Celebrities in court: How these carnivals of the grotesque play out to sate our basest desire for amusement

And if the West Hollywood tale is gothic, surely live-streaming it across the world is grotesque? Sir, allow me to flay you alive. Madam, right back at you with a dip in a salt barrel.

In print, it’s easy to avoid details of celebrity wars fought over reputation, career, earnings. Just don’t read. But social media, background TV and radio make the spectacle of them unmissable; in this case, a county courthouse becoming a global slaughterhouse of the private, personal, emotional, psychological.

The big beneficiaries of the live-streamed savagery are the networks, lawyers, stans. In everyday life, only the rare few are dark, twisted enough to delight in suffering, humiliation. But when it comes to celebrity? All bets are off. Screens big and small denude, denature subjects and audiences.

Fame strips watched and watcher alike of boundaries, shared humanity, so there’s no scrutiny laser enough, no detail salacious enough, no probing vicious enough, no humiliation abject enough, no shame scorching enough for our dubious amusement as consumers, spectators.

Who cares if celebrities are psychologically invaded, emotionally eviscerated, as long as the super-trouper lights them up for our nosiness, prurience, entertainment, setting talk radio smoking, social media blazing, TV ratings on fire?

The Roman era had its gladiator claques, edible Christians, thumbs up, thumbs down; medieval audiences got there early for the disembowelling, crushing, hanging; Madame Defarge scurried over two plain-two purl as Madame Guillotine severed the heads of her enemies.

Now, by the millions, the world is switching on the live stream of shame, claims of assault, sexual assault, intoxication, defecation, the outright base and animal, fascinating, titillating in a $50m claim and $100m counter-claim by people who loved each other once upon a time, where nobody lived happily ever after.

In the middle is a jury of their peers – yes, peers – swept up in the maelstrom of emotion staged or felt, lived or recollected, credible or incredible, in a world where, according to Nobel Prize for Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa, the seemingly real can be as important as the actually real.

It’s something reinforced by communications specialist Juda Engelmayer to journalist Edward Helmore in New York: how regardless of the verdict, Depp has had his moment “in the court of public opinion”.

“He entertained, and ended up getting a lot of people, including female audience members, on his side. That’s how he wins, whatever the verdict, because he wants the world to see he is still capable of producing fans and producing entertainment.”

As the movie-voice of the chameleon Rango Depp says: “I’m going to strip away this mystery and expose its private parts.”

Perhaps in life imitating art, we have it: the mutilated finger scrawling messages on lampshade and walls, the entrails of stars’ lives, scattered before the jackals of public and media are all about entertainment; the word coming from the Latin tenere, “to hold, grasp, possess”, the old French entretenir, “to stick together, to support” and Middle French “to sustain someone in a state of mind”.

According to Engelmayer to Helmore, both stars will be back to a greater and lesser degree proportionate to their “pre-war” careers. If the PR man is right, the public plaintiff, counter-plaintiff have it sussed and those who have been romanced, seduced, duped are the watching public themselves.

Last week, while the battle for Azovstal raged, climate scientists in Denmark rebelled and we discovered the UK’s flying insect population has declined 60pc in the past 20 years, invertebrates crushed by their political counterparts, scarce habitats, climate change, Depp v Heard was making hashtags, news headlines, front pages, nothing too private, lurid or banal for the public’s fleeting, shrinking attention.

Elevating Depp v Heard to, and above, news of actual import suggests we are, indeed, doing as culture critic Neil Postman warned – “amusing ourselves to death”. Moreover, allegations of domestic violence should never be parsed or analysed in the context of entertainment, stanning or popularity.

In London, the so-called Wagatha Christie libel trial has started, expensive lawyers mining the airy gossip of she said, she said, likely to be a million miles from the mutilating he said, she said of Depp v Heard and welcomed by many as a bit of noises-off, harmless, dozy diversion. Or perhaps Coleen Rooney, Rebekah Vardy and their PR handlers, too, have it sussed: that to be Someone or Anyone now requires spectacle, thrill, spill, seduction, what Vargas Llosa calls amazement.

Time then to get Thwaites – the so-called Doomsday Glacier – a publicist and into court. Make it box office. Lap it up before its melt laps our cities. Go on, sit back and be seduced, amazed. Enjoy.