Advertisement
Commentary
The awful truth about The Slap
You didn’t have to watch the Oscars live to know about The Slap.
Social media exploded. And within hours, regular media did, too.
After watching the clip once, a person was caught up. After reading one news story, OK, got it.
But it didn’t take long into Monday — the flood of memes, a feed inundated with GIFs, think pieces, hot takes and more hot takes — to realize:
We’re going to overthink this, aren’t we?
The takes were multitude: The Slap is about alopecia. The Slap is about toxic masculinity. About chivalry, the state of comedy, the male gaze, women’s appearances, fidelity, brutality, the lingering effects of growing up with domestic violence, about marriage, love, family.
Newsweek ran a story on the best slap memes.
Others ran listicles of every dramatic moment the Oscars had ever produced.
Twitter endlessly retweeted an image of Nicole Kidman, supposedly shocked by The Slap, followed by a slew of stories breaking the news that that the image of Nicole Kidman supposedly being shocked by The Slap was actually just her being shocked at something else.
The Slap says a lot more about us as a culture than about Will Smith.
Bullets are flying, wars are raging, children are dying, but this is what we're focused on.
The Slap says a lot more about us as a culture than about Will Smith.
We’re rubber-neckers. Always have been. We’re gossips and oglers.
We will stop on a highway to watch passengers pulled from car wrecks. Drawn to drama like moths to a flame.
It’s why schoolyard fights will always draw a crowd and high school cafeterias will always be fraught with drama. We’re gawkers and gossips and secret spillers. We can’t get enough.
And after we're done staring, the next urge — the educated American urge — is to place that moment on a slide under a lens and begin the dissection.
Sometimes a spade is just a spade. But it’s a great distraction, isn’t it?
The Oscars, of course, don’t matter. Art is subjective, for one thing. No millionaire needs a swag bag worth $140,000. No movie stars need this much back-patting.
It's cream and candy floss. Screens and mirrors, shadow puppets. Colorful distraction at best; at worst a disgusting display of opulence and ignorance of the real world.
There are innocents dying in Ukraine. Theaters and hospitals being bombed. But it’s much easier for us to analyze what is, essentially, a high school cafeteria moment.
We don’t know what's in Will Smith’s head, and — unless we’re his friends or family — we shouldn’t feel the need to get in there.
This is about a husband and wife, and the events that led up to a complicated scenario, with emotions spilling over. We don’t know the exact backstory between Will Smith and Chris Rock and Jada Pinkett Smith. It’s not ours to figure out.
But of course, that's what we love most about drama, about a scene — that it's not about us. We’re looking on from a safe distance at the car wreck. We’re not in the fight. We are outside, looking in at the mess.
And after we're done staring, the next urge — the educated American urge — is to place that moment on a slide under a lens and begin the dissection.
Human nature grotesque. Romans cheering for man-eating lions. Bread and circus.
We have, of course, other problems. Real problems. We have racism and sexism and climate change. We’ve got a violent dictator overseas who might start WWIII. We have actual world-threatening problems topics to think on.
But just like in school, it’s easier to analyze the cafeteria fights than to look at our own failing grades.
Our urge to micro-analyze and judge says far more about us as a people — who we are at our core— than anything one moment in time could say about two guys on a stage.
Deep down, we know this.
But we’re too scared to look at ourselves under the same microscope — or in the mirror.
Who knows what we’d see?
