LEFT: J.R. Eyerman original photo from 1952 with indication of cropped section; LEFT Cover of the English edition of Society of Spectacle from 1983. credit: APHELIS: AN ICONOGRAPHIC AND TEXT ARCHIVE RELATED TO COMMUNICATION, TECHNOLOGY AND ART.
The Night the Movies Died and Took the Oscars with Them
Will Smith’s assault on Chris Rock during the 94th Oscars ceremony on March 27, 2022 engendered one of the most widely discussed popular cultural events in recent memory. In the immediate aftermath, millions from all over the globe have been discussing this break in the fourth wall in articles, blogs, comment sections, tweets, instagrams and the like. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences tried to clean up the spill in aisle 1 but bungled it. It no sooner put out a statement then said statement was contradicted by others who had first hand knowledge behind the scenes at the Dolby theater. Charles Taylor in Esquire has come to a conclusion not unlike the thesis of this essay, “The broadcast showed how the Oscars could be killed off. Will Smith [a man who was once one of Earth’s most beloved humans] was the capper on a night that made it seem like a good idea.”
This 'incident' is a kind of Rorschach test for where we are all situated on multiple axes, especially of race (the event is complicated by the three African Americans at the center of ‘the slap’), class (as in privilege), gender and violence. The African Americans on screen, all of whom possess both class and status privilege, and the production staff, who for the first time were all Black, made this incident even more painful to think about. We have had three weeks to contemplate the event, but there is not likely to be a consensus on this matter for quite some time, if ever.
Those who are calling for us to move on from this discussion are doing so without thinking hard about what ‘the slap’ might mean. This was a ‘signalling’ event at a time when humanity needs to move beyond violence if human civilization is to survive.
If one of our most admired cannot escape an urge to beat another during a live global broadcast, what hope do the rest of us have to escape violence? Against the backdrop of Putin's war, something else we are all subjected to on the whim of ONE of us, this diorama looms large. Cultural meanings are more important than the individuals involved in making events, small or large.
People can blame or praise Mr. Rock and Mr. Smith (as if they were the only figures involved, not) ad infinitum, but the most important question regarding this cultural event is what it signifies about our collective participation in The Spectacle.
The Spectacle, as Debord and Baudrillard have discussed brilliantly, names how moderns are interpolated into commodification. We are living inside representations and those representations would hardly exist if not for modern capitalism’s ability to commodify ad infinitum.
In 1967, Debord declares Society and the Spectacle that we are deep into "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” By the time Baudrillard publishes Simulacra and Simulation in 1981, he has concluded that we are living inside a set of signs, each pointing to other signs; the simulacra are our experience. Some have interpreted this to mean we are not experiencing our lives at all but are caught in a hyper-reality which is, of course, no reality at all (e.g. the cultural understanding of The Matrix films).
The image above is side by side compilation of the cover of Debord’s book (on the right) and a photo of an audience watching an early 3D film (on the left). The cover image inverts a detail from the original photo turning it into a simulacrum, a manipulation of the image which once had a concrete referent, the people sitting in the theater, but is now a sign pointing to another sign. The audience in the picture, i.e. the first level representation, was not enough for the book cover; the representation had to be manipulated to bring its meanings ‘out.’
By the 21st century, we are all interpolated into The Spectacle. Viewing The Oscars means viewing an infinite chain of signifiers, all of which can hypnotize and generate profit.
Has something important happened? Did The Spectacle collapse during a globally broadcast live event? What might happen as we digest how ‘reality’ broke the fourth wall, thereby dissolving our enchantment with The Spectacle for a minute or two? How might our responses change once the representations we invest with ‘truth’ are revealed as pure performance? Can The Spectacle be dismantled? Can we exit The Matrix?
These question slip and slide all over the place as shock and anger about the actual attack leads us to parse the relative blame assigned to the various participants. How will we all process the infinite fractals of what happened to the bodies on the scene and the global audience? Who was ‘right’ and who was ‘wrong’? What blame can be ascribed to the primary actors in the scene, and were The Academy and the audience in the theater important actors after the fact? It seems clear that what has captured global attention is not only the initial assault and battery, but also, and maybe even more importantly, the reaction of The Academy officials in the theater and its producer, Will Packer, the first all-Black production team in Oscars history and the audience inside the Dolby. Was the global audience angry at the scene or angry at itself for participating in The Spectacle? Worse, was the global audience angry that their participation in The Spectacle was revealed as a bad bargain? What really led to The Academy officials decision to allow Will Smith to remain in the theater whereupon we were all subjected to and participants in his horrid acceptance speech?
Putting the fractals aside, I want to concentrate on how The Society of the Spectacle was fractured, if only for a moment, by this diorama. It makes sense to realize that at least part of the intensity of the response to this event has to do with that fracture, a moment in time when our collective hypnosis was ripped asunder by a single act of violence. In that moment, the real replaced the hyper-real.
Of course, the broadcast video was censored in the United States even while it went out raw in other countries, notably Australia and Japan. So attempts to edit the representation were defeated by the weight of the event’s global currency. It took some time for the audience in the Dolby and the audience at home to catch up to the real of the event, but mostly, we believed we had witnessed something shocking. But the shock was the result of not just the unprecedented violence, but also the break in the fourth wall, the wall separating the audience from the performance.
Russell Brand has an interesting take on what went down and its significance. I never thought too much about Brand till he guest edited an issue of The New Statesman titled “Revolution of Consciousness” in which his erudition revealed his serious anti-capitalist philosophy.1 The best comedians have excellent minds, but Brand also knows how to write more than a joke. Brand’s reaction to the break in the fourth wall was:
Oh no! The Spectacle cannot sustain itself. . .The seeping encroachment of the real world crept into The Oscars like the presence of the Ukrainian conflict, the awareness of the last two years of the pandemic, the sense of a broken and vicious culture could not be kept at bay even with all of the sequins and velvet and celebration. It slipped in in the form of a slap. . .That event broke the framework of The Oscars. . .Why are we even having Oscars? Don’t you think that what this shows us is that our reality can no longer sustain ‘it’? . . .The gala cannot hold itself together anymore. . .This is a festival of meaninglessness. Why is it suddenly being invested with such forceful and priapic meaning? So when it suddenly spilled into violence, what I felt was ‘oh well, this reality cannot work anymore.’ This reality is over. . .
I’ve been in that world, but as a system, one wonders what its function is now? . . .Ask yourself how much do you really care? Do you really care about Will Smith and Chris Rock and Jada? But [you will say] it is this issue and that issue. Sure, those issues are important. . . [but] We are all participating in something that we don’t actually care about at all. . .I am not condemning people for finding it seductive. That is what glamour does. Glamour is the synthesis of meaning, the simulation of meaning.
We all willfully enter a simulation of meaning when we put our clothes on and pretend our own reality is important, but to see it elevated, amplified to such a gargantuan, glitter colored turd of empty magnificence, for me, is something that has always been a little bit troubling. . .
On some level, everyone knows [these kinds of events are] kind of stupid, but everyone knows it’s kind of exciting if someone passes you one of those statues. . .
What I suppose I learned from that Oscar spectacle is that the reality we have been invited to live in, (the cultural reality because it not an objective thing, it is a construct). . .It’s falling apart because it needs to fall apart; it can’t even sustain itself using its own limited framework. . .Can you really stay invested in it?. . .
We are here, now creating a reality. . .If we continue to live in a kind of . . . outsourced reality that we are not participants in. . .then I think we are missing the point of life. . .[but even so] This is sad, something is over. . .The state of commercialization and commodification and has reached a tipping point. . .
The illusion is breaking down. The Oscars cannot even get to the end of itself without smacking itself in the mouth because it knows it is stupid now . . . [emphasis mine, of course]
Brand concludes that,
. . .continuing to live a life of distraction and casual unconscious destruction at a time when our ontology could be renewed, reawakened, where we can change reality. If we can get to a situation where it is normal to have that Oscars ceremony, surely we can create alternative realities.
Can we remake our reality into one where the existential issues of climate change, war, gross income inequality, a pandemic (and I would add, gender, race and class) are central to our meaning, not fighting for the attention of a populace drugged out on The Spectacle?
This is the same question as: How did the former guy make it to the presidency? The answer has been obvious for some time: he traded on his cultural capital, on an audience primed to accept braggadocio as achievement, on a series of dog whistles, signs pointing to other signs for wealth, toxic masculinity, sexism, racism, anger and frustration. These have been cultural currency for hundreds, if not thousands, of years; however, in the era of The Spectacle and extreme capitalism, these signs ricochet through the construct that is our accepted reality. The theorists of the Frankfurt school attempted to deconstruct the catastrophe of The Spectacle no later than the rise of German Nazism.
Ironically, all this stands in relief against the background of Putin’s War on not just Ukraine but an elected president, actor and comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has the wits and talent to put on a spectacle of his own. The most open sourced war in history is also the most immediately experienced by those not in direct line of fire in representations on screens everywhere. Zelensky’s bravura performance is telegenic in the extreme. Are The Spectacle, the materiality of war, war performance and war propaganda colliding on our screens?
It seems as if the violence in Ukraine that we are witnessing everyday should make the violence in the Dolby theater appear trivial. But the tens of thousands of deaths in Ukraine somehow do not diminish the violence of Will Smith. The lesser violence seems to pose important questions with wide reaching importance. From whence erupts the violence humans do to others? What is inside us that gives us permission to commit violence? How do bystanders police violence? Can we understand how “Fight, Flight, Freeze or Fawn” predetermined the Dolby audience’s freeze and fawn response? And who is finally responsible for keeping us all safe?
Can we exit the commodification of extreme capitalism?
[my words, Brand’s intent]
Has the slap woken us from our dazzled dream, our participation in the commodification of our psyches and even our embodied selves?
A memecoin of the slap
(Washington Post illustration; Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images; iStock)
The Spectacle regurgitated an artifact, a memecoin, within hours of the event itself. Spectacle reasserted itself in the form of ‘money.’
From the Washington Post: Two days after the Oscars, Ryan Watson, a 29-year-old landscaper and cryptocurrency investor bought $5,000 worth of Will Smith Inu. The coin garnered more than $3 million in trading, collapsing back to nearly zero within a week. Its temporary rise worked well for early investors like Watson, who cashed out with $20,000.
The above artifact demonstrates how quickly commodification succeeds at re-establishing its order.
The Personal is Political
Since childhood, I have loved the movies and Oscars night. The stunning female stars in their beautiful dresses, the gorgeous and elegant men dapper in their best, the score and song categories, seeing stars who were mostly no longer working but still in our imaginariums, the clips (The lack of clips was the first sign that the Oscars were not okay. Clips were especially helpful during the years when many films did not make it to a local theater in time to be seen before the Oscars aired and those clips were advertising for soon to be locally available films.), all these and more were high entertainment for a cinephile like me. This late 1940s baby boomer has, until now, not given up on The Oscars.
Maybe the slap did all of us a favor. I, for one, can longer sustain my suspension of disbelief, my wide eyed child’s fascination with this particular spectacle.
Nowadays, most of the celebrities parading on the red carpet are unknown to me. It isn’t as if I don’t follow a lot of young stars. From Saoirse Ronan to Jennifer Lawrence, from Timothée Chalamet to Ansel Elgort, I am aware of and admire the new generation of talent. But elevating those who have yet to accomplish much of anything does not appeal to me. And worse, trying to keep track of these neophytes is exhausting. Many of them are not even in the film industry per se, they are musicians, models, image makers and others who are just hangers on trying to appropriate the cultural capital of Old Hollywood. All of them are leveraging that larger cultural capital for their small private profit.
Were the Oscars always fraught with serious issues? Of course, but so is most everything else.
The finally increasing diversity on display this year was a sight for sore eyes, but that diversity alone cannot compensate for the lack of dazzle that comes from rewarding actual artistic achievement. In the past, if Hollywood often did not recognize the very best in any given year, eventually, many fine artists who managed to persevere within the Hollywood machine were awarded their golden men. In other words, I gave The Oscars and a corrupt Hollywood wide latitude as long as it allowed my childhood gaze to persist in its adoration of the glamor and elegance. My imaginarium was fed. My bad.
Those with power inside the Dolby decided Will Smith’s cultural capital was worth the probable alienation of the broadcast audience, the destruction of the ceremony itself and even the safety of those in the theater. Banning Will Smith from The Oscars broadcast for ten years, after the fact, is probably the most that could be done to assuage critics of the institution under The Academy’s corporate structure.
But how can the Academy even hold another ceremony? How will it ensure the participants that they are safe? What happens the day someone brings a gun or worse? The fourth wall is irretrievably broken. We are all inside the violence now.
But we should realize that people can now make and distribute film without Hollywood. Such films can come into our homes as easily as we stream anything else. Perhaps we will experience a golden age of story in the hands of bards who need not genuflect to Hollywood. Viva our contemporary Shakespeares who may yet break the back of the commodification machine.
The movies are dead. Long live film.
Dedicated to Alvin Sargent, winner of two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay, for Julia (1977) and Ordinary People (1980), who sacrificed popularity in Hollywood in order to keep his leftist ideals.
1 How much of Brand’s erudition in that anti-capitalist collection was performative? His eventual unmasking as a sexual abuser may or may not tarnish all of his work product, especially as he has adopted many trappings of the right wing since COVID.
copyright, 2022
