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Writing and Other Passions of Andy W. Taylor

These are Not the Heroes You’re Looking For

Andy Taylor, August 20, 2017December 19, 2021

You know that feeling when you’ve been putting something off for a long time, partly because you don’t want to deal with it and partly because you don’t know how to deal with it?

Insert heavy sigh here.

I read today the blog post from Joss Whedon’s ex-wife Kai Cole here – Joss Whedon Is a ‘Hypocrite Preaching Feminist Ideals,’ Ex-Wife Kai Cole Says where she explains how the Joss Whedon so many have worshipped and idolized as being a feminist is anything but. She’s confirmed for many what a lot of people have suspected for a while now, mainly that the person that fans have idolized and held up as some paragon of virtue and the person he is in his day to day life don’t add up.

It’s never easy as a fan to have to reconcile this. I don’t need to explain this to anyone who’s watched and enjoyed Firefly, Buffy, Angel, or any of the Avengers that Whedon has been central in bringing to life. Speaking for myself, its painful having enjoyed those shows & movies and having myself held up Whedon as that rare male writer of “strong female characters” to have to square these new facts about him.

It overshadows the work, taints it. Poisons it. Forces people to view it through a news lens, which can be a good thing. However, this brings me to the real reason I sat down to write this post. It’s not just Joss Whedon and his creations, that I am having a hard time reconciling my feelings about. There’s another pop culture figure that I have been guilty of fawning over in the past – namely Johnny Depp.

You can read my unabashed love letter to the actor  from January 2013 here – Welcome to a Year of Living Depp-erously where I laid out my ambitious plan to commemorate his 50th birthday and 30th year of acting in film by reviewing all of his movies. It sounded like a fun idea at the time. I managed to review only about 26 of his films (over a 3 year period) before I lost steam, distracted by life and my own creative pursuits.

I kept meaning to go back to it. To start it up again. To build this tribute to the actor I admired, but along the way something happened. Johnny Depp stopped being a fantastic chameleon of an actor that I admired and became a real person with some serious issues. Accusations of violence and domestic abuse related to him and his relationship with Amber Heard were all over the press as their relationship ended in divorce.

Part of me wanted to pull the plug on my tribute. Wipe the entries from the web. Distance myself from this version of a person I couldn’t reconcile with the person I was raving about on the screen. But as I said about Joss Whedon and his creations, there suddenly becomes something else about them know that you have this knowledge of the person and what they believe in. How they treat other people. You can’t disassociate that knowledge from their work. I can’t. I am sure some people can and do. It’s probably the only reason people like Depp and Woody Allen have careers still.

So in the case of my online tribute, I ignored it. It seemed simpler to wait and decide what to do with it. I was sure I was done reviewing any more of his films and blogging about it. But do I tear down the posts I have made? Try to erase it? It’s not as if I was trying to pretend they didn’t exist. I am sure anyone in this day and age that knows their way around Google and TheWayBackMachine could scrape up copies of them without any effort. I simply avoided doing anything about to avoid having to make up my mind about how I felt about Johnny Depp as a person.

Kai Cole’s post today about her relationship with Joss Whedon was the tipping point for me. I realized that I had been avoiding reconciling my previous worship of Depp as an actor ever since the news of his violence and abuse surfaced.

For the time being I am choosing to leave my earlier reviews of Depp’s movies up. I won’t be reviewing any more of his films in the context of this Tribute. I can’t fault myself for enjoying his work when I was oblivious to who he is as a person. Now that I’ve seen who he is and how he treats people, I can’t continue to blindly laud him.

I am certain that my opinion on this matters little to either Joss Whedon or Johnny Depp’s bottom line or whether or not they can sleep at night, but that’s not the point. The point is that we, the public need to stop elevating celebrities to such heights and realize that they are human. We also need to believe victims of abuse and violence when they tell us what is going on. We need to stop defending these people just because we don’t want to reconcile our love of their work, with the flawed and messed up people they may be in real life.

Thanks for listening to that rant. I return you to your previously scheduled ramblings from this website.

 

Johnny Depp

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