American audiences don't like Johnny Depp that much anymore, it sometimes seems. From one angle, a lot of the distaste for Depp is now coming from the fact that he allegedly abused his wife (of a year) Amber Heard. Then there is also the claim that he is a wildly irresponsible spender who wasted millions upon millions of dollars. However, I've been following Depp's career as an actor pretty closely since long before his trials with AmberHeard , and one thing I can tell you for sure is this: American audiences , in truth, haven't much fancied Depp for a long time. In fact, there cold even be an argument made that they never really liked him at all (he is not so much a leading man as one would think). But the question is why? Why don't the American audiences like him?
The answer, as with the rest of the American questions, is simple: Johnny Depp is, in fact, simply **too much of an actor** for American tastes. What's that mean? Well, a lot of it ties in with previous arguments I've made, which means a lot of it goes back to , first, the box/prison of ultra seriousness that grown white men are supposed to live in until death, and second goes back to cultural appropriation, or something like it. In short, Johnny Depp is a little too interested in being interesting, for the plain Jane Americans. They are frightened by him, and confused by him. Deeply confused. One way to put it is to say that, when the plain Jane American-- man or woman-- sees Johnny Depp, they start hearing that old familiar Amish phone call of blandness and perpetual suburban boredom calling them homewards again. So they reject him....
Many people of course will tell me that I'm merely imagining this. Johnny Depp, they'll explain, is clearly beloved by Americans from coast to coast. He's an A list Hollywood actor. What am I talking about? He's been incredibly famous for a long long time now, etcetc. This is all the true of course. The problem , however, is that Johnnys boat has caught a lot of holes for the years, and if you look at how he's doing at the box office recently -- say, since about 2011--- you'll see that at times it almost looks like the boat will sink. American audiences have been steadily beginning to reject him since around that year. I myself predicted it would happen, long before that date. How did I know? Because I know how boring the plain Jane Americans are, and I know their tastes like the back of my hand. I hate many of those tastes of course,...just like it seems Johnny does. Often, at least.
So where is the first place that Depp went wrong? In truth, it all begins and ends, in a big way, with Edward Scissorhands. This is arguably the most important film in johnnys career and often if you're discussing him with a casual fan it's the first one that comes up. Edward Scissorhands occupies a place that Pirates of the Caribbean simply does not: It is widely known and seen as a film that , though clearly strange, was also something rather serious. Pirates of the Caribbean is obviously written off as a ridiculous children's film made by Disney....and many would even argue that, though it was the beginning of Depp's real super star status, it was also the end of his chances at ever winning an Oscar , etx. Hence we shoot back to Scissorhands , in order to explain the opening blast of johnnys stardom, and here it is: It's true that American audiences hold Edward Scissorhands dear to this day, but what's also true is that, afterwards, they never really knew how to accept any other "masked" role Johnny did for one key reason, which is this: After Scissorhands, Johnny Depp wasn't as young as he had been when he made the film, and what this meant was that he was supposed to conform, immediately, to taking regular "I'm a dead serious emotionless and colorless white man for life" roles. Most other actors probsbly would have done this, immediately. Most have. Most have simply never taken any exotic or interesting roles at all. Channing Tatum, for example, is a recent white male star who did some vaguely interesting roles as a young man who it seems is now preparing to jump into his" dead serious white man" role for life until death. The problem with Johnny was that he somehow never got the call to do this. Or rather, he got the call, and just kept hanging up the phone.
When one looks at what Johnny spent the rest of the 1990s doing after Edward Scissorhands brought him success , a lot of wine, and a comfortable lifestyle, one starts to see that he just takes role after role where, it seems, he plays literally anything but the dead serious and strong, oh so masculine and courageous white man he was supposed to play. He does films like Dead Man , where he is a frightened white fellow who comes to depend upon an Indian for guidance, he does the Ninth Gate, where he plays a geeky white reader in Gay Europe (he never has a gun), Ed Wood where he steals Sarah Jessica Parkers clothes and wears them, Sleepy Hollow (he seems
Vaguely Gay and European as Ichabod crane) and he also does the now cult classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which to this day it seems, to me, that no one besides Deadheads selling acid in concert parking lots seems to really know about on any intimate level.
The only two films that Johnny does in the 90s where he plays someting close to who he is supposed to play are the gangster films Blow(2001) and Donnie Brasco...(this is how I met him as a teen in Little Italy) but even there, when you look at it, he doesn't quite nail the white American man who never misses a shot and never sheds a tear the way other actors usually do: In Blow, for instance, Penelope Cruz, aka "a human being with tits" at times threatens to steal the show, and so too does his daughter, whom is shockingly developed as a real person, plus he ends up in prison ...and then in Donnie Brasco, he plays a rat cop who is terrified to kill anyone like the bad boys in the Mafia actually do. In other words, johnnys the bitch in Donnie Brasco. Us bad boys in Little Italy watched it and hated him for his role in screwing over Pacinos "Lefty" Ruggiero character (who had 'cancer of da prick') in that film.
Therefore you see, by the time the early -mid 2000s come around , the next and obvious role Johnny needed to take, if he wanted to be Oscar material, was something dead serious, something where he would come out totally virile. He had to play another even harder white cop on a murder case , maybe, or a struggling angry husband always wearing a Guinea tee, a fighter of some kind, etc. Or of course he could have done what DiCaprio, also known as "Jim Dandy", did, when he got tired of waiting for an Oscar: He could have gone back in time, or to Alaska I guess, grown a beard , picked up a shotgun, and connected with the mountains whilst eating canned soup or burnt meat and shot something--anything at all-- to death. If he had done someting like this, Johnny Depp would be a respected American star right now. He would maybe have an Oscar. He would be secure, in terms of being an actor "folks can trust." The chance was there in the early 2000s ; the chance was missed.
Instead of taking something a serious white man was supposed to take, Johnny Depp took a Disney pirate. A "gay seeming" pirate (so we are repeatedly told) who, as it is commented in the film, starts out with "...no ship, a pistol with no bullets, a broken compass, & a sword perhaps made of wood..." In other words, it is a character who starts a film in a manner in which we are told emotionless and instantly successful white men never start anything at all: Totally and completely unprepared, disorganized, and prscticslly in rags. Not to mention the fact that this particular white man, Jack Sparrow, is sporting dreadlocks, a goatee with beads in it, earrings, rings, a colorful scarf tied around his head, and ...worst of all...eyeliner. He also, it should be strongly noted, seems to have not a single real female love interest throughout 5 entire films now. What in good hell was this guy thinking? This was the last role he was supposed to take! Seriously! The last role! Yet he took it...and despite Disneys "hand wringing" over Jack Sparrows "effeminacy", and even despite the fact that Orlando Bloom was perhaps supposed to be the actual star of the first Pirates film (we have all forgotten this now), Johnny Depp shot the Pirates of the Caribbean into legend territory ...at least so far as the kiddies are concerned.
Unfortunately for his fans down here in the trenches of american society who love him dearly of course, he also accidentally shot himself, as an actor, when this all happened. Because after Pirates, Johnny was never quite the same again. Not to say it had anything to do with him as a person of course. It didn't. Who it had to do with was, you see, that god damn plain Jane American audience. For after they met Jack Sparrow, (as their children watched) I'm of the opinion that they were , deep down, enraged with Johnny Depp for how liberated and free and not serious he seemed in that film. They watched In horror as their children met a character they loved more than them.
So the only natural response was to start slandering him, and to make sure he would , eventually , fail. This was commenced immediately. And much to the dead serious white man critics orgasmic pleasure , Johnny just kept taking more and more roles that white men need never take , throughout the 2000s, just like he had in the 90s. He became an incredibly strange and queer Willy Wonka that everyone was "mortified by", he became a psychotic English barber in Sweeney Todd, a lunatic writer in Secret Window, a sex crazed Earl of Rochestor in a film no one has seen called the Libertine, plus an animated role, for weird goth kids, in Tim Burtons The Corpse Bride. The only role he did in the 2000s that he was supposed to do, as a real white man, was Public Enemies, where he played John Dillinger the gangster. This film came out in 2009. It received horrific reviews and now sits totally forgotten. Why? Because by 2009, American plain Janes were at the point where they could now no longer accept him as such a character. He had gone too far. He had gone off the deep end, probably whne he did Willy Wonka.
Still, even after all of it, I can vividly remember thinking of Johnny Depp in, say, the year 2011 and 2012, and thinking that he wasn't nearly as despised by America as I would think he ought to have been by that point, for all of the fun he had. It was a curious thing back then, how few Americans had written badly of him. I enjoyed it. I thought maybe I adjudged my people the wrong way. Then, however, it quickly began: The 2010s began to roll onwards, and what might one day be described as the horror decade of johnnys career began to unravel. Film after film that he did, like Alice in Wonderland, the Rum Diary, The Lone Ranger, and then the new Pirates films all came out and, not only were these films completely eaten alive by the critics (wolves lying in wait) but they were also eaten alive, this time, finally, by the American audience itself. The reason is the same as always: The plain Janes from New York to La to Saint Louis and every good old Main Street in between were perplexed and also , now, **dead sick** of johnnys "refusal" to stop wearing masks and "hiding behind" costumes. The typical refrain of lament went something like this for the average US Joe: "this guy isn't a real actor. A real actor would stop doing these stupid fucking costume roles. When's this guy gonna stop HIDING behind a mask? When's he gonna do a REAL role? A serious role?"
A serious role, of course, is what? A masculine grown white man who doesn't wear costumes. A masculine grown white man who will play roles that -- surprise!-- aren't all that far from just being a masculine grown, regular ol white man. And I suppose that what I personally find so endlessly intriguing about all of this is the idea that a non costume role is real acting , whereas the costume roles that Johnny is most famous for are "not real acting". Maybe it's just me- but doesn't it seem a bit odd? I mean, when I personally think of acting, it seems to me that making an attempt to play a New York City cop in the year 2016 would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to play a pirate, or a Mad Hatter in wonderland, or an Indian in the 1800s West! Yet it seems the audience-- stateside--- does not read things this way. They see it all as exactly the opposite: they think that JD is relying on a costume or a mask to do most of the work for him. In fact, what's even more interesting to me is that, in 2016, when Johnny released Black Mass--- the darkest and most masculine role of his career as an Irish gangster---many fans, I saw , were initially hailing it as what would be his "epic" ; but then even this was derailed and crashed. Why? It's simple: Johnny Depp somehow still went too into costume as the Irish gangster. He literally had a makeup team that had his face made to look exactly like the real life gangster Whitey Bulger he was playing. This was something actors like Ray Liotta or Robert Deniro-- who both played real life gangsters in Goodfellas-- certainly did not do. I thought the makeup was fascinating. The fans, apparently, no. They watched and saw shades of Edward Scissorhands and Jack sparrow and the Hatter and everyone in between. "He's all washed up." they cried, "in the end Johnny Depp has nothing. Maybe he never had anything at all. He can't really act. He just wears fuckin costumes."
Of course, while all of this is being said stateside, I kept noticing something very different always being said in the Great Beyond, aka, ourside of America: Out there, where not every boy is born with the dream of soldiering for Uncle Sam, it seems that the love for Johnny has, this whole time, just been growing, instead of dissipating. Literally every time I wold read about how johnnys films bombed at the American box office during this decade, it also seemed that I would always also read about how well those exact films were always doing in places like Gay Europe and Asia and elsewhere. It would seem to me that the people in those places watch Johnny Depp films and see more than what the critics here see...where you can rest assured that they will describe each character Johnny does as "quirky". Quirky. That insufferable word! Has ever a word more fastidious been scribbled in the English dictionary? I tell you, If only I had a dollar for every time I read an article where John was described this way. I find the word insufferable. John's characters are not "quirky". They are just ...you know...characters. That's all. Good characters. Characters who deserve to be in a league with all those so called serious cop characters and mob characters and shotgun shooters and onwards, but who aren't allowed to be. Because "quirky".
-- NOTES
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