A week ago, the prestigious Oscar awards trended for all the wrong reasons. Award-winning actor Will Smith, who would go on to scoop the Best Actor Academy Award on the night, infamously slapped comedian and host Chris Rock after the latter made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Rock, commenting on Pinkett Smith’s shaved head, stated: “Jada, GI Jane 2, can’t wait to see it.”
This was a reference to the movie G.I. Jane, in which a lieutenant becomes the first woman to undergo special operations training. In an attempt to prove herself in that hyper-masculine and aggressive environment, she shaves off her hair in a symbolic shedding of her mocked femininity.
Pinkett Smith, on the other hand, did not shave her head as a symbolic gesture. She did so due to being afflicted with alopecia – an autoimmune disorder that results in hair loss. Millions suffering from alopecia have expressed the psychological challenges they suffer as a result of the condition. One can only imagine how much more self-conscious a woman like Pinkett Smith would be, given the scrutiny celebrities have to deal with.
Many articles and opinions about the incident focused mainly on the violence that Smith meted out to Rock – and on the violence that both men meted out on Pinkett Smith, who was mocked on a public stage, by a man, and then rendered even more powerless by her husband, whose “protection” was in itself an expression of power. But there is an even more serious issue that was largely ignored in the noise: the devastating way in which mental health problems found expression in that moment.
Smith’s violent outburst must be understood in the context of his documented mental health struggles. In his memoir titled Will, Smith documents his difficult childhood growing up in Philadelphia as well as problems that came with fame – some of which caused irreparable harm to relationships with those he loves most.
Smith talks about how childhood traumas have followed him into adulthood, often triggering aggressive responses when he is afraid or feeling threatened. Sufferers of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder have similar reactions.
Rock is not untouched by mental health challenges too. The comedian has a non-verbal learning disability that affects his social skills. The condition is similar to Asperger’s Syndrome, a neuro-developmental disorder characterised by significant difficulties in social interaction and non-verbal communication.
It is a disorder on the autism spectrum. In an interview with Gayle King two years ago, he admitted to having increased his therapy sessions to seven hours every week since the onset of the pandemic.
The mental health struggles of both Smith and Rock, as well as the certain emotional and psychological distress that Pinkett Smith is dealing with owing to her medical condition, converged on that world stage. The other aspects of the discussion that many analysts and society at large have delved into are all true. This was about forms of violence.
But it is also true that multiple realities can exist at the same time. One of these realities is that all these individuals are dealing with ongoing mental and psychological health issues. These issues impact not only on how they exist in the world, but how they respond to it. Rock’s inability to recognise social cues made it possible for him to joke about Pinkett Smith’s illness.
The joke was hurtful to Pinkett Smith, who is battling a debilitating illness. Smith felt harm being done to his wife and it triggered his trauma response. Making sense of these kinds of nuances is how we come closer to understanding mental health problems in our own spaces.
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