Fuck You, Johnny Depp                                                                        Dave Newman

Acting must do something to the brains of actors, specifically the prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead responsible for decision making and emotional control. Actors act and they lose basic, necessary functions.

Necessary functions for an actor include picking films that aren’t total shit.

I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know exactly what happens, but it does happen. One second, you’re young and broke and trying to understand Method Acting by watching Marlon Brando in On The Waterfront or reading up on Lee J. Cobb who studied an elephant in a zoo to play Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman; next second, you’re on Entertainment Tonight, waving to the paparazzi, a giant diamond engagement ring on your left hand courtesy of a famous actor who used to be the Mouseketeer that loved to breakdance.

Acting, I’m saying, leads to brain damage.

I’m not talking about Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz or even Eddie Murphy.

If you’ve seen Tom Cruise dressed up in Civil War garb or as a Samurai or both in the same film, you know he’s fucking retarded.

Cameron Diaz does one good thing on screen—she stumbles, breaks a high heel, looks at the heel, and keeps going. That’s it.

Eddie Murphy has been doing the same stupid laugh since 1980. If you offered him twenty million dollars, he’d blow an ogre, or at least voice the lickety-lickety noises behind the animation.

All of this is fine. Parents need somewhere to take their kids on the weekend or something stupid to ease their own brains. Hollywood talks about art and storytelling but seldom achieves either. Hollywood is distraction. The moving pictures dazzle with swords and lasers and big tits shot from the side so we can’t see the nipple. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz star in the same film, looking gorgeous with wind-blown hair.

But I’m talking about actors who have made art, know how to make art, and don’t.

I’m talking about Johnny Depp.

I’m talking about an actor who can do a pitch-perfect Hunter S. Thompson on screen, not an impersonation or a caricature, but a real-life, detailed character; an actor who can go toe-to-toe with Al Pacino while Pacino plays a guy who has cancer and is about to be off’d by his friends and family.

Allow me to list Johnny Depp’s last three roles: Rango, in which he plays an animated lizard; Rango the video game, in which he plays an animated lizard; The Tourist, in which he plays a math teacher from Wisconsin who ends up in Europe and in love with a spy played by Angelina Jolie.

Think about that.

A lizard, a lizard, and an action movie with Angelina Jolie.

Let me say that again: a lizard, a lizard, and a movie where he wears a funny hat and a beard made from discarded pubic hair.

Now go back to the beginning of Johnny Depp’s career.

Before TV and movies, Depp wanted to be a musician. He played guitar. He wrote songs. He quit high school to play in a band, The Kids. The Kids were popular locally. They opened for Iggy Pop. They played all around Southern Florida and shared a scene with Charlie Pickett, a badass slide guitarist who would later influence Jack White. Things were great. The Kids headed to Hollywood. They wanted to be famous. They played out. It didn’t work. They didn’t get a record deal. The band headed home.

Johnny Depp stayed on.

He was young and sexy and had the kind of eyes that make teenage girls orgasm. He met Nic Cage and Nic Cage encouraged him to be an actor. So Johnny Depp did a couple schlock films. The films didn’t pay much. He worked bad jobs. He married a make-up artist. His big break, working with Francis Ford Coppola on Apocalypse Now, ended up on the cutting room floor. He was, more or less, broke.

So he did what broke people do.

He compromised.

He took the lead in a very bad TV drama called 21 Jump Street. 21 Jump Street starred people so beautiful and sculpted they could drop years from their lives and play undercover cops in high schools and on college campuses. Depp played Officer Tom Hanson. He was tough but sexy. He kicked ass and busted bad guys. The show always had a moral (don’t do drugs! don’t get laid!), and some episodes were followed by a public service announcement. Depp said about this time in his life, “I was headed for lunch boxes.” Being on a lunch box is bad, but at least Depp got paid $45,000 per episode.

In the late 80s, forty-five grand was a lot of money.

Good for Johnny Depp.

He was young, he came from people without money, he had very little formal education, he got offered a shit TV show, he took it, he got rich. That’s great. It’s fantastic. I wish everyone in America, talented or talentless, could live that dream.

Johhny Depp got sick of 21 Jump Street. He realized how fucking stupid the show was. All that money they were paying him to be an undercover cop helped him think. The forty-five grand per episode cleared his head and refocused his dreams. He complained about certain narratives. He outright refused to do other episodes because the writing was so bad or the material was too conservative. Depp wanted to be an actor, not a lunchbox. He wanted to make art, and Fox TV does not make art. Depp, with a little power and money and privilege, stood up. He held true. Eventually the producers let him out of his contract.

Now look at the films Depp starred in as he was finishing up on TV: Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, Benny and Joon, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco, and Dead Man.

I’m not saying all of these films are perfect. They’re not. I’ve seen Arizona Dream twice, once because it starred Johnny Depp and Lili Taylor, and the second time to see if I could make any sense of the story. I couldn’t. Johnny Depp dreams of Eskimos. Lili Taylor wants to kill herself and be reincarnated as a turtle. The film is pretty awful, but it’s earnest. It was obviously not written for commercial reasons. I admire that. Art should make money, lots of it, but it shouldn’t be created for money.

Which is why Depp’s early acting performances are so interesting.

Edward Scissorhands is a beautiful fable inspired by Frankenstein.

Benny and Joon deals with a mentally ill woman, and Depp shows off his love of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? was based on a very good novel and stars a four-hundred-pound woman and Leonardo DiCaprio playing a severely mentally ill kid.

In Ed Wood, surely the most successful, least commercial movie ever, Depp plays a B-movie director who likes to wear women’s clothes and hang out with an aging morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi.

All of these characters, even Edward Scissorhands, are real. They are built on flaws they will never overcome.

We’re all built that way. We cut what we want to hold. We struggle to live on our own. We can never have enough love. Our ideas are stupid and unsellable. We are all failures. Look far enough ahead and you get death.

Johnny Depp knew this.

The films he chose made the world better for people who like film.

Consider Dead Man, directed by Jim Jarmusch.

Dead Man, set in the mid-1850s, is a Western completely shot in black-and-white. The film starts weird—weird like real life is weird and not like art that’s trying to be deep—and rolls hard into the lives of normal folks surviving early industrial America.

Depp plays William Blake, a man heading west to take a job as an accountant. On the train, he sees people killing buffalo. When he arrives in Machine, he finds out his job as an accountant for the local metal works company is gone. The manager forces him from the office at gunpoint. Outside, a woman blows a local in an alley; the local is not very nice to the woman’s head. William Blake meets another lady who sells paper flowers. She used to be a prostitute. They go back to her place. Her boyfriend shows up and kills her and shoots William Blake. William Blake shoots the boyfriend and kills him back. Then he escapes through an open window.

I hope I’m not making this sound typical. The plot has so many quirks, so many odd and terrible and beautiful images, that even the gun fights shine like something out of a book, like the viewer is somehow helping create the action instead of just observing it.

William Blake goes on the run after this. He meets an Indian named Nobody. Nobody was raised by white people but he dresses in traditional Indian clothes and lives in the wild.  Nobody decides William Blake is the real William Blake, the English poet obsessed with enlightenment. Thus, he becomes obsessed with William Blake, the accountant, the man who has killed and been shot, the man on the run, the man who is not a poet but a schmuck from Cleveland who tried to change his life with a better job and instead found a better life by simply staying alive in a place that didn’t want him to stay alive.

You don’t have to love Dead Man. You don’t have to like it. But after watching it, you’ll be sure that Johnny Depp picked the role because it was great. He picked the role because it was sincere and human and, maybe, because the commercial possibilities were nil. Ninety million people were not going to see a film the director described as “an acid Western.”

Johnny Depp was thirty-two years old when Dead Man came out. He’d kicked his old heartthrob image to the curb. Critics loved him. He had just worked with Jim Jarmusch, a director with as much integrity as any director working. Johnny Depp was an artist, a serious actor, a great actor, an actor’s actor. He could do whatever he wanted.

What he wanted to do was to create shit.

He wanted to make money and play lizards.

Transitions are not that fast or simple but it was coming, the brain damage, the way money and fame crack the skull of artistic integrity and bleed out commercial slop.

For every decent film Johnny Depp did after Dead Man, he delivered an additional clusterfuck. He delivered The Astronaut’s Wife, a movie about spacemen who come home possessed by alien spirits. Johnny Depp plays the main spaceman, Spencer Armacost. Spencer Armacost loses contact with NASA in outer space and something happens. Back on earth, he knocks up his beautiful wife with alien babies. In the end, Johnny Depp as Spencer Armacost is electrocuted and the alien spirit is set free before re-entering his wife who wanted to kill the thing all along.

Think about that. Johnny Depp, who seems like a literate guy, who shows up in documentaries about beatniks and outsider writers, who was best pals with Hunter S. Thompson, looked at the script for The Astronaut’s Wife, saw the part about a tentacled extraterrestrial being, and signed on as the leading man. It’s the kind of greed so common among artists with access to money that we barely notice it anymore. I mean, there are nine million fantastic novels out there that deserve to be adapted into films, and Johnny Depp overlooks them all and says, “Fuck it, let’s do The Astronaut’s Wife.”

Then he looked at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and said, “I’ll put on a shit-ton of make-up and even small children will know I’ve sucked the humanity right out of Willy Wonka.”

Then he did the same thing with the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, gobbing on the face paint and chirping like he’d eaten a tweety bird.

Johnny Depp should quit acting in kid’s films, and he should quit talking in stupid voices.

Even if, sometimes, the stupid voices work.

The first Pirates of the Caribbean was a lot of fun. Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow mumbled like Keith Richards on a vodka bender. But then Depp did it again in the sequel and it was boring. Then he did it again in the third installment, with more face paint, and it was worse and it was three hours long. There shouldn’t be a fourth installment of a movie based on a ride at Disneyland, but they made it and it starred Johnny Depp.

Depp, like most of America, gave up on anything that doesn’t shine like a gun or a diamond. He quit playing real people. He started playing people as imagined by Hollywood. Gone are the accountants and convenience store clerks and the dreamers and failures, and they’ve been replaced by detectives in ye ole London and CIA agents in Mexico and rare book dealers seeking out demon texts and gangsters and undercover cops. Look around your own neighborhood. See the teacher, the plumber, the landscaper, the cop who never shot anyone, the construction worker, the stay-at-home dad, the pharmacist, the bartender, the waiter—they’re all characters that Johnny Depp doesn’t play in an upcoming film.

Why?

It’s too hard.

There’s not enough money in it.

Not everyone can make art, even if you try to make art.

It’s embarrassing to try and make art, to be honest about the world, and fail.

It’s easier to be John Dillinger like all the other actors who played John Dillinger, to do what everyone else has done before.

Now, more than ever, everyone wants everyone to be like everyone else. Schools, universities, writing programs, department stores, banks—think the same, write the same, teach the same, sell the same, greet customers the same, steal money the same.

One story, one film, one job, one professor at a time, the world is being bleached into uniformity and blandness and boredom.

I have a couple books. The books took years to write and years to publish. When I was looking for an agent, all the agents wanted more guns, more action, a new setting, a bigger city. I didn’t want that. I wanted to write a book I would read, one that didn’t explode in my hands. I still do. I want to publish another book and another one after that and so on forever. I want the books to be set in places I love, places like Pittsburgh and Irwin and Ohiopyle and Ligonier where the dive bar next to the second-run movie theater offers stools crafted from real elephant legs. I want the characters in my books to hold the jobs I’ve held and the jobs my dad and mom and brother and friends have held and loved and hated. I want them to do the small miserable tasks we all do to give us the security to be happy and safe when we finally drive home.

I don’t want to do what everyone else has done before. Johnny Depp, and people like Johnny Depp and the people who live in the small wealthy world of Johnny Depp, make that hard. They see real-life douchebags playing pretend douchebags on the screen, and all of this makes money for other douchebags. Then they want all of us to do that same impersonation. This movie did big money, so some publisher wants a similar book to sell to Hollywood to be made into a movie exactly like the last one.

Be the same.

Always.

I don’t mean to sound pretentious. I’m not the guy in grad school who says, “But Ezra Pound said to make it new.” Making it new is easy. It’s almost impossible to not make it new. Take the cloud out of the poem—look, it’s new! Put the cloud in a different place in a poem—look, it’s new! Don’t put the murder weapon on the first page of your mystery novel. Don’t provide resolution. Chekov believed that if you introduce a gun early in your narrative, you have to use the gun. Don’t use the gun.

The other night, I talked to my friend Bob Pajich. After fifteen years of writing, Bob published his first book, The Trolleyman, an excellent collection of poems about UPS drivers, short order cooks, strippers, drunks, and men on motorcycles, all people who survive by labor in and around Pittsburgh where Bob grew up and still resides. We talked a lot about getting an audience. Getting an audience is tough. Words don’t easily fit into most people’s lives anymore. Bob is sort of quiet. I can be quiet too. Neither of us likes to shout our own names. Publishers demand you shout your own name. They want you to blog and Facebook and punch policemen and tweet about the arrest.

Being loud is the newest and worst requirement of all artists. It’s what I hate most about the climate for creativity in America right now: the volume. You must be louder than the other people who create. Your book must have the brightest cover. Your movie must have the snappiest tag line. Wear funny clothes in your music video and dance with your tits out.

All this loudness is bad when it comes to promotion, but it’s worse—the worst—when it ends up in a novel or story or a poem or on the screen.

Johnny Depp, lately, has been awfully loud in his movies.

I think people, the quiet ones, the ones who don’t get singled out for awards and promotions and attention, negative or positive, are still important. Most of us are those people.

That’s why I don’t write gangsters and astronauts and zany kids characters. I want to write my neighbors and friends and family, people from Western Pennsylvania, most of whom never turn up in books.

Their faces are average.

Their habits don’t explode like fireworks.

But drinking Folgers coffee when you love coffee and can’t afford decent coffee is important. Husbands and wives and partners going to work when work is the last place they want to be is important. Going to the gym when your doctor says go to the gym is more of a struggle or as much of a struggle as the story of the man who taught us to mass-produce cars. Everyone knows Henry Ford’s place in the history of the automobile and anti-Semitism—it’s not art to tell it on the screen. People existed underneath Henry Ford, thousands, and they matter, too.

But it’s easier to talk about Henry Ford.

It’s easier to go to space, to go undercover, to be a millionaire, to wear a top hat and be a recluse in a chocolate factory.

Johnny Depp consistently turns away from reality and aligns himself with gimmickry. What he did in his early films with his body now requires a gun. Or two guns. Or a police force backing him up. The clean lines of his early characters have been replaced by a sort of purple prose—throw it all on, all the effects and accents, and it’ll end up great.

But it doesn’t end up great.

It ends up awful or, worse, average.

It messes up the face of America, and art—or even entertainment—shouldn’t do that. We have politicians and CEOs and banks to remind us how little we’re all worth.

Art should provide hope, even if it looks at the hopeless. Hope in the face of hopelessness requires more than volume and money. It requires artists willing to engage the world on the most common level and create meaning from essential living, from our collective stories, and no task is more difficult than finding insight in the hours a man spends holding a road sign or a woman spends slinging drinks in a shithole bar. To fill in potholes and serve drunks and know the value each task offers or does not offer the world is a skill that borders on visionary and yet is essential to every single fucking narrative we tell.

Beware of any art that offers less.

I bitch about Johnny Depp but our general lack of integrity runs everywhere—actors and actresses who step out in summer blockbusters, poets who start writing language poems to get tenure, novelists who set their novels in New York because people in New York buy novels.

I’m not an art snob, a critic.

I’m desperate for something sincere.

Johnny Depp, according to a young Johnny Depp, was desperate for that, too.

Now he’s not.

Or he’s too rich and busy to think about it.

There are a lot of people right now that are too rich and busy to think about anything like art or the people who make art or the people who are interested in art.

Johnny Depp shouldn’t be one of those people.

He shouldn’t make movies to distract and entertain, but to entertain and enlighten.

Maybe he will.

Maybe he’ll Bill-Murray the industry and fire his agent and his publicist and start making movies worth two hours on the emotional clock of our lives.

Maybe he’ll pick up a novel and read it and love it and take a million bucks and give it to someone to adapt, maybe even the author.

Or not.

He could, and probably will, keep on being a movie star.

To which I say, “Fuck you, Johnny Depp. Give me back my money.”

To which I say, “I love you Johnny Depp. I’m praying for your soul.”

By Johnny Depp’s soul, I mean my soul.

I mean yours too, and anyone else out there who still believes.

Dave Newman is the author of the novels Raymond Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012) and Please Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (World Parade Books, 2010) and four poetry chapbooks. He lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania.