Johnny Depp’s Intimate Defamation of Amber Heard
The Depp defamation case against Heard, its conduct, its popular reception, and its outcome are consummately disturbing, coming, as they do, as part of a tidal wave of #MeToo and #TimesUp backlash.
In her opinion piece for the Guardian, ‘The Amber Heard-Johnny Depp trial was an orgy of misogyny,’ Moira Donegan writes, ‘In text messages to friends, Johnny Depp fantasized about murdering his then-wife, the actress Amber Heard. “I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead,” Depp wrote. In other texts, he disparaged his wife’s body in luridly misogynist terms. “Mushy pointless dangling overused floppy fish market,” he called her.’
When I read these text messages, most directed to Paul Bettany, I experienced a chilling sense of recognition. These demeaning representations of her dead or living body, of her most private anatomy, meant to manufacture and speak to misogynistic disgust for women generally and this woman in particular, reminded me of antifeminist satires going back to classical misogynists and to the hateful satires modeled on them by medieval and Renaissance male writers. These, too, focused on the female genital to score their most devastating hits at female dignity and personhood.
When viewing Heard’s testimonies on the stand during the sordid televised court proceedings, I realized I felt her descriptions were based on real events but exaggerated — then I had to examine that response within myself, problematize and examine it. I realized that no one other than them would ever, could ever, really know, and that personal knowing, too, is deeply compromised in both their cases. Her memories and accounts may be compromised by Histrionic Personality Disorder, according to some psychologists, and his memories and accounts are definitely compromised by his being a black-out drunk and heavy user of cocaine. He didn’t even remember certain episodes of kicking her in the back and butt on board his plane, and had to be told about it later by others who were there.
So, too, with countless other episodes where he’d lost it. No shortage of witnesses; they just like him better and sympathized with him more. That’s social and cultural–Hollywood and general. All predictable and not what I was struck by so much as the fidelity of Depp’s verbal style of intimate defamation of her femininity — her physicality–to textual misogynistic representations of the feminine going back two and a half millennia, accepted and in fact lionized as a foundational tenet of Western civilization, from Plato’s defamations of the womb in his ‘Natural Philosophy,’ through Aristotle’s theory of ‘feminine defect’ first put forth in his ‘Generation of Animals,’ to the ongoing manufacturing of disgust for women, their ‘inferior’ bodies (in need of ‘cleansing,’ feminine ‘hygiene,’ menstrual and feminine blood taboos, administration and control), their sex, sexuality, and reproductive physiology. These tropes are perpetuated in the Church, amid Republicans (the right to abortion war), and are rampant among the deluge of misogynistic social media memes and attack’s on Heard’s femininity surrounding this case. That’s what interested me; that’s what got my full attention.
Misogynist satires by authors such as Lucian, Juvenal, Ovid, Virgil, and Tertullian, and vernacular works by their medieval emulators (e.g., Giovanni Boccaccio, Walter Map, and Jean de Meun) were equally popular with the elite, male Renaissance literati, delivering up misogynistic representations of women and their perversely inferior bodies for ridicule. These works provided models for an archly satirical approach to Woman Hatred in literature and art.
Boccaccio contributed to early humanist literature with his antifeminist satire, Il Corbaccio (c. 1355), in which he pillories women’s physicality by creating an analogy between the female genital and the capacious Gulf of Setalia, “hidden in the Valley of Acheron beneath its dark woods, often russet in colour and foaming with foul grime and full of creatures of unusual species, but yet I will tell of it […].” Juvenal, particularly, includes many of the more damning misogynistic themes prominent in earlier antifeminist literature, like female disorder, drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, and, notably, woman’s reversal of the natural order as a domina who wants to “enslave, belittle, and enfeeble her male partner.”
Abjection formed a large part of what was both titillating and edifying in antifeminist humour, never so evident a factor as in Boccaccio’s allegorical narrative describing the “Gulf of Setalia” and its “River of Acheron,” in The Corbaccio. In his section titled “Beneath the Façade,” Boccaccio’s presentation of feminine physiology could not help but be effective as a deterrent to the contemplation of either marriage or heterosexual intimacy. As a cautionary tale, it deals in scatological terms in describing feminine genitalia, while using the effective metaphor of a polluted landscape:
“That Gulf, then, is certainly an infernal abyss which could be filled or sated as the sea with water or the fire with wood. I will be silent about the sanguine and yellow rivers that descend from it in turn, streaked with white mould, sometimes no less displeasing to the nose than to the eyes, because the style I have picked draws me to something else [anal penetration, “Love from the Back”]. What shall I say further to you therefore about the village of Evilhole? Placed between two lofty mountains, from here sometimes just as with Mongibello, first with great thunderclaps and then without, there issues forth a supherous smoke, so fetid and repulsive that it pollutes the whole countryside around. I do not know what to say to you about it except that, when I lived near it (for I remained there longer than I would have liked), I was offended many times by such blasts that I thought to die there something other than a Christian death. Nor can I otherwise tell of the goaty stench which her whole corporeal bulk exudes when she groans excited sometimes by heat, and sometimes by exertion, this is so appalling that, combined with the other things I have already spoken of, it makes her bed smell like a lion’s den, so that any squeamish person would stay with far less loathing in the Val di Chiana [an unhealthy, swampy river, at the time of writing] in midsummer than near that.” (In The Corbaccio, Giovanni Boccaccio. Trans. Anthony K. Caswell. Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1975.)
Depp’s copious texts, defaming feminine physicality, weren’t confined to Heard as a target; in another text stream, also with Bettany, he called his ex-wife and mother of his children, Vanessa Paradis, “an extortionate French cunt.” Strangely, and though these text messages became public very early into the trial, it never seemed to suggest to his avid fan base that he isn’t, essentially, a nice guy. On the other hand, as Moira Donegan describes, some of the onslaught of Hate directed Heard’s way was murderous: ‘“He could have killed you,” says one viral Tiktok supporting Depp, the text superimposed over photos of Heard’s bruised face. “He had every right.” The post has more than 222,200 likes.’
When Depp characterized Heard’s feminine reproductive anatomy as a, “mushy pointless dangling overused floppy fish market,” he entered the lists of literary woman haters going back for over 2,400 years of antifeminist condemnation of women’s bodies as repulsively alien, ‘other,’ ridiculous, inferior and inherently monstrous. He’s now permanently bedded down for posterity among the other more infamous actors in the patricist, literary sex wars. Moreover, his verbal assaults–their nature, temper, import, substance and imagery–found fertile ground in the traditionalist ranks of overt, covert, internalized and (all too often) unknowing misogynists going forward.
