The Once Unknowable, Now All Too Knowable Will Smith
In July, 1999 The Onion published a headline that has always stuck out in my mind for being hilarious, incisive and true: “Will Smith: The Black Man Everyone At Work Can Agree On.”
The headline did not accompany a story. It did not need to. Everything that you needed was in the headline itself.
Needless to say, that headline reads much different now that Will Smith has gone from being the Black Man Everyone At Work Can Agree On to the Black Man Who Is Tearing Our Nation Apart With Violence and Rage thanks to his televised assault on comedian Chris Rock during the Academy Awards.
For a VERY long time Will Smith effectively cultivated a slick, shiny persona of more or less complete unknowability. For decades, Will Smith only let the world know what he wanted it to know about his life: that he was handsome, rich and charming, with a gorgeous movie star wife and beautiful children. Oh, and also the name of the latest CD, film or television show.
I remember once watching Smith on Late Night with David Letterman and having the same response that Christian Bale did when he saw Tom Cruise bantering with Letterman and decided to base his performance in American Psycho on the creepily All-American icon.
Smith seemed so intent on convincing the world that he was normal, sane and EXACTLY like his freshly scrubbed public image that he couldn’t help but come off as deeply weird.
As with Cruise, it felt like Will Smith was doing an only intermittently convincing impression of a human being because of a deep-seated conviction that it would be all over for him if the public knew what was actually going on in that big, calculating brain of his they would be mesmerized and disgusted.
It makes sense that Smith is good friends with Cruise, and not coincidentally Scientology-friendly/curious because have similar approaches to stardom.
Smith’s fame is infinitely trickier and more difficult because he is black. You don’t become arguably the biggest movie star in the world in a deeply racist country without exercising a level of self-control and calculation that borders on preternatural.
Needless to say, that is NOT how Smith is viewed now. A man who once thrived on being unknowable beyond his carefully tended public image is now, if anything, excessively knowable.
The Smith family has become synonymous with unwise public disclosures. They’re emotional exhibitionists, perpetually airing their dirty laundry in public.
Smith is now infamous for losing control in a dramatic and violent manner on what should have been the greatest night of his life, the historic evening when he won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Something was clearly deeply wrong with Smith during the early years of his fame that he did not want the world to know about, just as there is clearly something wrong with him now.
I can’t even imagine the kind of pressure he’s under, and has been under for over three decades but hopefully in the days and years ahead he can figure out a happy medium between being polished to the point of unknowability and letting his inner ugliness out for the whole world to see.
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