The revenge of Uncle Fluffy.

This is another piece in the NYT about Will Smith — it's by Melena Ryzik, Nicole Sperling and Matt Stevens — and I think it's worth reading, because it raises the more general problem of what happens to a person who chooses the strategy of niceness:

From his start as a goofy, G-rated rapper and sitcom star through his carefully managed rise as a blockbuster action hero, Will Smith has spent decades radiating boundless likability. But his amiable image was something of a facade, he wrote in his memoir, noting that a therapist had nicknamed his nice guy persona “Uncle Fluffy.”...

Mr. Smith wrote that he had another, less public, side: “the General,” a punisher who emerged when joviality didn’t get the job done. “When the General shows up, people are shocked and confused,” he wrote in “Will,” his 2021 memoir. “It was sweetness, sweetness, sweetness and then sour, sour, sourness.”

I'm interested in the wages of niceness. You can try to be nice, but if it's a strategy — a means to an end — it's only going to work until you snap or — even if you never snap — it can fail because other people perceive you as phony or because they may rely on you to keep up the niceness charade while they proceed to take advantage of you more and more.  

Remember the "Queen of Nice"? Who was that? Rosie O'Donnell? Ellen DeGeneres? Neither of them turned out to be very nice, and maybe deploying the "nice" persona made them even less nice than they'd have been if they'd gone ahead and been straightforward. And yet, where would they be if they hadn't played "nice"? Where would Will Smith be? Would he have been a big success in rap music if he hadn't taken the "goofy, G-rated" lane?

But most of that NYT article is about how he's hurt his family's brand, which was "rooted in his seemingly-authentic congeniality":

For several years, a growing branch of Smith family enterprises has adeptly delivered reality-style revelation and emotional intimacy across an expanding number of platforms. Beyond Mr. Smith’s acting career and his introspective, best-selling memoir, there is the popular “Red Table Talk” show on Facebook Watch, in which Ms. Pinkett Smith, their daughter, Willow, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, hold forth on everything from racial identity to workout routines to the Smiths’ unconventional marriage....

How they sold that "unconventional marriage" as part of a "goofy, G-rated" "congeniality," I don't know. I haven't been watching. I'm surprised by what counts as wholesome and mainstream sexuality these days.  

“I think most people would give him the benefit of the doubt,” said [Jonathan] Murray, a co-founder of the production company Bunim Murray, which pioneered reality TV. “But it really will rest on whether we believe that he is authentically dealing with this.”

There's that word "authentic" again — used, again, not to mean actual authenticity, but the perception of  authenticity. It's  "seemingly-authentic" and "whether we believe" we're seeing authenticity. The authenticity can be completely phony baloney, but the question is, are we — the idiots on the sofa — buying it?

"Particularly for his wife. And she’s got alopecia. So… not a happy home life."

I got through the entire blogging day yesterday without mentioning Will Smith, but this morning, reading the comments in last night's cafe, I took the prompt to watch a clip of Joe Rogan talking about it. 

That's a 15-minute clip. I still intend to watch the rest of it, but 5 1/2 minutes in, I found myself wondering what Ricky Gervais has said about the incident. Ricky is brilliant, and he's a stand-up comedian who's hosted awards shows and roasted the big stars. Here he is at the 2020 Golden Globes. 

I would expect Ricky to defend the role of the comedian versus the stars, but all he did was one little thing, retweet this tweet from the British "Office" twitter feed that shows the tiniest clip from an old episode of the show:

“And she's got alopecia. So... not a happy homelife." pic.twitter.com/b1NYWWIncX

— David Brent Music (@DavidBrentMovie) March 28, 2022

ADDED: From that 2020 Golden Globes performance: 

 

"Let's go out with a bang. Let's have a laugh at your expense — shall we? Remember: They're just jokes. We're all going to die soon. And there's no sequel."

Oh, but the "just jokes" defense — just jokes at the expense of the hyper-privileged — that's not going to work anymore. It's the Era of That's Not Funny, and the preening empaths are out there in force telling you never ever ever ever to joke about anything that's actually physically wrong with a person. Or something like that. Can we still laugh at bald men? At bald white women? Who knows? I'm guessing we've reached end of the entire tradition of comedians on stage at awards shows making fun of the stars for the amusement of the little people out there in the dark. Whoever they get to emcee will be telling the stars they are wonderful and beautiful. Will Smith smacked the comedy out of the whole show. Get all the jokes out ya fucking mouth, from now until the end of Hollywood.

Chris Rock — punched by Will Smith for a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith's hair — once made a documentary about black people and their hair.

Here's the trailer for "Good Hair": 

 

Here's Rock making the joke, Will chuckling, and Jada not amused, and then Will striding onto the stage and hitting/"hitting" Rock:

 

At 0:42, I felt sure what I'd seen was a fake "Hollywood" punch. Rock stood planted in position and even leaned his face forward, then — it seemed — threw his head back after the seeming contact. 

And Rock recovered so quickly, still smiling, and chattered out "Will Smith just smacked the shit out of me." But if it was scripted, would he have said "shit"? I haven't been watching the Oscars in recent years, but back in the days when I used to care enough to live-blog the hours-long show, I had the tag "fleeting expletives" to keep track of the litigation that arose after Cher's saying "fuck" at the 2002 Billboard awards activated the FCC. Who can even remember what the Supreme Court ultimately did about that threat to free speech? 

But when Will Smith got back to his seat and proceeded to yell "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth! Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" it was hard to believe it was scripted. But, as I said, I don't know where we are with fleeting expletives these days, and maybe we are right where it would be scripted precisely because it would create the illusion that it was unscripted. 

Then Smith wins the best actor Oscar, and we get to listen to his speech, which give us another chance to assess the real-or-fakeness of the punch/"punch"/slap/"slap":

But if he's such a great actor — do we really still believe the stars who get the statuette are "great actors"? — he should be able to sell a scripted acceptance speech with faux-sincere lines about his being a "river of love" or some such nonsense and to cry seemingly real tears of apology.

What makes me think it was real is that it makes Smith look bad. He looked ugly yelling "Keep my wife's name out ya fucking mouth!" And he overshadowed his own winning of the Oscar. Why would anyone do that? The best explanation is that he lost his temper. But exactly why did he lose his temper? I think we'd need to know more about his relationship with his wife. Remember he was laughing at the joke, and she was looking grim. The camera wasn't on them continuously, but I imagine she said something to him or gave him a look that meant you'd better act now or you are not a man. 

Finally, it's sad that the Smiths aren't proud of Jada's hair. She boldly shaves it down to almost nothing and that's a way of expressing great confidence in one's own beauty. I'm seeing some articles talking about her alopecia, but if you go to that link, you'll see she has a thin line of baldness across the top, and it's something that would be hidden if she didn't shave her head. She's highlighting the beauty of her face and the elegant structure of her head. She's not like those women in Chris Rock's movie who spend so much time at the hairdressers, use harsh chemicals, and cause so much importation of human hair from India. 

Jada Pinkett Smith could have had any wig she wanted. To go to the Oscars with a shaved head is to make a strong statement that you think this is your best look. Chris Rock said she could play in a sequel to "G.I. Jane," which means she could play Demi Moore's iconic role. Demi Moore is famously beautiful. 

The best response to the joke would have been an imperious smile that meant: Yes, I know I am beautiful. Not: My husband will now punch you in the nose!

"During the procedure, an instrument called the 'UltraFemme 360' is repeatedly inserted into the νagina."

"'It introduces heat which stimulates cellular turnover which makes you feel younger again... And it gets tighter and nicer and functions like it did when we were back in our twenties.' An additional attachment is also worked around the labia and the urethra 'which does make the appearance sometimes tighter and helps with stress incontinence and you become more supple.... So it’s easier to have sex again.' According to the Vitality Institute’s website, the treatment works to 'stimulate your body’s healing response, cell regeneration, collagen synthesis, and blood supply.... Two out of 10 women do have a happy time while they’re getting the treatment. That’s what the literature told us.”

The first quote within the quotes is from Kelly Rainey, the owner of the Vitality Institute, which is getting a lot of publicity because Jada Pinkett Smith says she had that procedure and that her "yoni is like a 16-year-old — I’m not kidding. It looks like a little beautiful peach."

I'm blogging this because I'm seeing other blogs taking the angle that Smith is absurdly vain — e.g., "FIRST-WORLD BRAGGADOCIO: Jada Pinkett Smith is 46 but says her vagina is ‘like a 16-year-old'" (Instapundit). But I think what's important here is the commercial venture that involves sticking an instrument repeatedly into the vagina to "introduce heat" and the claim that this is somehow healing and tightening.

By the way, the yoni is the vulva, not the vagina, and it's the vulva, not the vagina, that might look something like a peach.

Here, from Buzzfeed, is "33 Images Of Food Just Straight-Up Looking Like Vaginas" (funny images, but they're funny because they look like vulvas, not vaginas).

None is a peach.

"There's something about the Olsens that makes them seem like trinkets...."

Robin Givhan on the Olsen twins:

Ashley Olsen... appeared on "Good Morning America" and spoke with Diane Sawyer. The morning host insisted that they stand next to each other so the audience could take note of just how teeny-tiny the millionaire author is compared with the statuesque journalist. We couldn't help but wonder: Would Sawyer have been so inclined to treat the equally diminutive actress Jada Pinkett Smith or former labor secretary Robert Reich like a Travelocity gnome?... Assembling [their new] book took more than a year and was daunting, one of them said. It might have been Mary-Kate. But it could just as easily could have been Ashley. It was impossible to tell them apart.... As individuals, they do not seem fully realized. As adults, they are a blur. When we see Ashley solo in the middle of a cocktail party, we wonder: Where is her other half? What is she doing? And who left this child alone in a room crowded with adults?

Soooo.... wow... twins are freaky.... I mean, I thought Givhan was critical of Diane Sawyer, but then, she just went on infantalizing and dehumanizing them. Hey, big news: Twins are human. Short people are human.