I’m going to leave my dictionary for a moment here to talk about a couple of recent events in Hollywood. First is the involuntary manslaughter conviction of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was the “armorer” on the set of the film when Alec Baldwin accidentally shot a cinematographer during the production of the film Rust. At 24, Gutierrez-Reed was probably a little “young” to be an armorer, but apparently her father is a well-known stuntman, marksman and armorer who presumable passed on his “expertise” to his daughter. But according to a Variety story, “Gutierrez Reed acknowledged that she had only been working as an armorer for a few months, and had no formal training.”
Variety noted that there is “no official certification process for film armorers.” Since live rounds are not “technically” supposed to be used on film sets, the chance for “carelessness” is obvious when one does show up unbeknownst. Bruce Lee’s son Brandon Lee was killed by a live bullet on the set of The Crow; I recall that because the only job I could find that was hiring people on the spot when I first arrived in Seattle was security guard, and for some reason I was sent alone to watch the front gate during the burial of Lee at the Lakeview Cemetery. There wasn’t any trouble keeping paparazzi out; the only guy who showed up claimed he was from People magazine.
The question of course is why there was live ammunition on the set at all; we are told that a munitions supplier named Seth Kenney was responsible for supplying the dummy rounds to be used for the film. He admitted that he brought with him live rounds from another job, but he denied leaving any of them mixed in with the dummy rounds. Gutierrez-Reed was accused of being “sloppy” and disorganized, and apparently didn’t check to see if she had any live rounds at that particular moment; she claimed to have checked the rounds she had in her pocket, but took two rounds from a box she didn’t check, assuming they were not “live” mainly because she wasn’t supposed to have any at all. We are told that her conviction makes her a convenient fall-person for Baldwin, although he probably shouldn’t have pointed the gun at anyone, even as a “joke.”
But that was hardly the “big” news coming out of Hollywood for me. Last night at the Academy Awards ceremony the winner for “best original screenplay” was French director Justine Triet for the film Anatomy of a Fall, which is about the trial of a woman accused of murdering her husband by first hitting him in the head, then pushing him off a balcony. Now, I’ve let it be known that I believe this film is about a lot more than that (I posted a “review” of the film on the Amazon UK site).
It is my educated belief that Triet based her film on the
Depp-Heard case. I have been “informed” that Triet began writing her screenplay
for the film in 2020 well before the U.S. trial; but interestingly, my first post
on the Depp case was in February 2020, when I noted that The Daily Mail had obtained the now infamous audio recordings and had
released transcripts of the most damaging bits for Heard, those where she sounds
possessed by a demon while admitting to being physically abusive. Those audios immediately shifted public opinion in favor of Depp.
I am fairly certain that Triet is lying if she claims she wasn't aware of this, and that her tortured, manipulative film isn’t an attempt to discredit that audio evidence and to rewrite history, since even after the UK trial people were no longer believing that Heard was the “victim” she claimed to be based on what they heard in those audios. Triet certainly seemed to have convinced herself long before she said the following four weeks into the Virginia trial when she was still filming:
It was very surprising to see this trial take place in real life while we were filming. Obviously disturbing. It was in the middle of filming the trial scenes for the film. The trial of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp was broadcast live from the United States. When I came home from filming in the evening, I watched almost live. I actually saw parallels there.
Triet went on to claim she didn’t know anything about the Depp-Heard case previously:
I haven’t been told that much about it. Reality is always much worse than fiction. In the trial, Amber Heard is extremely mistreated. There is delusional misogyny in this trial. This taught me one thing: the reality is much worse, at least in the United States. The reality is totally beyond imagination. I could never have written something like this. I can’t create this perversion.
Of course she is engaging in her own delusions there, and her film is a perversion of reality. During the U.S. trial, a mountain of evidence was presented to prove that Heard was lying and the real abuser in the case, and her own claims of abuse I discussed (again) a couple posts ago. For someone to claim that this was all “delusional misogyny” only exposes that person's own delusions, as we might conjecture from this:
Well, "adjudged" by Heard shills anyways. If you think about it, it isn’t hard to suspect that Triet is trying to rewrite history, and the most obvious evidence of that is the inclusion of audio evidence in the fictional trial, which is a "discussion" between the accused and her deceased husband. She didn't invent the audio angle in her film all by herself, given that it first came out when she allegedly began writing her screenplay. I think it is clear by the weight given the audio in the film--it lasts a whole 10 minutes of screen time (yeah, I watched the film), that Triet's motivation for making this film was to discredit that audio, pure and simple.
In the film, we are presented with a “visual” scene of what occurs from the recording device that the husband was supposedly using for the purposes of material for a book he hoped to write. They are discussing why she spends so much time away when they have a blind son at home, and the husband seems to be the one who has to take care of everything. She claims it is his problem and he needs to “solve” it himself.
Her verbiage then takes on the aspect of cruelty, and once the encounter turns “violent” the camera pans over the faces of spectators in the courtroom as we are now listening to the audio recording as they are; they have just heard the wife (played by German actress Sandra Huller) berate her French husband in ugly terms; when he accuses her of being violent, that is what we hear next.
But Triet clearly has an ulterior motive here, and that is convince people that what was heard on the Depp-Heard audios that turned the tide of public opinion in Depp’s favor and against Heard was not the “truth.” She wanted to create a film that presents an alternative narrative that refuses to accept the one that might be (and was) adjudicated by a jury based on the evidence presented in a real trial, that for people who supported Heard and believed that Triet’s fictional film was “the truth,” they (and she) apparently preferred fiction to the truth.
Triet’s film takes the usual liberties in manipulating viewers with a contrived and tortured set of circumstances to heighten a sense of a woman being the “real victim,” which of course denies the reality in the Depp case that it was a man who had rejected a life of being abused by a woman whose cruelty could never be satisfied or resolved—and having decided to step out of that relationship, he must be destroyed—or “canceled”—in a manner that only required that one “believe all women” and reject the due process rights of the falsely accused.
The fact that a real jury rejected this narrative is what a gender activist filmmaker like Triet cannot bear, and thus she attempted to “correct” the “injustice” caused by the public turn against Heard's "narrative" by making a film of unbelievable (and disreputable) contrivances and manipulations to satisfy her fevered mind against the truth, and in turn that of the viewer whose lack knowledge of the real trial would make them easy prey for her false narrative.
Of course I am taking “liberties” based on what I believe, but there should be no doubt that at the very least Triet obviously didn’t come-up with the audio angle for her film all by herself, and knew the impact of the Depp-Heard audios as early as even before she allegedly began writing her screenplay for the film. That she felt the need to make a film that discredited this real evidence and restore the “credibility” of the “believe all women” mantra should not be doubted, even if she hypocritically denies it.
The fact that that term “monster” which she uses in her film is obviously culled from the UK trial and the text messages, and the Huller character isn’t a “perfect victim” as many people tried to style Heard is part of the new "narrative" she concocts; yes, there were indications that the fictional character physically abused the deceased. But you can't believe your ears, it wasn’t the “truth.” Yes, she hit her husband once, she admitted, but everything else was a contrivance, a fraud perpetrated by the husband who was “hitting” himself. The absurdity of this contrivance is nauseating, but it certainly worked for those who were most gullible for misinformation, and for film critics who lap-up propaganda films like this.
Anyone who followed the Depp-Heard case can’t be but appalled by the disingenuousness Triet is trying to perpetrate on intelligent, thinking people here, contemptuous of both them and the truth. That Triet is perpetrating a fraud on viewers with her own self-victimized propaganda discredits not just herself, her film, film critics who “bought” her self-serving deceptions, and of course the Academy Awards self-congratulating voters—but most importantly, the truth itself.
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