I confess I had no idea who he was Chris Rock until Will Smith famously slapped him at the Oscars. What a stir. Cinema no longer mattered, nor haute couture dresses. Will only.
Let’s judge it, let’s analyze each edge of its polyhedral character. They call him macho, arrogant and sick. What he did was wrong, very wrong. How can you think of it, in front of millions of spectators and being a reference for so many young people. There is no excuse: it doesn’t matter that he was nervous, or the ambiguous past that linked him to the victim and his wife. It doesn’t matter whether or not Chris Rock knew about Will’s wife’s alopecia problems: it’s quite questionable to make humor with the physique of others. The fact is that the conflict arose and that the solution was that of a primary school playground. A slap and a swear word of those that are said with suppressed rage and that are much more threatening than a clenched fist.
We have two criminals: the humorist who is not funny and the aforementioned who responds with violencewhen his wife’s honor could be defended by herself or by Will himself with the gift of speech when he had received the prize: he would have been considered a worthy gentleman of America.
“An exemplary measure does not need to destroy a person who had brought more smiles than sorrows”
And now, as in the wonderful novel by Fiodor Dostoyevski Crime and Punishment, we also have a sentence. Will Smith had already resigned as a member of the Academy, but now he has also been banned by it from any event linked to the institution and of course the Oscars gala for 10 years. In addition, the film projects he had with Netflix and Sony have been cancelled. Instead, Chris Rock has seen how tickets to his comedy shows have sold out and how his cache has risen considerably. When similar contrasts occur, he reflected on the proportionality of things and returned to Crime and Punishment; In the plot, the young student Raskólnikov, fed up with misery and the dark world in which he lives, kills an old loan shark with an ax to rob her and, when discovered by a second person —innocent and good—, also murders her. There is no excuse: if he went mad with rage, hunger and misery, it was not the system that unloaded the ax, but his own hand. The protagonist wrestles with himself over the morality of what he has done, filled with remorse. As he strives to do good deeds for others, he ends up confessing and, given his sincerity and good record, he is sentenced to only 8 years of hard labor. He will still be in time to have a life. I’m sorry if I gave you a spoiler, but since 1866 you had had more than enough time to read this tremendous novel.
The fact is that Will, for a slap, has received a temporary sentence greater than Raskólnikov and right now he is in a private clinic to “rehabilitate”. I already know that I only have partial and advertising information about Will Smith, but I also know about the proportionality of things. An exemplary measure does not need to destroy the life of a person, who until now had brought more smiles than sorrow to others. Some will tell me that he has sunk by himself. Of course. But remember that unshakable ethic when you are faced with real problems, with the images on television of Bucha’s corpses while unpacking this Easter vacation. Is there proportion between our initial horror at the invasion of Ukraine and our progressive detachment from the horror? Do we really believe we possess a true sense of humanity? I want to think that, as it is said in Crime and Punishment, in the end it is love that regenerates us.
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