in Pajiba, Depp
pissed away his career with a history of abuse allegations, a $20,000 wine habit, rambling incoherent interviews, and a string of terrible performances in mostly terrible films. MTV’s bit only served to remind us of that.
Depp’s appearance also got the hashtag #JohnnyDeppIsAnAbuser going on Twitter again. So he’s got that going for him.
Not that everybody agreed with that assessment. Some in the Depp cult predicted that the astronaut appearance would be the start of a glorious Depp revival.
Yeah, I don’t think so. Depp’s win in the court case against Heard was certainly a high point in his life. But it may be all downhill from here.
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I understand why Depp did this, but what was in it for MTV? A desperate attempt to be edgy and controversial? I suppose it sort of worked, this is the first time I’ve heard anyone talk about the VMAs in about a decade.
Looks like Depp has, in fact, lost in the court of public opinion, even if a loud and vocal minority are trying to make it appear otherwise.
Meanwhile, it seems that Facebook DMs are not actually private (color me shocked!) … a message someone sent to me earlier today, about Biden’s student loan forgiveness program suggesting I call some number (I’d ignored it at the time since I’m doubly ineligible: not in the US and lacking in student debt), vanished this evening and was replaced with “This message was removed because it violates Facebook’s community standards”. This is bizarre on multiple fronts (isn’t “community standards” more or less a standard big-business euphemism for “no porn”, and in a few cases also “no hate speech”? How is telling people about Biden’s student loan program even capable of being a violation of community standards?) but the most significant bit is that at no time had I clicked the little three-dots menu on the message in question and used the “report” option. Nevertheless, a Facebook moderator apparently read the contents of that chat and found something in it objectionable. This means they not only can read all DMs on the site, but they sometimes will proactively go into a chat without anyone having pushed the report button to bring it to their attention as problematic in any way. And may then start altering or deleting stuff, also regardless of whether the affected messages, or anything in the chat at all, had been reported as a potential violation of anything.
This reemphasizes what seems to be a generally useful rule of thumb: nothing on Facebook is actually private, no matter what privacy settings you apply to it. The employees can read everything, including “private” messaging, and they do not limit their attention solely to messages people have reported to them, but can and do sometimes go on fishing expeditions looking for violations (and God knows what else) without provocation. And there are enough of them doing so that, despite the sheer size of Facebook’s user base, there is a non-negligible probability of your messages being read. (In roughly 15 years this is the first case where I know for certain messages of mine were read by a mod there without provocation, but that’s only because this is the first time the mod who did so made an alteration; how often has a chat I’ve participated in just been quietly read by one and left undisturbed?)
Nothing on Facebook is private. Assume the employees are reading every single word you send, in your timeline, in groups regardless of privacy status, and in chats. They probably aren’t actually reading every single one but they’re reading enough that they’ve probably read something you wrote that was intended for a much narrower audience. And you can’t know which something, so the only safe assumption is that any given one has been read.
The only real question left about the instant case is who is that employee stalking, me or the other guy? Given I have a long and awkward history of being singled out for all sorts of bullying, harassment, special negative attention, extra shoulder-hovering, double standards, goalpost moves, and miscellaneous other bullshit by authority figures of every stripe, and generally regarded with suspicion and treated as out-of-place and at-most-questionably belonging in a place*, I wouldn’t bet against it being me; that being said, the message the employee chose to delete was one of the other guy’s, so maybe it actually was someone else instead, for once.
(The sender is an acquaintance I don’t especially know well, who at this time does not even remember having sent me any messages on that topic earlier today, but says three people have said he did. Drunk texting, perhaps? Though we increasingly seem to be living in a Black Mirror world, and the Black Mirror explanation would be that FB employees can delete any messages they don’t like not only from a chat but also from the sender’s brain, lest they simply send another copy later on otherwise…)
* The one exception seems to be store detectives. I don’t get followed around constantly while shopping by someone repeatedly asking if I need any help, or similar such subtle (and deniable) harassment, of the sort often experienced by POC. Everywhere else, though …
Didn’t even know they still *had* the VMAs, frankly.
The only way Depp can salvage his career now – at least for a segment of the audience – is to steal the show in a fantastic film or surprise-hit TV series, and I don’t think he has it in him. With perhaps the exception of Black Mass, his every film role in the last 10 odd years felt guided by his vanity, a refusal to accept his age, and his need to be quirky, handsome and lovable like his early 2000s image. He’s been beyond complacent.
A quite literal spoiler below for Fantastic Beasts (although if anyone cares I’d be surprised).
@Lollypop:
Captain Jack Sparrow, however iconic a character, is a catalyst—not a protagonist. (That was Elizabeth.)
Like Depp, the British Wizard Series has systematically destroyed any capacity I once had to give a shit about it.
@Full Metal Ox
You really can’t go wrong with a franchise that has fattened the wallets of J.K. Rowling, Johnny Depp, and Ezra Miller.
@ Full Metal Ox
Urgh yeah I know it’s off topic but even if JK hadn’t utterly trashed any goodwill it would be possible to muster towards her, the quality of her output in the Harry Potter universe post-books (which young me very much loved) has tainted everything retrospectively anyway. The seventh book in the series was bad enough, but the second Fantastic Beasts film is honestly one of the worst I’ve ever sat through. And I’ve watched Troll 2.
I imagine I’ll check out the last Fantastic Beasts if I ever encounter the opportunity to pirate it, out of morbid curiosity.
@ lollypop
You might enjoy this.
I thought the Fantastic Beasts series was going to be about Newt Scamander and, well, fantastic beasts. Which would have been fun. Instead, it ended up as a tedious Nazi allegory. But maybe it’s for the best that it’s terrible since I don’t want to support Rowling in any way.
@Alan
Well that was a lot of fun! Thanks! I recommend Jenny Nicholsons review of the second film too if you haven’t seen it.
@LouCPurr
Yes! I agree it’s good it isn’t good as it avoids moral wrangling. But a fun one-off film about magical creatures would have been so much better! Or if you insist on doing Grindlewald, do a grown up story with a more dangerously alluring, superficially reasonable, complicated and conflicted villain than Voldemort with interesting themes and a indepth portrayal of ACTUAL GAY RELATIONSHIP GODDAMNIT. Grindelwald is meant to realise he was wrong in the Potters, it feels a bit… queasy to have that canonically true while being “yeah he’s wizard Hitler”.
*Edited to add sorry everyone, I think about these things far too much. I’ll stop now, haha.
Speaking of Sherlock Gnomes, forget Johnny Depp. How did they manage to get Maggie Smith on board?
Off-topic, but multiple news sources are reporting that Mikhail Gorbachev has died.
I watched the VMAs and I would have sworn that was Elon Musk projected on the helmet!
The applause really sounded fake, so that explains it.
There were a lot of edits to things supposedly going on “live”, as well as a 5-second loop of the stage before the show that was very jerky and popped up for most of Maneskin’s number.
@Surplus: There are a lot of DMs on Facebook lately that are spam which show up as supposedly being from a friend/acquaintance. I had my phone blow up a couple of weeks ago with friends asking WTF? So probably one of the hundreds or thousands of people who got it reported it and FB for once did the right thing and removed it globally. Nothing to do with your personally, they just zapped it from on high. That’s why it said “content inappropriate”.
If you clicked on it, change your FB password or you might be a carrier for it next time, and tell your friend to as well. It’s spam with a worm in it; in a month or 2 you might be used to send out the next batch.
Chill. FB isn’t persecuting you. They’re not keeping up with their spam like they should, but that affects everyone, not just you.
Can we just let him fade into obscurity please
@ surplus
I always advise the new barristers, assume everything you ever commit to writing, no matter how privileged you think it is, will one day be read out in open court by a judge.
I can speak from experience. An email I sent to opposing counsel about the delights of a particular city contained the phrase “but the courthouse is a shit-tip and smells of piss.”
The judge had to concede I wasn’t wrong not least because I was stood next to a hole in the floor and a sign warning not to use the plug sockets.
Now, because of the court strike here, everyone is posting pictures of dilapidated court buildings; so in that respect I was ahead of the curve.
Kind of off-topic, but @Lollypop, I’m happy to find someone that agrees with me that the 7th book in the Harry Potter series was worse than the rest! My issue was that it tried to cram a disproportionate amount of backstory/worldbuilding that could have been built up more throughout the series. Then again, if you’re writing a series, it’s probably hard to plan that far ahead…then again again, she could have gone lighter on the backstory stuff anyway.
I had the same problem with the Hunger Games trilogy, though not as much.
@Surplus – Yeah, I’m guessing it was because the sender sent multiple messages that FB flagged them as spam. Also, it could have been through a program that made it seem like it was coming from a FB friend, as GSS suggested. A person I know had her email address hacked and used to send spam advertising messages.
But distrusting Facebook in general seems sound! (In my case, I also don’t *like* using it because it reminds me of work. Which sometimes annoys people when they try to contact me and I don’t check my messages.)
Johnny, you are almost 60.
@epitome
It really is! I re-read my old copies in a nostalgia fit recently (probably why it’s been on my mind), for the first time since the last book was released. I read the seventh at the time in a rush to find out what happened, and on revisiting I was surprised at just how much the quality dropped off. It suffers with a lot of JK writing issues that have emerged later in her career – poor pacing, overly complex “get out of jail free” lore to bridge logic gaps, and it was just quite… boring. They spend SO LONG in that bloody tent.
@ lollypop et al
There’s an offence here known as “Loitering with intent”
That did get referenced a bit in regard to the last book.
I’m not surprised Depp is broke. He used to fly the kids to his hometown on Halloween because there’s no trick or treating in France. And yes, of course it was a private jet.
@Mimi Haha:
What? That’s horrible! What sort of Vichyesque government are they running over there these days, that would do a thing like that to punish all of the nation’s children for … erm, what are they punishing them for, anyway?
I never even read the seventh book. When the sixth book was about to come out, Rowling made a big deal about saying ‘somebody is going to die! Not Harry, obviously, but somebody major’. And just based on the ending of the fifth book it was obvious to me who it was going to be, because that was just the way stories like this went.
When the sixth book turned out to be predictable in that along with many other things, as well as each of the books gradually getting longer and more rambling as Rowling got more famous and harder to edit, I basically decided that was enough and never even bothered to pick up the seventh book.
Based on everybody else’s comments, I didn’t miss much; and based on Rowling’s comments, I don’t want to do anything that would give her more money anyway.
I can’t remember where I put the Trump stuff; so I’ll stick this update here if I may.
This is the DOJ’s response to Trump’s motion to appoint a special master.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.618763/gov.uscourts.flsd.618763.48.0_1.pdf
A lot of it is technical legal argument; wrong court, time limits, standing etc. But there are some interesting factual bits.
First, they reject Trump’s conspiracy allegations. Perhaps no surprise there.
They also say there’s no need for a special master as they have appointed their own privilege review team to do the same job. They point out that they have already returned some stuff (although they say they didn’t need to) so their own team can be trusted.
But two points that stuck out to me.
They explicitly state the offences under investigation are not merely keeping the documents. They say that the issue is using the documents in furtherance of other crimes.
They say an issue with appointing a master is that this would impede a separate investigation by the intelligence services.
That seems to imply that whilst the privilege team is only passing on documents falling within the scope of the warrant to the FBI; they are letting the intelligence services see everything; including the privileged stuff.
Is that carpet a bit busy for a top secret storage facility? I’d have gone with something a bit more utilitarian.