Did the Johnny Depp trial turn the tide on cancel culture?
Mercy is a pillar that keeps any functioning and tolerant society upright. It is an acknowledgement of our universal fallibility. It is far from absolution or the other extreme of cancellation. It sits in the middle ground of accountability and forgiveness, which provides the necessary open space for a society to grow, converse, and be empathetic. The bipartisan extreme of cancel culture narrowed this breathing space and condemned many who found themselves outside of the linear realm of stringent acceptance to the ash heap of history without any chance of redemption.
This outlook of moral certainty has beset the world of culture more than most. Celebrity, after all, is an alternate reality and the online world these stars exist in is devoid of the same personable discussion that allows us to empathetically hash out our differences in genuine society. If pubs and public spaces were comment sections, you would never leave the house. As playwriter, Danny Robins recently told me: “Once you get two people in a room together, it’s very hard to hate each other. Just as it’s very hard to change people’s minds in 140 characters, but when you do get together and talk about stuff, you do feel that people’s positions are less hardened than even they themselves thought.”
However, when it came to culture, this compassionate search for reconciliation seemed to not only have been abandoned but recklessly inverted. As Los Angeles band, The Paranoyds recently told us: “I think a lot of the politics and bands in the US was sort of routing for bands to fail and get cancelled a couple of years ago. I really hope that phase is over because it just seems a very nasty route for someone to get cancelled. Not to get into choppy waters but being on that hyperdrive of going through the archives to try and take down this band needed to stop.”
It is indicative of the current climate that such a comment has to be prefaced with the hedge of ‘not to get into choppy water’. However, very recently, there seems to have been a more open discussion on cancel culture and where the line between indefinite condemnation and a show of mercy should be drawn. Part of this perhaps comes down to the comment section notion that ‘Johnny Depp survived cancel culture’ following his public hearings with Amber Heard. Maybe he turned the tide on the trend along with it.
The actions that were unveiled in the trial were messy and deplorable and should’ve been way beyond anyone’s perception of perfect ethics. Even the trial itself turned justice into a public PR show revelled in on social media, where the undercurrent of dangerous rhetoric was openly extolled as top comments. However, somewhere amid this nettlesome enthrallment, a seed of mercy seems to have been sewn. Perhaps this is because of how widespread the coverage was. In hearing the fine, everyday details of the case unfurl, it forced people to engage in the full discussion without putting their guard up and drawing a line.
In the end, the judicious process of law and order even identified a grey space with its verdict. Prior to the trial, Depp was, indeed, ‘cancelled’. However, when everything was aired, he ended up winning in a court of public opinion. He was not exonerated as a saint by any means, and he should still be held accountable for his actions. This is where mercy comes into proceedings when previously it was shunned in favour of an unmovable moral fixed position that left no space for the nuance of detail in the realist way that life unfurls.
As lawyer Katherine Lizardo said of the trial: “When [Depp] stepped off the stand, I think he already won based on his definition of winning, because he already obtained the favour of the court of public opinion… once he told his story.” The pertinent point there is ‘once he told his story’. Given the nature of the trial, we had to listen to that story in full. It was by no means a glowing tale, and associating it with the word ‘winning’ seems ethically glib and gross. Revelations about both Depp and Heard were very problematic.
These are very uncomfortable truths that I have issues writing about alongside ‘mercy’ for fear that it seems like absolving their actions. That is not the case. It is merely that when everything came to light, you could reconcile how such a toxic situation came to pass and with that came a degree of empathy and, therefore, mercy. This allowed us to see what is absolutely inexcusable and what is human nature gone awry and worthy of forgiveness. In this regard, the trial proved illuminating—we had to engage with the discomfort of reconciling that people behaving badly does not necessarily equate to truly bad people.
This is a realisation that allows for a window of compassion. When we are allowed to see how the errs of our ways have come to pass, then we can grow and make changes as a society, and what at first seemed like an impasse can become a signpost for positive change no matter how toxic the road that led there may have been. This is the difference between the dead-end of cancel culture and the curve of mercy, understanding and redemption.
When justice is allowed to run its course without people putting up fences, it stops the bipartisan tug-of-war of extremes and opens up a space of amity where resolution is possible and remedying it makes society more equitable for all as we move with the tide of liberation and stop the loggerheads of stern certitude. The morally obvious will be dealt with anyway, but this allows for the grey area – no matter how dark that grey may be – to be illuminated and resolved.
