On the first page of
Will Smith’s recent
memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his
father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up
blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young
Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family
entertainer to save his mother, himself, and everyone else.
اضافة اعلان
“I would be the golden
child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be
the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break
character. Not once.”
That he became a perpetual
conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “
Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “
I Am Legend,” a
druglord-defeater in “
Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “
Ali” — might
have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s
most bankable actors. Off-cameraa, he behaved much as he did on camera,
revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.
Over the last couple of
years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only
semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly
vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube
Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but
more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing
character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s
melting it down.
This pivot to transparency
makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in
trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23,
and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there.
Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show
“
Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite
old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.
Their path has been the
opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan
that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines
between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have
downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and
garish one, and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking,
especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.
Theirs is a perfectly timed
reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands,
especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye,
and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt-out. It is
also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its
de-stigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would
have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in
earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.
Will might be the Smith
family member with the highest public profile, but it is Jada who helped draft
the template of the family reinvention with “Red Table Talk.” The show, which
appears on Facebook Watch, began in mid-2018, and quickly became known for
unexpectedly vulnerable conversations, both with celebrity guests, and also
between the hosts: Jada, Willow, and Jada’s mother, Adrienne.
Watch enough “Red Table
Talk” after reading Will’s book and absorbing his YouTube series and you might
encounter the same tale told a few different ways — he’s been workshopping this
unburdening for some time. Unlike Jada, who approaches the show and shares her
truths more casually, Will has fully embraced this shift and is treating it
like he would a blockbuster film: rehearsal, polish, flawless delivery.
“
Best Shape of My Life”
begins as a weight-loss show — Will has a mild dad-bod paunch. To address it,
he flies to Dubai to work with his personal trainer, as one does. He wants the
process filmed, he says, because “the cameras act like my sponsor — they keep
me accountable.” He partakes in intense physical challenges — walking to the
top of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on the planet, or navigating the
Dubai Police Academy obstacle course — and is also working on his memoir.
Soon, he begins to chafe at
that accountability. Agonizing over the weight loss goal begins to feel like
false tension. So does stress about the deadline for his book. Instead what
unfolds is a tug of war between his compulsion to perform and his need to
retreat. The fourth episode is titled “I Quit,” and then he continues for two
more episodes — this is, after all, a Will Smith production. But seams are
fraying: In the fifth episode, he crows, “They’ll get what we give them.”
Several segments of the show
are given over to Will’s reading segments of his memoir to family members and
friends. These moments limn vulnerability without ever detaching it from
performance — Will cries about the challenges in his childhood home, and his
onlookers, including his therapist, nod along. At least a few years past his
box-office-domination peak, he has built a more scalable reward system.
Once the sort of superstar
known for smooth maximalism, Will has experimented with this sort of
behind-the-scenes content before: “Will Smith’s Bucket List,” a series on
Facebook Watch, and “Will Smith: Off the Deep End,” a nature immersion doc. But
the last year has constituted a multiplatform career rebrand in which Smith
uses all the tools of celebrity in service of peeling back its layers.
In his autobiography, he
writes movingly of the tug of war he feels in regards to his father, who
instilled in Will the discipline with which he would build his astronomically
successful career but was also abusive. In one section, he suggests that he
considered pushing his elderly father down a flight of stairs as retribution.
But the real revelation
about Will’s relationship to parental authority comes in “King Richard,” last
year’s biopic about Richard Williams, father of Serena and Venus. Richard
Williams was often maligned for the single-minded way he raised his daughters,
but Will plays him empathetically as a stubborn hero, leaning into his
doggedness but never making him an object of derision. (He was nominated for an
Oscar for the performance.) No means are beyond bounds when the ends are so
enviable.
It’s likely the role has
double meaning for Will — on the one hand, it’s a celebration of the
transformative discipline he learned from his own father (in a non-abusive
context), and on the other, it’s an argument for his own style of parenting. In
both the memoir and at the Red Table, he speaks openly of how his heavy-handed
fathering of Jaden and Willow exploded in his face on multiple occasions. When
Willow’s first single, “Whip My Hair,” became a hit, she rebelled against the
pressures of touring by shaving her head. The action film he made with Jaden,
“
After Earth,” was a colossal flop. (Will has another son, Trey, from his first
marriage, who is a sometime DJ and occasionally appears on “Red Table Talk.”)
And yet the levelheadedness
of the younger Smiths is somewhat remarkable. They are untethered thinkers in
the way that children of privilege can often be, but they are also curious and
empathetic and, all things considered, decidedly warm. (Listen to Jaden talk about
learning how to navigate paying for dinner and you’ll melt.) Given their
parents’ full-circle journey to untouchable celebrity and back, and given that
they were born into a far more transparent generation, it’s easy to adapt to
their family’s newfound visibility.
For Will and Jada, though,
the high wire act of confession is, naturally, a reassertion of power. To be
this vulnerable, effectively without fear of reprisal or public collapse, is
perhaps the ultimate test of celebrity. The only question that remains is what
secrets still lurk behind all this transparency.
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