For perspective: on March 31, 2022, the morning cable news leads with images of burned out Russian tanks, shelled and smoking Ukrainian villages, numb-looking refugees and their wan children, flayed apartment buildings drizzling charred furnishings down onto grey streets. There are corpses on the pavement, sprawled here and there along the sidewalk, faces smeared into an out-of-focus blur in deference to viewers in the United States watching this coverage while they eat their morning toast and Cheerios.
But cable news knows the hearts and minds of its viewers. After fifteen minutes of disheartening coverage of the war in Ukraine, the emphasis shifts to Hollywood celebrities talking about Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars. It’s a little dizzying. Will Smith is like Russia attacking the smaller, if more charming and insouciant, Chris Rock, plucky Ukraine in the morality play arising from the Academy Award incident. At stake are democratic values: freedom of speech, I suppose, and the right of comedians to be offensive.
As everyone knows, Chris Rock was on-stage, apparently to announce the winner in the category of Best Documentary Feature. The venue was the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles on the evening of March 27, 2022. Rock made a few jokes and, then, gestured at Jada Pinkett Smith, Will Smith’s wife. Smith, husband and wife, were seated at the front of the auditorium next to an elevated runway leading to the center of the stage where the comedian was speaking – apparently, steps afforded easy access to the thirty-foot runway leading to the stage. (If the geometry of runway platform and stage had been different, or, if Will Smith had been seated deeper in the audience and more distant from the stage, the assault would not have occurred – presumably, if the outraged Will Smith had been compelled to traverse a greater distance to reach the comedian, he might have reconsidered his impulsive assault.) Rock looked at Jada Smith, pointed in her direction, and said: “Love your look, Jada. See ya in ‘G.I. Jane’.” The gag was obscure and I doubt that most of people in the audience understood it. Rock was referring to Jada Smith’s hair, or lack thereof. She was sporting a bald, shaved head on the occasion. There is celebrated sequence in an old bad movie, G. I. Jane ( ) in which Demi Moore, cast as a bad-ass Marine, shaves her head to achieve a regulation “jar-head” appearance. Rock seems to have been alluding to this scene, possibly well-known to Hollywood insiders, but likely long forgotten by most of the audience viewing the spectacle on TV. (I certainly didn’t understand the jest in real time.) The camera crew cut away from Rock to the Smith’s to show their reaction. Will Smith laughs jovially but his wife seems insulted – she frowns and rolls her eyes. What follows is surreal: with no intervening shot to show Will Smith’s change in reaction, the image cuts to a longer shot in which Smith is already stalking down the runway platform in the direction of Chris Rock. Smith has a jaunty spring in his stride – he looks like a middle-weight boxing champ marching confidently into the ring. Rock expects that the encounter will be mock-aggressive – after all, we’ve just seen Smith laughing appreciatively at the joke. Smith approaches Rock and punches him in the side of the head. Then, he returns to his seat next to his wife. Witnesses say that the room became dead silent. Rock says: “Wow! Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me!” Smith, now seated, shouts: “Keep my wife out of your fucking mouth!”
Rock, a seasoned trouper, doesn’t lose his composure and presents the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Later, Will Smith wins the Academy Award as Best Actor for his performance in King Richard. Smith, who is tearful, apologizes to the Academy, but not to the victim of his assault. And, then, he has the audacity to claim that the assault arose from his excellent acting. In order to successfully perform the role of Richard Williams, the fierce father of Serena and Vanessa Williams as portrayed in King Richard, Smith had to school himself in “ferocious love”. The requirements of the role have slopped over into his real life. Taking “method acting” to its reductio ad absurdam, he has enacted the part of Richard Williams in defending his tennis star daughters byvindicating his wife’s rights – although, this begs the question of what rights? Her right to be free from a stupid joke alluding to her baldness? Her right as a Black woman not to be mocked about hair? Her right to shave her head as opposed to wearing a wig or some other style that would disguise her hair loss?
In any event, the actors in audience are moved. They rise and give Will Smith a standing ovation apparently for his courage in punching the much smaller comedian and, then, turning the assault into a confirmation of “method” acting. (The Russian, Stanislavski, who wrote the bible of method acting, An Actor Prepares, would have been enthused about Smith’s performance in this moment.). But it is all fake. Smith isn’t contrite. Later, he is filmed at an after-party dancing happily and waving his Oscar in the air. The ghastly standing ovation verifies Alfred Hitchcock’s famous contention that actors are basically pretty furniture, to be moved here and there on the sound-stage, but otherwise too stupid to be of any consequence – they are, Hitchcock declares, “cattle.” A couple days later, a backlash ensues led, curiously enough, by another comedian, Jim Carrey. Carrey decries the incident and denounces the standing ovation. This denunciation seems to cause the cattle to stampede in the opposite direction and, now, there are calls for Will Smith to suffer some sort of “accountability” for the assault.
Media coverage, at the outset, subtly favors Smith’s side of the story. The assault is characterized as a “slap”. Possibly, this term derives from Chris Rock’s statement that he was “smacked” by Will Smith. But footage of the incident shows that Smith hit Rock with enough force to knock him sideways. Whether he uses a closed or open fist is uncertain. Similarly, Jada Smith’s condition of hair loss is dignified with the medical term “alopecia”. The purpose for this terminology is to suggest that Ms. Smith suffers from an exotic, disabling, and tragic illness – this seems a tendentious way to characterize her situation. Under this description, Rock is making fun of a woman with terrible disease. (In fact, Rock’s joke referenced Demi Moore shaving her head in a sequence itself derived from Taxi Driver – in that film, Robert de Niro, as the deranged Travis Bickle, shaves his skull into Mohawk to prepare himself for combat with the “scum” of New York.) Rock may not have known about Jada Smith’s diagnosis of “alopecia” and thought that she was affecting a style that is common among black women – to name one example, Lena Waithe’s shaved head. (Waithe is an important actress and director – she directed Queen and Slim, an anti police violence film released in 2019, is regarded as an influential spokesperson for the Black community, and has appeared Westworld and The Chi.)
After the tide of public opinion shifts to favor Chris Rock, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences is faced with a dilemma: why didn’t it take measures against Smith and expel him from the program? Instead, Smith was given his award and standing ovation, presumably applauded for his assault. The Academy accordingly claims that it “asked Smith” to voluntarily leave the auditorium but that he “refused.” But this seems to be a cover-up. People who were present don’t recall any one approaching Smith to compel him to leave the premises. Presumably, the Dolby Auditorium was full of burly security types who could easily have forced the actor to depart – but none of them were involved. Some commentators suggest that someone from the Academy may have approached Smith’s PR staff and discussed the situation. But this issue remains uncertain and disputed. (Smith who is now facing some kind of sanctions is not likely to add to his woes by publicly commenting on whether the Academy asked him to leave.)
The role that race plays in this sordid tale is unclear to me. Certainly, if a White actor, someone like Clint Eastwood or Sean Penn, had assaulted Chris Rock, the outcome would have been far different. The fact that the attack was Black-on-Black leads, it seems, to some folks minimizing the incident. Indeed, the Black actors at the Academy Awards seem to have construed the situation as “all within the family” – this rhetoric was used to indicate that Rock and Smith would patch up their differences and that love would prevail; presumably, Rock would be coerced into a hug with Will Smith and that would be end of the affray. Further, it seems that Will Smith may have consulted with the eminence gris in the community of Black actors for advice – he allegedly approached Denzil Washington as a kind of elder for words of wisdom. (Denzel Washington is supposed to have responded in the mode of a Black preacher reminding Mr. Smith that at the moment of your greatest glory, the Devil comes for you.)
Four days post-incident, the press continues to debate what consequences should be levied on Will Smith. But this debate is ill-informed and obtuse. The consequence, needless to say, is that Smith should be charged with criminal assault and battery and compelled to face the implications of his acts in the criminal justice system. To reiterate an earlier point: if the prickly Sean Penn had attacked a presenter at the awards ceremony, he likely would have exited the hall in handcuffs and spent the night in jail as opposed to partying with his fans brandishing his Oscar over his head. And the discussion on this topic is distorted by immediate media reports that “Chris Rock declined to press charges.” Of course, this comment utterly misconstrues the nature of the criminal justice system. The victim, Chris Rock, doesn’t have any authority to determine whether charges should or should not be pressed. If a man assaults his wife and the wife later “declines to press charges”, her failure to cooperate, although practically significant, is a legal nullity. Smith’s assault and battery was a breach of the peace and, therefore, an offense committed against the People or State of California. We don’t give the victim, readily subject to various forms of coercion and duress, the right to determine whether criminal proceedings are instituted. Celebrities have vast wealth and power – they can “buy-off” their victims. Michael Jackson, apparently, engaged in this practice. But this doesn’t mean that the crime didn’t occur and wasn’t an offense contrary to the civilized State and its people. Again and again, talking heads on TV, some of them lawyers, note that “Chris Rock has declined to press charges” and that, therefore, it is the role of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to punish Will Smith. This is arrant nonsense. If O. J. Simpson had paid 100 million dollars to the estates of his victims, should the grieving families have been allowed “not press charges” and simply accept their new fortune in recompense for the murders? Indeed, the whole idea of “pressing charges” is a legal fiction. In this case, Will Smith committed an assault and battery that would be, at least, a fifth-degree misdemeanor assault under Minnesota law. (I haven’t take the time to research California’s statutes.) Whether Chris Rock notionally “presses charges” or not is irrelevant. The offense was committed in front of a thousand witnesses at the Dolby Theater and in full view of millions of TV viewers. When a battered woman is coerced into not testifying in a case of assault, prosecution of the offense is seriously hampered and, indeed, may not be successful. But domestic assaults occur out-of-sight, in bedrooms and kitchens, often, without witnesses except crying children who don’t know exactly what they are seeing. Will Smith’s assault was open and obvious, doesn’t involve any plausible claim for self-defense or justification, and, therefore, could be readily prosecuted without any involvement by the victim. Therefore, excusing Smith from criminal consequences on the basis that Chris Rock has declined to press charges is craven and grossly opportunistic – another indication that the rich and powerful are afforded exceptions to the law not available to the rest of us.
The absurd claim that no crime occurred because “the victim didn’t press charges” is, further, evidence of a deplorable development in criminal justice – that is, the privatization of the criminal system. This destructive process began with evolution of so-called victim’s rights. These rights were first recognized about forty years ago. Hitherto, the victims of crimes were callously treated as mere witnesses to the events that had injured them. In a response to wide-spread practices ignoring the input of victims as to sentencing as well as other court proceedings, the judicial system has encouraged greater victim participation in criminal cases and, indeed, advocacy groups have arisen to assist victims navigate the additional traumatizing aspects of criminal prosecutions. But this movement has gone too far and many people are led to feel that the essential nature of a criminal prosecution is Victim versus Perpetrator. Of course, this is not the traditional model in Anglo-American jurisprudence nor should it be. One fears that the emphasis on Chris Rock not pressing charges against Will Smith will further confuse this issue. Not one commentator has remarked upon the fact that the victim in this incident doesn’t have the legal right to determine whether State or People of California will institute criminal process against Will Smith.
A Hollywood insider opining on air on March 31, 2022 said the Academy will likely suspend Will Smith’s right to vote for Oscar nominees for one year. This is the penalty that he will pay for publicly assaulting Chris Rock. “We can’t take his Oscar away,” the Insider said, “after all Harvey Weinstein still has his Oscars.”
On another news front, the War in Ukraine continues.
