And the Oscar for Jealous Husband Goes to Will Smith

Reality is always messy, ripe with conflict, unsettled resentment, and bittersweet redemption. Ironically, the compelling filmmaking ingredients necessary to make it to the Oscars were the ones Smith²-Rock delivered during the 94th Academy Awards. Watching the incident was like seeing all of what the world has known as jovial and light-hearted entering reality’s no man’s land. Not sure if we should be thanking the Academy for this one.

It's easy to make fun of the incident through the gaze of an objective third-party; viewer stakes are low and Twitter’s ablaze reaping the benefits in the aftermath. The very real lives of the people involved in the scenario are a different matter altogether.

Jada Pinkett Smith’s Red Table Talk with Will Smith from July 2020 amassed 5+ million views and featured a cavalier Jada disclosing her “entanglement” with August Alsina to a crestfallen Will. The death knell rings towards the end of the video when Will insists their relationship can go back to normal once he gets her back, which seems to mean cheating of some sort. Jada laughs it off, mentioning that he’s already gotten her back plenty, to which Will reinserts that he must get her back. Driven by a retributory force, the exchange begs the questions: how has he gotten her back in the past, how is he planning on getting her back now to even the score, and what does an even score even mean in an allegedly open relationship?

Anything cerebral the video evokes is eclipsed by Will’s sunken face and watering eyes. In the evidence of his pain, the who, what, when, where, and how become irrelevant.

The picture of a man who needs to be loved.

In his new memoir Will, Will reveals his experiences with “raging jealousy” in response to Jada and Tupac Shakur’s close friendship: “In the beginning of our relationship, my mind was tortured by their connection. He was 'PAC! and I was me … though they were never intimate, their love for each other is legendary.”

To complicate matters, Will goes on to express his jealousy of Tupac’s “fearless passion” and “militant morality,” later comparing it to his own inability to stand up to his abusive father: “[He] triggered the perception of myself as a coward… I hated that I wasn't what he was in the world, and I suffered a raging jealousy: I wanted Jada to look at me like that.”

The slap seems to have a hidden meaning.

At the heart of the Oscars incident resides Will’s desire to enact a Tupac-esque militant morality. Combined with the pressure of performing in front of his elusive spouse, Will resorted to showing both his wife, the world, and most importantly, himself, that he was worthy of the love he perceived between Jada and Tupac.

Will goes on to share that he felt oddly happy when his and Jada’s relationship deepened, which meant she was spending less time with Tupac and deeming it a “twisted kind of victory.” Reminiscent of Euclid’s Common Notions in Elements, “things which equal the same thing also equal one another,” Will’s logic seems to follow: “if Jada’s love for me is the same as Jada’s love for Tupac, then I am equal to Tupac; I am therefore courageous, strong, and morally sound.”

Once again, jealousy, love, and the whole orchestral ordeal of human relationships resides in a deepened understanding of the self.

Still more speculatively, the question remains: was this incident the culmination of a frayed marriage plagued with chest-tightening jealousy or a microcosmic rebuke after years of the public’s anonymous conjecture and abuse?

One truth will prevail from this collosally public incident: most battles are faced within.