This Is Why That Slap Was So Disturbing

Will Smith slaps Chris Rock. Why was it so disturbing? Why did it make people, even people like me, wish they hadn’t seen it? I thought about it this morning and I came up with this. Those people are supposed to be different. The hapless jizz toilets and preening, vacuous mamma’s boy Bad Pitcocks, vain and empty and ultimately loathsome, are nonetheless our trusted ambassadors, our human gateways to the artificial world of lights, camera, action. And we love that world dearly. So when one of them crosses the line and reveals himself as a simpleminded schoolyard bully, as Will Smith did when he strode up and slapped that smiling little man, it breaks a contract we paid for time and again at the box office and it’s a reminder of how fake it is, and worse, how even human beings who live in a shell that only resembles reality are still just animals. Every newsfeed for years has been nothing more than an endless episode of Humans Behaving Badly and now our fake humans are doing it too. We might be lost. In some way, deep down, we’re all waiting for enlightenment, a time when people will rise, when the baseline of ethics will firmly move upward and the common man and woman will move up with it. We can, this slap says, give a human being oceans of money, the best of everything we have, even our adoration, and all that is simply not enough. Our rise will still have to take place only in the movies, a bitter paradox and the final fly in the ointment.

There are some great people working in film and television, dedicated and noble craftspeople with vision, but as an art form, it’s topheavy with bottom feeders. There are hustlers in that world, just like in every other art, but the glitter and light and the possibility of celebrity notoriety- one of the emptiest aspirations- seems to attract a peculiar variety of soulless gollum, one that might have otherwise gone into politics or cultism. If the magic is to work seamlessly, if this art is to grow and complicate and become ever more, the men and women with passion and zeal, dedicated to the best in their craft and its finest ideals, to craftsmanship and storytelling, to the robust and the sublime… They have their work cut out for them, more clearly than ever. Maybe an unscripted awards show is a bad idea. Start there.