TMI

 

    poynter.org photo

Are we over Will Smith yet?

Doesn't look that way. The notorious Slap is still sparking a veritable feeding frenzy across the mediaverse. So many columnists, professors and pundits have weighed in, I feel like I got PhD's in sociology, psychology and toxic masculinity in the week since the infamous moment that distracted the Academy Awards from the more hopeful messages of award winners “CODA,” Jessica Chastain, Ariana DeBose and “Drive My Car.”

Aside from echoing Denzel Washington's biblical sentiment on the matter – who are any of us to judge? – I don't have much to add. Based on a decades-long career, Will Smith is a veritable monument; most of us are no more than flies buzzing around his edifice.

But for all the probing of residual racism or the fragile insecurity of manly men, let me nominate two other candidates for boogyman in the superstar's tragic fall: Fame. And fortune.

We didn't know it on Sunday night but now we have all been informed that Mrs. Smith, Jada Pinkett, suffers from the hair loss condition alopecia. That makes Chris Rock's “G.I. Jane” joke about her even less funny. We've also learned from her husband's autobiography “Will,” that he, his siblings and especially his mother were victims of physical abuse from Will's father.

While that backstory obviously played a role in Smith's act of violence at the Oscars, it overlooks the decades in between, when he had the time and the resources to heal and learn. Those decades were spent in the mansions, yachts and seven-figure automobiles that regularly fill star-gazing featurettes at the bottom of internet news pages. 

You'll never believe where your favorite Celebrity lives …

Events like the Oscars are our culture's version of ancient Roman spectacles of excess. They are gatherings of the Beautiful People for the rest of us to admire, and envy, and wish we were. It's glam to the max … and beyond. That's the point.

On Sunday we saw the downside.

As Dame Helen Mirren observed a fews weeks earlier at the only slightly less opulent Screen Actors Guild Awards, the acting profession is an uneasy marriage of ego and insecurity. Always has been, always will. Any creative act cannot exist apart from the uncertainty of not knowing if you can do it.

Possessing a gift for acting doesn't mean you possess a psyche that can process, much less handle, the extreme dangers that come with looking so deeply into our collective soul. And as has been observed for time immemorial, trinkets you may acquire along the way – a gold statue of a guy named Oscar, say – aren't much help when it really counts.

It's ironic, as Maureen Dowd observed in this week's New York Times, that the writer with his finger most on the pulse of the Oscars, not to mention the world around them, has been dead for 400 years: William Shakespeare. Not only did he provide the stories for best-picture contenders, “Macbeth” and “West Side Story,” but his “Hamlet” put words in the mouth of courageous Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zalenskyy. Dead or not, the Bard seems the only ghost writer capable of getting all the nuances in the Tragedy of Will Smith.

That the ruckus is still going so strong weeks later is a symptom of something even more wrong in the modern word:

TMI.

Too Much Information. The reason we all know so much about so many intimate details in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, including the names of her lover(s) and how her husband felt about him/them, stems from that thing we're never without. It's always there in our pocket, or our purse, or on the nightstand by our bed, the last thing we look at each evening, the first thing we check tomorrow morning.

Our phones are the nerve endings of a single nervous system uniting billions of people around the planet. Surpassing the most far-out fantasies of the most dystopian science-fiction writer, TMI is what we've got now, instead of truth. It's a handy megaphone for sociopathic propagandists masquerading as presidents. It's what enables the rest of us to collect harebrained assortments of ideas and call it science, or proudly assert belligerence in place of belief.

It's what Shakespeare called “the sound and the fury … signifying nothing.”

Will Smith is the latest poster boy for TMI, providing catnip for idle minds that surely have better things to do. 

He won't be the last.