True Crime Rots Your Brain

(**Content warning: abuse, violence against women, Johnny Depp, and weddings**)

When I made a TikTok video defending Amber Heard earlier this summer, I lost somewhere between 2,000-3,000 followers. It was hard to get an exact number since I was also gaining followers from other videos at the time; for days, the app would tell me “you gained 150 followers since you last logged in!” but my actual follower count would stay the same or even drop. At the time, it was a bit surprising that this many of my followers sided with the clear anti-feminism of this carefully-crafted culture war.

I am not normally interested in the internal lives of celebrities. People in the public eye (actors, musicians, content creators, etc.) exist to create entertaining and/or informative media, and then I pay them for their labor (money for theater tickets, money for vinyl records, interacting with their content through likes and shares so they can win favor with the company mining our data for advertisers, etc.) I’m no more interested in the love life of Jennifer Lawrence than I am interested in the love life of my car mechanic. You perform a job, I compensate you for that job. It’s a simple transaction.

Sometimes, though, the context of an artist’s life enhances our experience of their art, or “says something” about our broader society. Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Others (2001) becomes all the more real when you realize that it was made in the wake of her divorce from Tom Cruise. Taylor Swift crafted an entire album’s narrative around the public’s perception of her as a dumb blonde, and it’s one of my favorite records of all time. The troubled development of the Peter Jackson Hobbit films say a lot about the current state of labor and the influence of media conglomerates on the rights of small nations. So on and so forth.

So when I, Anna Marie, notorious celebrity-ignorer, actually get around to making a video about a celebrity, you know it’s important.