Taika Waititi and the Heartbreak of Parasocial Relationships

In the ugly aftermath of the Heard/Depp defamation trial a number of websites ran lists of celebrities who liked a Johnny Depp Instagram post celebrating the not so small fortune Heard will have to pay her ex-husband for defamation. 

That might seem petty even by the standards of contemporary pop culture media. Who cares what posts famous people like or dislike? Why does it matter? 

It matters because liking that particular post is much different than liking a less violently divisive and controversial online missive. 

By liking that post each of the celebrities were, in a virtual but very real way, supporting a man accused of sexually assaulting his ex-wife wife with a liquor bottle in his personal and legal travails. 

By liking that post, they’re establishing, whether they intend to or not, that they are happy with a ruling that can ,and probably will, have a chilling effect on abuse victims who will now be even more reluctant to come forward now out of fear that their reputation will be publicly destroyed the way Heard’s was. 

For people like myself who are mortified by the online romanticization of Depp and evisceration of Heard (at CVS I saw a tabloid with a headline calling the Aquaman actress the most hated woman in the world, which, honestly, does not seem hyperbolic) this is a list of celebrities to be disappointed in and skeptical of. 

I diligently scanned the list to see if there were any personal heroes on that post of shame and was disappointed but not terribly surprised to see Taika Waititi’s name on it.

I’m a huge fan of Waititi as an artist, as an actor, writer and director. But I know just enough about his personal and romantic life to understand why people who revere him as a cultural figure are, at the very least, let down by him as a person, even if his personal life should be none of our business.

It’s a process that has happened over and over and over again. Fanboys and Fangirls will naively fall in love with an actor or filmmaker based entirely on their work and the characters they’ve played. We’ll decide, often without any evidence, that they’re just like the characters they’re famous for playing, as well as unproblematic politically, great people and, for good measure, excellent husbands. 

Take Waititi’s Guardians of the Galaxy 2 co-star Chris Pratt. I fell in love with him on Parks & Recreation and ignorantly assumed that he was just like his character on the show, a lovable puppy dog of a man-child you couldn’t help but adore. I also assumed that he and Anna Faris were the perfect couple, would be amazing to hang out with, and would be together forever. 

Then he made Guardians of the Galaxy and my stupid brain assumed he was half Andy Dwyer, half Peter Quill and one hundred percent awesome dude. 

Pratt then divorced Faris, became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, got all Christian and shit and remarried someone a decade younger who is a scion of both the Schwarzenegger and Kennedy families. 

Kind of hard to be a normal guy when you marry into the Kennedys and the Schwarzeneggers. In a sad but not shocking turn of events, it turns out that Pratt was not currently a lovable underdog and probably never was. 

Waititi is like Pratt in that he was once a modestly popular cult figure whose fans got all sorts of ideas about who he was as a person based on his movies and television shows, projection, hope and hero worship. 

We decided he was a great guy as well as a great filmmaker and actor as well as an excellent husband and someone who would never disappoint us politically by doing something like publicly supporting a man accused of domestic violence. 

Then Waititi divorced his fan favorite wife, shacked up with Rita Ora, an international pop star sex bomb fifteen years his junior and may very well have enjoyed a threesome with Ora and Tessa Thompson. There’s nothing wrong with having hot sex with famous people but it does render you slightly less relatable to the masses, and speaks to how overly invested many of us are in the lives, and not just the careers, of our favorite artists

Oh, and he went from being a guy with some small movies people dug to being an international movie star and blockbuster filmmaker. 

I am going to go out on a limb and say that that might have changed him and not necessarily for the better. While we’re on the subject Depp himself was once a beloved cult figure with a modest but ferociously loyal following who saw Depp not just as one of the best, most daring actors of his generation but also a good man who chose offbeat, worthwhile projects and had a longterm, healthy, age-appropriate relationship with Vannesa Paradis. 

Then, like Pratt and Waititi, Depp became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, split with his longtime partner and traded in modest projects for soulless billion dollar spectacles. 

Even John Mulaney falls into this pattern. We all fell in love with Mulaney, his life and his wife and watched with sadness when he got divorced from someone who seems really cool, got involved with an international sex symbol and lent his voice to the high concept blockbusters Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Chip N’ Dale: Rescue Rangers. 

The only cult figure to attain comic book super-stardom without losing his sterling reputation and his original following is Paul Rudd. Like everyone else I’ve mentioned he started small and culty and then exploded into superstardom as Ant-Man. 

But he did not get divorced! Nor did he do anything that might cause fans to think he’s anything other than the consummate mensch and great guy we all think he is. 

Rudd is the exception that proves the rule because usually when we throw ourselves into intense parasocial with favorite actors or creators we only think we know nothing can come of it but heartbreak and disappointment. 

Unlike pretty much everything I write that doesn’t involve creating an elaborate fictional life/death for actor Cary Elwes, this piece went viral and reached an audience beyond the site’s extremely small but wonderfully loyal core readership. When that happens, misunderstanding and anger almost invariably ensue so I am going to put this in bold and all caps so that you can’t ignore it: I AM NOT IN FAVOR OF JUDGING CELEBRITIES WE DO NOT KNOW HARSHLY BASED ON WHAT LITTLE WE KNOW ABOUT THEIR PRIVATE AND ROMANTIC LIVES. IT IS NOT A GOOD THING OR A POSITIVE BUT IT DOES SEEM TO BE HUMAN NATURE. THERE’S NO SHAME IN DIVORCE. THERE’S NO SHAME IN HAVING A MESSY PERSONAL LIFE. I WAS DESCRIBING SOMETHING IN THE CULTURE AT LARGE, I WAS NOT ENDORSING IT IN ANY WAY.

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