Boasts Emma Cooper that she’s getting a “pretty balanced” hate: “I’m proud that it’s pretty much 50/50.” That does not mean that she is receiving a lot, a lot of hate. For a few days, the Australian filmmaker who a year ago opened a new theory about the death of Marilyn Monroe, nothing less, she has disabled her mobile notifications. It is not the first time that she has gotten into a puddle, not in vain she spent time in a psychiatric hospital populated by pedophiles for one of her documentaries, but this time the splash is different, and the stain does not come out with anything.

If that of O. J. Simpson was without any doubt the trial that marked the 90s, the court battle between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard looks set to become the most notorious legal process of the decade in question. One of the biggest movie stars in the world accuses her ex-wife, also an actress, of defamation after she publicly presented herself as a victim of gender violence. The premise, of course, is not for less.

It is difficult to find a single person on the face of the earth who does not know how the legal battle that starred six weeks of our conversations ended in the late spring of 2022. For this reason, in the documentary Depp vs. Heard, the least of it is the case Depp vs. heard. Their protagonists are not even present beyond the recording of their interventions, by word or gesture, in the trial sessions already repeated a thousand times. And even so, the same week of its premiere it has slipped into the top 10 on Netflix.

My intention was always to analyze the conversation around the trial, to focus on us, the viewers.

Cooper has not met with Johnny, Amber or their lawyers. Neither has he consulted any expert, any journalist who covered the case… Nobody. He hasn’t talked to anyone. “Really, my intention was always to analyze the conversation around the trial,” says the director in an interview with Variety, “I wanted to get away from the judicial he-said-she-said to focus on us, the viewers, on how we communicate, in how we assimilate events that have nothing to do with us”.

We the viewers appear, indeed, in the series of three episodes. We went out brushing our teeth, having cereal with milk for breakfast, lying on the sofa after work, on the bus… The most televised trial in history has not understood screens or formats. Depending on the local jurisdiction of Virginia, it is the judicial authority that opens, or not, the doors of the court to the cameras at the request of the parties. It was Johnny Depp who requested that everything happen in the public eye. “It is an impressive public relations strategy, no other would have had a greater impact than this trial,” says one of the influencers who became a commentator on the sessions.

Social networks, indeed, exploded around the process. In an analogy with Big Brother, beyond the direct from the room what the public wanted was commentators. And so, small channels that had nothing to do with the judicial chronicle went from recommending recipes or facial creams to broadcasting the trial of the decade rigorously live and before millionaire audiences willing, moreover, to pay.

All the videos made Johnny Depp look good and Amber Heard look bad, because they’re the only ones people wanted to see.

The problem with mass audiences, however, is that the public is not even-tempered and seeks confirmation of their ideas. He wants the world to be read to him according to his own prism. The public relations campaign of the protagonist of Pirates of the Caribbean was served on a platter. “All the videos made Johnny Depp look good and Amber Heard look bad, because they’re the only ones people wanted to see,” recalls another of the viral commenters, “Depp had to be glorified.” The few channels that sided with his ex-wife were harassed by thousands of trolls and were condemned to irrelevance by the voracity of the algorithm.

“It is the number one news”, the voice of a television announcer is heard, “it surpasses Elon Musk, it has more than four times more visits than Joe Biden, more than five times more than the opinion on abortion, more than six times more than the war in Ukraine. This is the biggest online news in the country.” The trial filled more than 200 hours of direct streaming in a month and a half, and on deferred he became the main target of memes and manipulated videos on TikTok. Of course, all aimed at humiliating Amber Heard.

This has surpassed the news, or the trial, it has become a cultural moment

“This has moved beyond news, or trial, to become a cultural moment,” says content creator Dellara Gorgian, “if there had been TikTok with O.J. Simpson… It would have been wild.” Popular coverage itself slipped into the court sessions. Johnny Depp’s ex-wife alluded to her in her final statement: “They harass me, they humiliate me, they threaten me every day. People want to kill me, people want to put my baby in the microwave, they tell me those things,” she said. , “It’s horrible, it’s painful and it’s humiliating that a human being has to go through this. Maybe it’s easy to forget that I’m a human being.”

“The jury has a very difficult role because this already goes beyond defamation,” says a Fox announcer, “it’s a wild trial.” The question that the Netflix documentary leaves in the air is, indeed, whether all this avalanche of comments would have influenced the future of a trial that was in the hands of a jury, ordered not to consult external information on the subject but which was already it is impossible to isolate from the general feeling.

They harass me, humiliate me, threaten me. People want to kill me, they want to microwave my baby

“How were the networks not going to influence the jury? They returned home every night, they have families who are on social networks. There was a ten-day break in between. The cameras turned this trial into a zoo,” denounced Elaine Charlson , Amber Heard’s lawyer, in an interview on CBS after the verdict that convicted her client. Days later and on the same set, the lawyers for the other party would deny the majority, of course. “We live in a world where we no longer necessarily believe who tells the truth, but we believe who we like best,” concluded a content creator.

The answer to the question she was looking for has been found by Emma Cooper almost without looking for it. In the third chapter of the documentary, a curious epilogue is exposed, which had much less impact than the trial itself: a series of documents dismissed in the trial and which showed conversations between Depp and his team in which he acknowledged that he had hit his wife. . Although this information is by no means new, many headlines about the documentary focus on this new evidence that could alter the conclusion of the trial. And that immediately puts Cooper on one side.

“I can’t help but look at some of the things that are said about me, without people having seen the series, and it’s interesting how people are jumping to many conclusions, but that was never my intention,” he analyzes in Variety, “didn’t it It’s fascinating to see how deeply people are in love with Johnny Depp and his character? It’s the power of Hollywood at its best.”