The Slap

What do I think of what happened at the Oscars? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

I remember back in 2015 seeing ads for a series called The Slap. The series description is as follows:

“A once happy family suddenly begins to fall apart following a seemingly minor incident in which a man slaps another couple’s misbehaving child.”

I remember seeing these ads for the series I never watched and thinking, “How could you make a whole series about a slap?”

My past self would be surprised to see what my social media feed looked like yesterday and no doubt will still look like today.

So there was apparently some event called the Oscars on Sunday night. I wasn’t even aware of it and didn’t watch it, but when I got home and got on my laptop and browsed through Facebook, I saw people talking about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock over a joke. There has been debate on all sides about this. One debate is if the event was staged or not, but I do want to ignore that and I’m going to treat it like a real event.

The event was about Chris Rock making a joke about Will Smith’s wife, Jada, and having a bald head which is actually due to a medical condition she has. At first, Will was laughing about it until he saw that Jada was very upset by it and so Will walks up on stage, slaps Chris Rock, and then profanely tells him to not mention his wife at all to which he agrees.

As someone who has been married before and hopes to be again, my first thought was this was a man defending the honor of his wife. I know in the past when someone insulted my ex on Facebook, I tore into them and I can honestly tell you it was a time of rage. I think most people know that when it happened, you get out the popcorn and watch. There will be fireworks.

But this is how little I pay attention to Hollywood. I didn’t know at the time that the Smiths practice an “open marriage” to which I don’t know how that can be called a marriage. Thus, for Will Smith, it’s okay if another guy sleeps with his wife, but God forbid if another guy makes a joke about her.

It’s hard to consider it a defending of honor after that.

Not only that, he was laughing at the joke at first and then later after he wins an award, gets up and apologizes to everyone. Hard to say “I was defending my wife’s honor, but I want to apologize to everyone.” A contrast to also make to this is the way Rock responded.

I suspect when he saw Will coming up to him, he knew something violent was about to happen, and assuming he was really hit, he stood there and took it and then made a self-effacing joke about it and went on. If this was real, that did take self-control. Should Rock have made the joke? Probably not. Does he come off the better man in this? Yes.

If this was staged, I suspect it won’t work anyway. Most of us view Hollywood as a mutual admiration society with people in it coming together to tell us about how evil wealth and popularity are while having wealth and popularity. We normally turn to entertainment platforms for, well, entertainment, and not to be lectured.

Thus far, my plans are that tomorrow we will get back to Kapr’s book. I did manage to finish it over the week, though if I finish the Michael Bird book I’m reading, I will have a brief interlude to give my thoughts on that. With this being in the news, I decided I needed to comment on that and honestly, there will be a lot to say about Kapr’s book tomorrow and I wanted to wait until I would have more time and since it’s my day off, it will be much easier.

In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)