The slap heard 'round the world - my 2 cents.
I couldn't give a damn about celebrity culture - and yet I totally understand why people (including me) are transfixed by this bizarre event.
The interesting thing about paradigm-shifting events is that they don’t have to be substantial — they don’t have to actually matter for them to matter. I’m usually the last person to care about what goes on in Hollywood, and I could care less about the Oscars (though I do have warm memories of watching it with my mom when I was in my teens).
Will Smith’s slap of Chris Rock is fascinating because even people I know who’d normally be similarly averse to tabloid celebrity-worship were moved by what happened. I was too! I actually felt really bad for Smith, someone I find ultra-talented but hollow and uninteresting on a personal level.
I’ve already fired off two hot-headed Facebook posts and furiously dictated two separate reams of text in my e-mail drafts! Oddly, there’s so much to say about something that ultimately doesn’t matter, and even more oddly, I find a lot of the response to be really valuable, even where I disagree.
After listening to some of the clips below, I even disagree with myself (to a degree)!
My favorite take by far:
Hot-headed Facebook post # 1:
quick reax to last night's Oscar debacle:
1) Y'ever have moments on special occasions where it's like there's a voice in your head that's going "don't ruin the occasion don't ruin the occasion don't ruin the occasion don't ruin the occasion don't ruin the occasion"? And then something minor sets you off and >boom< you've ruined the occasion?
2) Will Smith laughed at the joke, then saw his wife Jada's disapproval and reacted to THAT. Yeah, people often laugh when they're nervous, but I didn't register it that way. His unhinged acceptance speech was >more< disturbing.
3) What we call "civilization" is a veneer built on a lie. That wouldn't be so bad if we didn't actually believe the lie, but we clearly do, judging from the reaction to last night.
Entire masses of people have lost the ability to appropriately measure the scale or urgency of violence. They're utterly disconnected from the violence of our nature.
I grant that there are some people who've lived in homes with domestic violence who may have been triggered by last night. I also grant that some people were watching with family/kids. The rest are reaching, wallowing in any excuse to signal injury.
We routinely subject football players to 1000 times the physical punishment as last night - and this starts when they're children. And speaking of children, our government has massacred them in droves - often on purpose - in too many spots on the globe to even count.
And people are triggered by last night? Wow. How do you think we got here?
5) That said, I was actually sad about what (appears to have) happened, even though I don't care much about celebrity culture or the Oscars, and even though I don't care much for Will Smith.
It was still his moment to shine, and a moment for the country to celebrate recognition. (Dude does work his ass off too, and it was cool to see him give his all, acting-wise, in a three-dimensional role.)
6) a tip: The threat of physical roughness between males is always there. If you're so horrified and disgusted by this, you're ignoring something that, like it or not, is embedded in the social fabric. And you're way better-off not kidding yourself about it.
If I'm I'm making fun of another guy who knows he's more physically powerful than I am (or has the stature to get away with it) there's an ever-present sense that I'm gonna be careful not to take my humor too far. I've never been in a fight in my life - and this is partially why. Because instinctively I know how to pre-emptively avoid these kinds of episodes. Yes, big mouth me knows when to shut it.
It's just the way it is. We >need< to stop lying to ourselves about shit like this.
7) If I'm a Chinese leader and I'm reading the Twitter reactions to the Oscars, I'm thinking "The time to invade is now - this is a deluded nation of puppy dogs as if they're veal calfs who've been kept in crates their entire lives."
8 ) We >depend< on men to be able to cross that line, but then expect them to turn it on and off. I don't get why Will Smith lost his cool in that setting either - my guess is he's been in tons of situations where he hasn't lost his cool, but clearly something got to him.
It's not just men, either: A mom whose child is threatened can summon a million times the violence we saw last night. It's in you too.
My grandmother would stick a hand inside a chicken carcass and rip its organs out like it was nothing. And she was the one of the sweetest, most tender people I've ever met.
When we were in a department store once a man came and stood right up against me and before I even registered what had happened my grandmother swatted him in the head with her umbrella and yelled at him to get away from me.
Her sister threw a rock at a man's head when they were basically children because the man was "bothering" them and a few days later the man died. I thought it was the coolest story when my aunt told me as a kid.
I said "You killed him!" My aunt was like "Oh my god, don't say it like that!"
These ladies were tough - AND loving.
Let's get some fucking perspective here, okay? For god's sake.
Another take I thoroughly enjoyed (from the sports show Brother From Another, which ran four segments on the incident on the first day of coverage alone!):
Hot-headed Facebook post 2:
Zooming-out from the big story of the week...
Years ago, when two people from the band Sonic Youth divorced - I didn't go back and look up the year b/c things like that don't matter - I read something where someone wrote something like "I don't know what I'm going to do now. I'm so crushed b/c I used to look to that couple as a model of how to be in a relationship. I'm so sad."
Of course I thought that was lame and pathetic and I still do. I actually found that deeply alarming - and it tells me a lot, specifically that so much of what we like to classify as people having power over other people involves people being more than willing to >give away< their power when they don't have to.
I just can't fathom the depths a creature has to get to in order to invest that much of themselves in the couple status of two people they only know through art. I'd say "Whatevs, to each their own," but the fact that so many people are walking around like that fucks us all up.
Now's the time to re-think. Celebrities aren't your parents. And if you wanna take a tip from someone whose parents were never married, your world isn't going to shatter if two adults decide, for whatever reason, to live their lives apart.
I'm not denouncing marriage or life partnership, I'm saying that these illusions are poisonous and keep grown-ass people in a perpetual state of adolescence that's so willfully naive it's like being frozen in a Stephen Spielberg movie forever.
I'm also saying we have no excuse to personalize and stake our own well-being on what celebrities do. I'm saying that that's harmful and that the people around you depend on you not to be a groveling simp.
This is a make-or-break moment for all of us in so many ways, and we're getting a golden opportunity to level up - to GROW up, if you wanna put it bluntly.
It's not that the Oscars slap isn't fascinating - just about everyone I know has been interested in it on some level, including me - it's the way people talk about the marriage of these two uber-famous people as if we have ownership over that marriage.
That's what really galls me - and it's a completely avoidable behavior that has disastrous consequences in multiple domains when we won't snap ourselves out of that shit.
Cue the parade of people who will have the audacity to tell me that I have no "right" to "tell people how they should feel." My pre-emptive answer, so I can spare us both the breath: If you wanna keep being a child, fine. Just don't complain when you get treated like one for your entire existence.
And maybe find something else to stake your emotional health on so that you'll come across with the bearing of a full human being. You're not a groveling butler in the story of life, and if you want to be treated differently, you can stop acting like one at any time.
Again, these are not your parents. And even if they >were< you'd have to find a way to stand on your own.
(I have two even more incendiary responses that maybe I’ll post soon.)
Here, Dr. Jason Johnson employs the term “toxic masculinity” in the most sensible way I think I’ve ever heard it used:
And there’s this — check out the Innvervisions (Stevie Wonder) box set behind NBA commentator Vincent Goodwill, who brings up a great point about journalists needing to be more conscientious about what they say about players:
DL Hughley getting deep as usual:
Comedian Aries Spears cuts to the bone:
Fat Joe weighs-in:
And finally, comedians Andrew Shulz and Akaash Singh give us a taste of what we can expect comedians to do from here into perpetuity:
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! There’s an endless supply of takes about this incident online. Happy hunting…
<SRK