2 images of male beauty — side by side this morning on the front page of the New York Times.

I found this juxtaposition entrancing:

  

We see the idealized domesticated males, together, with idealized dog, on a park bench, looking simply and virtuously for a modest home. And we see the ominous male, heterosexual, standing in the dark next to an empty space where there once was a woman. Somehow his very looks have brought on madness! He — standing alone — is proof of the causal connection between male beauty and madness.

 

I've read both articles, but let's take a closer at the one about Johnny Depp, which is titled, when you click in "Johnny Depp Through the Looking Glass/Examining the madness that male beauty elicits." This is an opinion piece by Rhonda Garelick, School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons/The New School:

Mr. Depp, like many Hollywood megastars, has long benefited from his striking good looks, which clearly played a role in the enormous social media support he garnered during the trial....

Garnered. They called my name.

Beauty remains a subject reserved largely for and about women.... Women, metaphorically, occupy the realm of faces and bodies. Men are presumed to live in the realm of ideas and action. So, according to conventional thinking, to focus on a man’s beauty (as opposed to, say, his virility), or use it to adjudge his character, risks emasculating him, depriving him of his inner value, his spirit, strength or accomplishments. 

And so we shy away from mentioning male beauty very much. Mr. Depp proves an exception to this rule. In his middle age, he still possesses an unusual, arresting facial beauty. A beauty that exceeds conventional handsomeness, and — especially in his youth — wandered into a kind of feline, even feminine territory....

Yes, the NYT displays 1989 photograph of Depp. He was the kind of man about whom people used to say — quite commonly and openly — He would have made a beautiful woman or Too bad such looks are wasted on a man.

And that specter of Mr. Depp’s striking earlier beauty hovered over him in that courtroom like a protective force field, impossible to dispel.... 

In the end, while Johnny Depp was declared the victim of defamation, and garnered sympathy by implying he had been physically abused, he has emerged more able than ever....

Whoa! We have sighted the rare second "garner." For Johnny Depp and Johnny Depp alone there is the madness that manifests itself in the form of a double "garner." We have surely lost our mind!

He's so beautiful he must have won the lawsuit because of his beauty. Well, the woman is beautiful too, but it was some sort of battle of the sexes... or rather, beauty contest of the sexes. Who was more mesmerizing? Who drove us more mad?

The alternative theory is that the jury followed the instructions and perceived her to be lying and him to be telling the truth. But wasn't comparative beauty part of that perception? Even if looks inevitably influence how we weigh credibility, it's not madness. It's the human mind, being human. When you look at a face and perceive beauty, isn't part of that an intuition about the soul within the face?