OGWiseman Rambles
On High Fantasy Tropes, Sci Fi Weirdness, and--in a one-time departure for me--Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.
I’ve been listening to some classics of High Fantasy: My first experience with Brandon Sanderson’s “The Way of Kings” (A ten-book epic he’s halfway through writing, of which I just finished the first book and am ravenous for the second), and a second reading of Robert Jordan’s ultra-epic “The Wheel of Time”—a full 14 books in length, a work so epic that Jordan died before finishing. Jordan’s widow hired Brandon Sanderson to write the last three books, which he did, in what I consider the greatest “called shot” in the history of fiction.
(With only three jutting rock promontories in the frame, I’m not as sure as I’d like to be that this is maximally epic. Can there be even more?)
The Way of Kings concerns Kaladin Stormblessed, the son of a provincial doctor who becomes a soldier, and then a slave, then a soldier some more, and then, as near as I can tell, a god. There are lots of other characters you can tell are going to be the stars of later books, but Kaladin is the center of this one.
His world is called Roshar, and it’s populated with humans but pretty much everything else is different. Sanderson’s thing is a magic system and world built with way more rigor and thought than most other writers in the genre, and in that sense he really is one of the greats.
Kaladin is a medic, the best soldier anyone has ever seen, an articulate philosopher, moral paragon, and charismatic leader. His flaws are… well, maybe they’re in the second book. He also covers some GROUND. He starts this book as a naive child in a rural village. He ends it having killed thousands (!) of soldiers, upended the ruling order of his local kingdom, acquired powers not seen in thousands of years, and spoken directly to god. There are nine more books in the series! If he can top this nine times, no wonder he’s sold so many books!
The analogous character in “The Wheel of Time” is Rand 'al Thor, who starts the first book as a naive farmboy in a rural village and quickly becomes the most powerful person in the history of the world, discovering powers that haven’t been seen in thousands of years. He can teleport at will, bend the minds of those around him, and erase things from existence with balefire. He also has PhD knowledge of prophecy and plays the harp as a world-class level. Along the way, even as he kills thousands and upends the entire political structure of his realm (which is not named in the books but which fans call “Randland”). Along the way, he remains ever the farmboy, with a commitment to right and justice that cannot be dislodged, not by quarreling Lords or by the Dark One himself.
(Rand ‘al Thor, hero of RandLand and all around good-guy)
Lest you think that me pointing out the considerable similarities in these books is a means of criticism, let me be clear: I love these novels. In their uncomplicated virtue, in their unapologetic virtuosity and in their unselfconscious excess, I really love them and have since I was a child.
The point of analyzing the tropes is, that’s where we discover the underlying need that’s being served by these books. And just looking at sales numbers, it’s fair to say that whatever need they’re serving is widespread if not universal.
I think the need is basically “The desire to live in a morally simpler and more tractable world.” In the real world, mostly, things don’t work out as most people were hoping, and then, instead of a climactic final battle that determines the ultimate outcome, there’s a letting go that happens, which we call “maturity”.
Most of us mature, but many of us never lose the desire for things to be different—for someone, somewhere, in some world, to kick ass on behalf of a righteous and accessible cause.
Will Smith got super famous at 21 when he started “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, but by that point he already had a recording career that included a hit song while still in high school. (Note that the song was called “Girls Ain’t Nothing But Trouble”, which could certainly be read as a kind of high-fantasy foreshadowing of his recent hubris.)
In the ensuing 30+ years, Smith has starred in movies including an unprecedented string of hits, he has recorded numerous albums, he has produced, he has invented signature dances, he has experienced religious conversion, and he has been involved in politics (okay, he hasn’t upended a whole ruling class, or killed anyone as far as I know). In the last decade or so he’s gotten very involved with social media, and is one of the best celebrity practitioners of the form in his age bracket.
He’s even had setbacks and failures, learning lessons along the way, like a good hero needs! He made “The Wild Wild West” instead of playing Neo in “The Matrix”. He went for his Oscar multiple times, making good-but-not-great films like “The Pursuit of Happiness” and “Concussion”, but the ultimate prize always seemed to elude his undeniable talents. He even paid dearly for his sense of loyalty, making “After Earth” so his son could co-star, a film so bad commercially and critically that Smith had to take an 18-month break afterwards to get himself together emotionally. (I didn’t see it. Did you? I doubt it, and there’s not that many Will Smith movies I would confidently predict that about.)
This time, he had the goods. “King Richard”, if you haven’t seen it, is a *great* film, and Smith is great in it. He had to know he was the favorite going into that Oscars night. It’s easy to imagine how on edge he must have been, like Kaladin or Rand ‘al Thor facing their final battle (less murdery, but let’s just go with this analogy). Thirty years of doing absolutely anything he set his mind to—except this, this one thing, this big, golden statue—all that build-up held in under the iron control he’d developed, so he could deliver the perfect, charming, calculatedly self-effacing acceptance speech.
Then Chris Rock—who was a presenter, by the way, not a host—stepped up to the mic and delivered a pretty lame joke that depended on the audience both knowing who Jada Pinkett-Smith was AND knowing the particulars of a Demi Moore-flick from 1997.
My thoughts about the morality of the incident itself are brief and not really unorthodox enough to write about in detail:
Rock’s joke was pretty tasteless. Making fun of someone’s medical condition usually is. And if he didn’t know she had a medical condition, that’s worse. It’s not too high a bar to know what the hell you’re about to make a joke about on worldwide television.
Jada Pinkett-Smith is not “Will Smith’s Wife”—she’s a public figure who has starred in major movies, and currently hosts an Emmy-winning talk show. Tasteless jokes about public figures in the movie and TV business are the Oscars stock in trade. The Smiths know that and should have been ready.
Assaulting someone who makes a joke you didn’t like is obviously wrong. It was wrong on every level, and Will Smith deserves approbation.
Everyone involved are multimillionaires, and Chris Rock is a lottery winner who could take a hundred more slaps and still be way ahead as far as luck in life. Doesn’t mean it’s fine to assault him, but his tour is sold out and I’m not losing sleep for him.
From a high-fantasy perspective, Smith’s behavior in this incident is actually fairly on-theme for a hero. Both Kaladin and Rand ‘al Thor abuse their power in defending those they love.
But then—and this is what has stuck with me in the week since The Slap—then Will Smith went and sat down. He stayed. He yelled and screamed and then he watched Questlove win an Oscar (can you IMAGINE what he was thinking in those few minutes, as the adrenaline started to drain away), and then HE won an Oscar and made a speech in which he pointedly did not apologize to Rock (who, let’s be honest, can take a punch and handled the whole thing like a pro).
And then, in the final sordid epilogue to the evening, Will Smith went to a bunch of Oscar parties and sang a half-hearted rendition of “Gettin’ Jiggy With It”, and he stopped being Kaladin or Rand ‘al Thor, and instead started being King Robert Baratheon from Game of Thrones—a killer with no war to fight, a hero past his shelf life, entitled and self-pitying and in the grip of his own weapon, his own giant ego that he once wielded with such ferocity.
I wonder how I would have felt if Will Smith had slapped Chris Rock, and then instead of going and sitting back down, he’d marched out of the theater and foregone getting his award. If he’d skipped the parties, skipped the attention, and taken his wife home to comfort her.
I think I would have respected it more. I’m not a fan of violence most of the time, but he still could have been the hero. There would have been honor in it.
Will Smith today resigned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This is a savvy PR-move. It gives the impression of punishment, it lessens media focus on the Academy’s “investigation”, and The Academy is a weakening, toothless institution anyway—besides he just won the grand prize, what does he need them for?
But his apologies fall on deaf ears, at least to me. I’m not going to boycott him or indeed do anything about it, but the mythos of the Fresh Prince is gone. He’s not a hero, he’s just a guy, and he might say that he always was, but he spent decades trying really hard to fool people about that and it largely worked until Chris Rock made a G.I. Jane joke at the wrong time.
That said—Will Smith is a tough kid from a bad situation in a tough part of Philadelphia who made it out, and the stuff that happens young stays with you, especially when you’re near the edge of your capacity in the biggest moments of your life. My son will be here in three months, and I’m painfully aware of how much the next few years matter for the eighty or ninety after that.
Only storybook heroes channel every bit of their trauma into the struggle for righteousness—Real heroes become less functional because of trauma.
In his apology, Smith wrote: “I am a work in progress.” We’ll see, based on where he goes from here.
What I love about fantasy is that it’s a vision of Utopia and Dystopia at the same time—limitless individual possibility even in the context of a world of horror and violence. In our fallen world, in this decadent culture of 2022, we are all bound to our hypocrisies; the most powerful are bound tightest of all, because that hypocrisy is the currency of power.
If Will Smith had not learned how to smack somebody in the face and still go to the party, he could never have become Will Smith.
(And yes, what happened is another symptom of the same disease that necessitated the #metoo movement. Hollywood has an entitlement problem *in general*.)
High Fantasy promises us a world in which that compromise, that hypocrisy, is unnecessary. It tells stories of powers so great that even a truly honorable person can succeed at the highest possible level. And I am here for it.