Remembering Johnny Depp
The Cinema Le Champo sits on an indiscernibly pretty street in the Latin Quarter of Paris, near cafés with sidewalk tables, churches, grands boulevards. I noticed on my walk to the theater how consistent Parisian imagery is, and at times redundant—where one finds real-life paintings, one finds tourists. It is easy to feel like some of Paris’s creative energy has been stifled, by the incessant need to present history to new people, when the city can’t handle masses like New York or London. The former has admittedly been spoiled with arthouse venues (I hate checking Screen Slate’s daily newsletter because I’m frightened by how much I’m missing), but the Champo doesn’t belong with brownstones or high-rises. It’s probably better, in fact, than most Manhattan offerings, and unique in its exclusively vintage lineup. Save for three venues with which I’m familiar, Paris showtimes are reserved for new releases.
The theater has been around for 80 years, and cinema is history, after all, best paired with more history. “Come to the Champo,” Truffaut would tell his friends, “I’m there every afternoon.” One of the theater’s two screening rooms still employs a periscope projector, where the reel is reflected off mirrors and onto the screen.
A gentle crowd gathered for the Champo’s presentation of Dead Man, the 1995 Jim Jarmusch film, last Thursday. This group stayed for the credits, in the modest black box that lay behind the rather grand Art Deco façade, white and creamy and regrettably inedible. Perhaps I have been idealizing French culture for too long, but wouldn’t New Yorkers bustle off to their next commitment as soon as they knew they could recount Dead Man’s ending? Even Paul Dano’s post-Wildlife Q&A (one of several) played to a near-empty house at Lincoln Center last fall.
The more objectively striking difference between the Champo and its New York equivalents might lie in programming. Posters that line the exterior of the building advertise an upcoming screening of an old Woody Allen film. When I saw them, I was reminded of Catherine Deneuve’s defense of Roman Polanski, and the better defined lines that seem to exist in France, between art and artist. The face of the current Jarmusch retrospective is Johnny Depp, Dead Man’s protagonist, an actor embroiled in conflict with his ex-wife Amber Heard, who claims to be a victim of domestic violence. Depp has also been filing and settling lawsuits for management issues and financial troubles. I don’t mean to lump him and Allen together—one of the flaws of the #MeToo movement has been its amalgamation of a wide range of sexual misconduct—because Depp denies the abuse, and is suing Heard for defamation. But I did question, at first, the Champo’s decision to feature Depp so prominently in the promotion of a set of films for which he is by no means the defining actor.
Or maybe he is. Am I about to write a love letter? Certainly not for the cadaverous, hard-metal Depp of 2019, but maybe for Dead Man Depp, in his role as accountant-turned-outlaw Billy Blake. Blake made me miss the younger actor, who surprised with his creative choices, and was a tasteful curator of personalities, rather than a guy in need of work. This Depp preceded the star that emerged from Pirates of the Caribbean, the multimillionaire with romantic French connections and a faux-European ambience, who bought a village near the Azure Coast and a tropical island, too, who was arguably corrupted by Jack Sparrow, because Jack Sparrow became a cash cow, and so Hollywood sought, with trademark desperation, to replicate his charisma, until demand ran dry.
Billy Blake peers out a train window at the beginning of Dead Man, on his way from Cleveland, Ohio, to Machine, a company town where he is to be employed. Depp’s expressions in this scene are familiar—the Willy Wonka gulps, the slightly downturned mouth and watchful eyes. Blake wears a tartan two-piece suit, round glasses, and a kind of half-top hat, easily distinguishable from the rags and wild beards of his fellow travelers, thus labeling him an outcast. When Depp arrives in Machine, he finds that his position has already been taken, and later that night, outside a bar, he attracts the attention of a woman selling paper flowers, naturally for his unassuming innocence, and maybe for his cheekbones. The woman, Thel, and Depp wind up in bed together, but then Thel’s husband returns (from a journey of self-reflection, it seems), and a shootout ensues, from which Blake is the lone survivor, now compromised by a bullet wound. Thel’s husband’s dad is Blake’s would-be employer, the robber baron of Machine, so Blake has a target on his back. He escapes into the birch woods and canyons of the Wild West, aided by a Western-educated Native American, Nobody, and two equine companions. The question of where Blake and Nobody plan to go is unclear, but they do go far, evading bounty hunters and the opportunistic civilians who have seen Blake’s face on wanted posters.
Dead Man is two hours long, and a man in front of me in the ticket queue lamented its unwatchability. “I’ve tried five times,” he said, “and each of those five times I’ve fallen asleep before it ended.” The man asked if there were other films from the Jarmusch retrospective playing that night, and he left when told there were not. Perhaps I tolerated the interminable stretches of silence and languid pacing because Depp featured in nearly every scene. He evolved from a hopeless tagalong to an able fighter, gunning down enemies but retaining his disconnect from this new environment, eternally surprised when a spontaneous decision yielded desirable results. Boyish satisfaction is on display in Depp’s later, more commercial films, but not as authentically as here. Embedded in Blake’s inexperience, too, is a melancholy, as if some part of him is aware of everything to come, the death and bloodshed necessitated by Westerns, or else because he remains affected by the unwanted attention he receives, first as a foreigner, and then as a fugitive.
This low-frequency sadness does not inhibit Blake’s affection for Nobody, with whom chemistry develops quietly and gracefully. My favorite scene from the film might have been the one in which Blake leans against a tree, weakened by his injuries, enveloped in a fur coat that might have been pilfered from Elizabeth Taylor’s wardrobe, lightning bolts painted on his cheeks. A fire crackles before him, and Nobody takes Blake’s glasses and wears them himself. Nobody thinks Blake will die, and leaves him by that tree, vision blurred and wounds festering, but before he does, we see Blake smile at him. There is camp in Depp’s demeanor here, in the way he has sidestepped machismo even as he outplays the opponents who exert it most forcefully, in the mischief with which he conveys gratitude, in his androgynous beauty, significant today, given that Depp is no longer young or beautiful.
When Blake found a dead deer and curled himself around it, painting a line down his nose with its blood, or when Blake cried on the boat making its way out on the Pacific Ocean, truly moribund after reaching the coast and the care of a Native tribe, I wanted to cry out in protest. Oh, what fame and fortune have done to Depp’s soul, so pure and untouched in this film! He has been one of the highest paid actors in the world for nearly twenty years. Maybe this complaining is belated at best, and probably misguided, because Depp is a movie star, and a potential asshole, and has long been both of those things, but you wouldn’t know it from how he moves and mourns in Dead Man. Now he needs a movie to make you forget it.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer and sophomore at Columbia College.
