Johnny Depp - Messenger of the Gods

Johnny Depp has acquired a reputation for choosing his roles carefully. He has often played the outsider. His fame started with the outcast role of Edward Scissorhands, and since then he has played several writers and investigators, as well as chameleon-like characters who have mastered the art of duplicity.

Writers and investigators are solitary characters, loiterers at the edge of society, by virtue of their cultural dictate to explore the recesses of the mind. The investigator either hides his identity through deception, or is seen by many as an outsider trying to uncover secrets better left hidden.

Language was created to deceive, for to tell stories is to tell lies. The inventor of language and master of deception is the Roman god Hermes, aka Mercury in Greece. In Roman times, great human dramas featured the pantheon of Olympian gods, and were transmitted orally. Today, the human drama is projected onto the silver screen. In the theater, actors are magnified into gods. The action star is Ares, god of war--Vin Diesel, and the 20th century Arnolds and Sylvesters. The sex symbol--Marilyn Monro--is lusty Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty. Johnny Depp is Hermes, messenger of the gods, whose domain is language, travel, commerce, and duality. (Note that he is also a Gemini, which is ruled by the planet Mercury.) Certain actors are most successful at portraying a specific aspect of human nature. For example, Mark Wahlberg suffers as the straight leading man (see Demme’s The Truth About Charlie or Burton’s Planet of the Apes); his gift is to play Icarus, the eternal boy who reaches high towards the heavens, only to fall (Rock Star, Boogie Nights). Depp is not so much the scholar or man of letters (Anthony Hopkins) but the man who uses words for his own ends -- the trickster. Mythologists have identified several aspects to Hermes, and Depp’s roles fit nicely into each category.

As messenger of the gods, Hermes rules language, the written word. In several roles, Depp plays a writer: a journalist in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the author of Peter Pan in Neverland; a rare book dealer in The Ninth Gate; a writer in Secret Window.

For the messenger, the means of conveying the message is through travel. Hermes rules travel, commerce and merchants. As one who moves between two worlds, Hermes works at the boundaries. In Blow, he is a drug trafficker who uses deceptive means to smuggle marijuana and cocaine across the international border; in Chocolat, he is a wandering gypsy who travels by riverboat and temporarily lives at the outskirts of a French town. Although the villagers do not want his kind around, he cannot be evicted, because he is on public land.

Death figures prominently in Depp’s films. Zeus granted Hermes access to the underworld, as guide of souls. He escorted Persephone from the underworld, to be with her mother Demeter after Persephone's semi-annual stay with Hades, lord of the underworld. The underworld is Hell, as well as that which remains hidden from society, for example, the criminal underworld. Many of Depp’s movies relate to the occult, which by definition is that which remains hidden. In various roles, he investigates the following: the authenticity of a book that can summon the devil in The Ninth Gate; deaths perpetrated by a headless horseman, who rises from the dead in Sleepy Hollow; the murders of Jack the Ripper, which are motivated by the occult philosophy of the Freemasons, in From Hell. In this film, Depp literally guides souls to the underworld by putting coins on the eyes of the deceased, allowing them to cross the river Styx. In Dead Man, he is William Blake, an accountant named after a writer, who is dying from nearly the beginning of the film. At the end, he is sent on a boat by his Native-American companion and guide Nobody, to enter the next world. In Donnie Brasco, he investigates the criminal underworld by going undercover. As a drug dealer in Blow, his character is a member of the criminal underworld. Additionally, he had roles in two Nightmare on Elm Street films at the beginning of his career.

Hermes invented lying. As an infant, he stole Apollo's cows, and then lied about it to both Apollo and Zeus. As master of deception, Hermes the trickster is changeable and ambiguous. As a god who works in the boundary between two worlds, Hermes thrives in duality. In a culture that feels comfortable in the either/or of black and white, Hermes is grey; he challenges the comfort zone. The hermaphrodite and the crossdresser are examples of the simultaneous embodiment of both masculine and feminine. Hermes is at the root of hermaphrodite. It is not surprising that Depp plays crossdressers in both Ed Wood and Before Night Falls. On a psychological level, this duality manifests as the taking on of two roles, and the ambiguity of which role is the character's true self. A clear example of this was Ed Norton’s role as Aaron Stampler/Roy in Primal Fear. Is the real personality wimpy Aaron or tough guy Roy? Not until the end of the movie does the audience or Richard Gere’s character know the real identity of Norton's character. In The Astronaut’s Wife, Depp plays an astronaut who loses contact with Earth for two minutes while he and another astronaut are repairing something outside the shuttle. After an emergency return landing, his partner goes crazy and dies of a stroke. Later, the man’s wife kills herself. A NASA employee brings to the wife’s attention that maybe an alien entity possessed Depp’s body through a type of sonar invasion while he was outside the space shuttle. Throughout the film, his wife is not sure if the occupant of her husband's body is her husband, or an alien impostor. To make matters worse, she is pregant with twins (note the theme of duality made literal, as well as the Gemini symbolism); the NASA employee theorizes that the twins will carry out the aliens’ goal of destroying human civilization through flying a special type of aircraft designed by the alien.

In Donnie Brasco, Depp is FBI agent Joe Pistone who goes undercover to infiltrate the mafia, the criminal underworld. Depp fulfills two Hermes roles, as (1) one who enters the criminal underworld (2) through deception. In a conversation with his wife, who threatens to divorce him because he is never home, he speaks like the men with whom he spends his time--uneducated NYC Italian--and she says the man she married was college-educated. "I'm not becoming them--I am them," he later states. Depp starts to take on his undercover identity even at home, losing touch with his true self.

In Don Juan de Marco, Depp is both Don Juan and an unnamed everyguy. As Don Juan, he is a master communicator who uses words to seduce. Even his psychiatrist is not convinced that Don Juan is just a manifestation of the regular guy’s psychosis. At the end of the film, reality and fantasy merge into magical realism, leaving the protagonist’s real identity undefined. In all roles, one questions which character is the “real” one.

Tags: Johnny Depp - mythology - Mercury - Hermes - Gemini - trickster

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