So much has been said and written about Will Smith’s “smackdown” of Chris Rock during Sunday night’s Oscars that I hesitate to even bring it up. For some, Smith was right to defend his wife, actress and singer Jada Pinkett Smith, from Rock’s tasteless joke about her shaven hair. For others, Smith’s behavior was entirely out of line, exposing not only his own arrogance but also a blind spot to his status as a public role model. As basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar put it, “With a single petulant blow, [Smith] advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.” Still others speculated on the authenticity of Smith’s actions. Perhaps the whole thing was staged—a stunt that would boost interest in the flagging Academy Awards show. An even more elaborate theory emerged on Twitter: commenters noted that Pfizer was one of the main sponsors of this year’s Oscars and that the pharmaceutical magnate has been plugging a new therapy for Alopecia Areata—the very autoimmune condition that caused Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss to begin with. Perhaps Smith and Rock were working for Pfizer, indirectly (but quite successfully) calling attention to the disease. Inevitably, people also speculated that Smith was not so much upset by Rock’s joke as by his alleged dalliance with Jada Pinkett Smith. And finally, for his own part, Smith himself suggested that his outburst was in keeping with his Oscar-winning role as tennis-dad Richard Williams in the 2021 sports drama King Richard:
And yet, as I see it, the real story here is not Smith’s assault on Rock. One could witness similar slaps on playgrounds and in bars throughout the known world. On the contrary, what’s fascinating is the reaction stirred up by this incident—a bizarre combination of gleeful amusement and somber reflection that strikingly corresponds to a passage in Søren Kierkegaard’s A Literary Review (En literair Anmeldelse, 1846). According to Kierkegaard, “the present age” (Nutiden) is “an age of publicity, the age of miscellaneous announcements: nothing happens but still there is instant publicity.” What he means by this is that modern people would rather discuss things than do things. For that reason, they relish a good controversy, precisely because it affords them an opportunity to conversate and to expostulate. But herein lies a problem. The present age is “enervated by too much reflection,” so much so that it can no longer distinguish between good and evil, virtue and vice. There is only performance. With this in mind, Kierkegaard observes that people today would rather not undertake heroic deeds themselves. Instead, they arrange for actors and stuntmen to pretend to do so for entertainment, and this diversion continues to occupy them, at least for a time, even after the fun is over.
At the banquet in the evening, the admiration would resound. But whereas what usually happens where admiration is authentic is that the admirer is inspired by the thought of being a man just like the distinguished person…here again practical common sense would alter the pattern of admiration. Even at the giddy height of the fanfare and the volley of hurrahs, the celebrators at the banquet would have a shrewd and practical understanding that their hero’s exploit was not all that good. … Instead of being stimulated to being discriminating and encouraged to do the good by this festival of admiration, the celebrators would rather go home more disposed than ever to the most dangerous but also the most aristocratic of all diseases, to admire socially what one personally regards as trivial, because the whole thing had become a theatrical joke.
So, from Kierkegaard’s standpoint, whether Will Smith (or Chris Rock or Jada Pinkett Smith) is the “hero” in this debacle is beside the point. What matters is that our media-driven society craves moments such as this one, when comments sections and Twitter memes soak up the hours of tedium. For awhile, we seem to have meaning and purpose, until the controversy passes. And then we wait for the next one to come.
🎶“Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more.”🎶