4:24:22

"But the faces...are just sweet."

This is Northern Exposure's editor reflecting on what she sees when she looks back at the show in 2017.

I know exactly what she means. It's the thing no face has today, not even the young ones. And it's what I keep going back in time to find, to look at: the sweetness and innocence in people's faces.

Do you think it's simply youth? It's not. You have to go back in time for this. You can't rob the cradle. You can't leave your middle-age wife for a woman half your age.

What I said last night, about Northern exposure being about goodness.

How nourishing that is.

That means the past is the face of everyone's youth--we as a culture, we as a people, we as a society--still in tact and unspoiled by the wholly corrupt decrepit future that was just around the bend. We let it take us. We let it age us. We let it get under our skin. No amount of botox or filler or skincare or makeup or fame will ever rejuvenate that. This sweetness comes from inside.

The Depp/Heard trial, about which I almost have no words, especially when I see what Depp used to look and sound like, reveals the tragedy of what happens to faces when people let themselves spoil. I don't need "evidence" or court testimony or a stream of endless misogynistic YouTube comments to know what became of him---or Heard for that matter. No one is "innocent" here, much less, the victor. How are we judging innocence anyway? Everything but a man punching his wife? Everything but two people who are supposed to love and care for each other destroying and maligning each other? How low we have set the bar. "Only when we understand all is vanity, only then it isn't"

You can see in their ruined faces what Depp and Heard have done to each other and to themselves.