Stop Lying, You Love the 'Slap Discourse'
Will Smith lost his damn mind, then everyone else did, too. But not all the takes were bad!
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We’re a full week into The Slap Discourse, and still working our way through the stages of grief.
Everyone’s had a take. Everyone’s gotten mad at a take. And the “I’m just so over this” brigade is trying to find fresh and original ways of expressing their blasé superiority.
We know we shouldn’t be so emotionally invested, yet we remain fascinated by a single act of mild violence at the goddamn Academy Awards—which, depending on who you asked, represented toxic machismo, gallant chivalry, or rank narcissism. It was then directly followed by a flailing attempt at a mea culpa during an Oscar acceptance speech, loaded with language familiar to abuse victims and cult apostates.
Is it ridiculous for a culture to be so fixated on such a trivial event, what with ALL THE REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS HAPPENING IN THE WORLD? Sure, it is.
According to a Morning Consult poll, 88 percent of Americans are aware that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, after the latter made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith—who suffers from alopecia—that referenced a little-seen 25-year-old movie.
Roughly the same percentage of Americans are aware there’s a war going on in Ukraine. That’s 12 percentage points higher than the percentage of Americans who have heard about inflation hitting a 40-year high. By contrast, just 48 percent have heard about Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay Bill” (which, hilariously, is already leading to some teachers eliminating all gendered pronouns in the classroom altogether—all to maintain compliance with the law. Unintended consequences for the win again!).
Still, for all their fading popularity (as well as the sad deterioration of “the movies” as a dominant cultural institution)—the Oscars still matter. It’s THE premiere event of celebrity self-congratulations. Winning an Oscar continues to carry a huge cultural cachet, and even the most forgettable Oscar ceremonies are usually good for at least a one-day “water cooler” news cycle.
This year’s Oscar show was set up much more like the Golden Globes than past “traditional” Oscars ceremonies—with the top-line nominees sitting at tables near the stage rather than in rows of seats with the rest of the audience. That’s how Smith was able to get right up to Rock’s face less than 10 seconds after the joke was told. And the show was, up to that point, a dreadful bore—seemingly embarrassed by the product it was selling (which would be, “the movies”).
And then, like a hallucination, one of the most famous, consistently successful, and universally liked movie stars of all time—widely considered a shoo-in to win his first Oscar for playing Serena and Venus Williams’ father—reacted to a mean (but lame and forgettable) joke at his wife’s expense by swaggering on to the stage and slapping one of the most broadly popular comedians of all time (and a two-time Oscars host!) in the face.
Will Smith, much like Tom Hanks, rivals few modern actors with his durability as an A-list actor who’s generally well-regarded, family friendly, and somewhat bigger than life.
We all like Will Smith. We were all rooting for him to finally bring home Oscar gold, more than three decades into his evolution from goofy novelty rapper, to young sitcom superstar, to global movie icon. Nobody wanted to see him sully his entire reputation with a moment of globally-televised insanity. This sucks.
How could you not be shocked? Who the hell wouldn’t have an opinion, or perhaps even many opinions? And who wouldn’t have an opinion about other peoples’ opinions? What are takes for, if not to be used in service of discussing the public self-immolation of one of the world’s most famous people?
There were dumb takes, to be sure, particularly those involving racial essentialism.
But there were worthwhile takes, too.
Joseph Patel, an Indian-American and one of the of the producers who won a Best Documentary Oscar for the sublime Summer of Soul—directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson—tweeted (then deleted) a thread directing his anger at Chris Rock for referring to him as one of “four white guys” when announcing the award.
“You absolute fucking dick,” Patel tweeted in Rock’s general direction.
But Patel, for all his righteous anger over his career-affirming moment being completely overshadowed (as well as his ethnic/racial identity marginalized by a joke), conceded that Rock—who just got slapped in the fucking face and chose in a split second to suppress his instincts as a veteran standup comic capable of roasting hecklers for an hour straight, and save the show by just moving on and giving out the damn award—might have merely been searching for an easy joke to lighten the mood.
Patel later tweeted “I never need a statue to tell me how nice I am – but it sure helps”—a paraphrase of a line from Queens hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest’s “Lyrics to Go.” (Linden Boulevard, represent, represent!)
Patel’s thread was an absolute journey of anger, honesty, and finally—acceptance with grace. I’m glad it was (briefly) part of the slap discourse!
I’m also glad for basketball legend, activist, and prolific writer Kareem Abdul-Jabaar’s Substack contribution, in which he wrote that Smith “brought back the Toxic Bro ideal of embracing Kobra Kai teachings of ‘might makes right’ and ‘talk is for losers.’
Here’s an excellent and representative passage from KBJ’s essay:
Worse than the slap was Smith’s tearful, self-serving acceptance speech in which he rambled on about all the women in the movie King Richard that he’s protected. Those who protect don’t brag about it in front of 15 million people. They just do it and shut up. You don’t do it as a movie promotion claiming how you’re like the character you just won an award portraying. By using these women to virtue signal, he was in fact exploiting them to benefit himself. But, of course, the speech was about justifying his violence. Apparently, so many people need Smith’s protection that occasionally it gets too much and someone needs to be smacked.
But it was another legend, the Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar (who for my money made the best movie of the year, Parallel Mothers) that said Smith’s Oscar acceptance speech reminded him of “a cult leader.”
“You don’t defend or protect the family with your fists, and no, the devil doesn’t take advantage of key moments to do his work,” Almodovar wrote in an Oscars journal post for Indiewire.
Referring to Smith’s assertion in the speech that Denzel Washington comforted him after the slap, with a warning that “the devil comes for you” when you’re at your highest point, Almodovar responded:
“The devil, in fact, doesn’t exist. This was a fundamentalist speech that we should neither hear nor see. Some claim that it was the only real moment in the ceremony, but they are talking about the faceless monster that is the social media. For them, avid for carrion, it undoubtedly was the great event of the night,” he added.
You might not be impressed with these three examples, but they landed with me during this communal experience known as The Slap Discourse.
Sometimes there’s a nugget of knowledge or perspective that makes wading through the swamp of takes worth it. And maybe at some point I’ll do a roundup of the very bad slap discourse takes (you all seemed to like that kind of thing when I did it about the worst early-war in Ukraine takes).
But for now, I’ll just say that The Slap Discourse—however frivolous—is not without value.
As mad as it seems, we’re legitimately learning things about each other and ourselves—all because because the Fresh Prince slapped the guy who played Pookie in New Jack City.
Life’s bizarre like that.
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P.S.: Check out my latest Daily Beast column—which argues that the recent Republican-authored school speech bans are each inspired by self-described “patriots” having a weird inferiority complex about American history.