Perils of mining your marriage
So Will Smith dropped his apology video for the Oscars slap on the weekend. Watching it was like tuning in for the bigreveal episode of the murder mystery, only to find out they’re running a Christmas special instead. There was a lot of emotion, a lot of sincerity, and no actual explanations.
See, the sensation of the Oscars slap was never really about the slap. (Men slapping each other isn’t exactly rare, it’s a pub on a Saturday night.)
No, the central mystery was why? Why did Will Smith slap Chris Rock in front of 15 million people on America’s most prestigious awards show over one lukewarm joke about his wife’s hair? It’s like ramming a KitKat up someone’s nose because they cut in front of you at the supermarket checkout. It’s a disproportionately crazy response for the crime at hand.
And the video still doesn’t address this. In fact, I’m not even sure Will Smith knows why he did it.
But if you’ve been following the Smiths for a while, you’re probably not surprised he did. Shocked maybe, but not surprised that something like this happened. See, Will and Jada Pinkett Smith have become a grisly advertisement for the perils of mining your marriage for #content.
If you’ve missed the gory details, rumours of infidelity had swirled around them for years. But unlike most celebrities who’d hide it, they tried to monetise it. Jada started Red Table Talk, her notorious talk show. It’s been peppered with the kinda personal revelations about their lives that made you turn to your boyfriend and say, ‘‘If you ever said that about me on TV I’d leave you – and put Lego in your shoes for decades.’’
Most infamously she revealed her affair with August Alsina there in 2020. It made the Smiths the most talked about couple all year. But the scandal was genuinely uncomfortable to watch. And they’ve continued on doing this since then.
Now, Jada has always name-dropped Will in interviews. But it’s gone from referencing the famous relationship to publicly using its flaws and weaknesses on a show as entertainment material. Will has also come on the show, slightly more hesitantly, to do the same thing.
In a way, they’re just doing what everyone does now and turning their internal lives into #content. But it’s an incredibly dangerous strategy.
It’s not the same as being famous for your acting. That’s a job, it’s separate from you. This is deep-sea-drilling-of-the-soul. Kim Kardashian makes it look easy. But only a handful of people can successfully carve out their own internal organs and offer them up to the Instagram gods.
Iknow because I had a brief, bloody stint as an influencer. And trust me, it sends you insane. Exposing the most intimate parts of yourself, like your marriage, makes you immediately volatile. How can you be chill when performing your own vivisection and exposing the deepest, bloodiest parts of your heart? And doing it repeatedly, on the scale the Smiths do, would make you hyper-sensitive to the slightest comment about it. Even a lame GI Jane joke.
But also, because you’ve broken the boundary between your internal life and external life, it really makes your grip on reality slip. You’re not sure what’s real anymore. And it warps your idea of what’s appropriate in the real world. So a chill Hollywood star can become a foaming Joe Pesci character on the biggest stage ever – and not even realise how crazy it is.
Obviously it’s not an excuse for what he did. Rather I see the Smiths and the slap as a metaphor. They symbolise the pyrrhic victory of mining your marriage for #content. It keeps you current. But it’ll also send you mad.