The Jazprose Diaries Presents: Recent Episodes
Andrew Jazprose Hill
Cultural commentary, fiction & memoir by an award-winning Black writer from the Deep South with roots in newspapers, talk radio and major-market TV news.
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After allegedly using steroids to bulk up for the movie 'Ali,' the actor has never seemed quite the same.
After watching Will Smith’s unmanly attack on Chris Rock at one of the best Oscar shows in years, many of us are asking WHY.
Why does a man with an estimated net worth of $350 million walk onto a stage and slap a man worth a $100 million in the middle of a live telecast shown around the world?
How did the former Fresh Prince lose his cool to this extent?
We are told Smith was defending his wife’s honor. That Chris Rock’s insensitive joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s hair loss was in poor taste. That it’s always a bad idea to cast aspersions on a Black woman’s hair.
In his ‘apology’ upon receiving the Best Actor award, Smith suggested tearfully that maybe he was channeling the character he played in King Richard. He said love makes you do crazy things. But none of this seemed quite right given his unnecessary over-reaction to Rock’s ill-conceived joke.
Smith also suggested that his behavior might have been a case of art imitating life. But of course, he got that wrong, too.
First art imitates life. Then life imitates art. That’s how it usually works. But even if Smith had not yet separated from his onscreen character — a very real and dangerous difficulty for actors — the art/life imitation thing doesn’t ring quite true, either.
So what was going on at the level of the real?
Moments before the infamous slap, Chris Rock alluded to Denzel Washington’s Oscar-nominated performance in Macbeth. But under the circumstances, a line from a different Shakespeare play would seem to be more relevant.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
That line from Hamlet usually refers to protestations of love and fidelity that are too excessive to be believed. In other words, it’s about a lie, a coverup.
Anyone understanding that would have to ask, what’s this defense of Smith’s wife really about? Why make so public a show of his purported love?
Fidelity issues?
Only Will Smith and his wife know what’s really going on in their relationship. Despite years of public commentary about their supposedly open marriage, Smith recently told Gayle King that there’s never been infidelity in their marriage.
Something about that denial smacks of Aaron Rodgers’s definition of immunized.
If your privately held definition of fidelity is broad enough to mean “faithful to your idea of fidelity” or “faithful to what the husband and wife have agreed to,” then Smith did not lie to Gayle King.
Was his over-the-top display of a chivalrous husband an effort to reclaim a wife he may have been worried about losing to an interloper like rapper August Alsina, as Cosmopolitan suggests?
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On today’s Jazprose Diaries, we look at a 52 year old Christmas story that’s a bit different from holiday films like It’s a Wonderful Life. This one is called My Night at Maud’s and it asks a tantalizing question--would you give up your principles for love?