Will

"I thought Will Smith’s memoir was really, really good. He had an excellent co-writer, Mark Manson. Some people might say, ‘Oh, Will Smith’s memoir is only good because Mark Manson wrote it’—people often tend to belittle celebrities for not being 100% responsible for their own success. That’s not the right way to think about it. Will Smith recognizes talent, picked an amazing co-writer, and deserves credit for that, too. What I liked most about Will was Smith’s self-awareness and self-analysis. He’s very upfront about how his emotional limitations motivated him to become a celebrity. He foregrounds his growth and change as a person, even recounting some of his therapy sessions. He shares insights about what made him a celebrity and kept him a celebrity. The book stresses how he was shaped by growing up in a household where his father was violent towards his mother. Early on, he writes about having a childhood defined by fear and shame about his fear, specifically his failure to protect his mother against his father, which is a very typical response; children in that situation tend to feel like they should be stopping the violence, and if they aren’t, it’s their fault. He talks about how he responded to the family situation by becoming an entertainer and trying to be funny. All of this ended up inflecting his early days as a performer: he would perform in order to get love because he equated making people laugh with being loved. He writes, “To me, love was a performance, so if you weren’t clapping, I was failing.” He points out that this also makes for unhealthy relationships because he craved constant applause. It was a bottomless pit: there was no end to the amount of love that he needed. Maybe less so to me. I grew up in a household with domestic violence so intense and frequent that police were often called to my house. I appreciated reading about someone else who grew up in a similar situation. It’s more common than we acknowledge and it’s always better to talk about realities than to hide them. I appreciated him talking about how much it shaped him in adulthood, how it made him hypervigilant. He describes a moment early in his career where he was in a meeting with an executive challenging something about Smith’s show. He and three of his friends, who were from the same community, started getting really tense, worried that the guy was about to physically attack them. He realizes soon after that he had completely misread the situation, that he has to train himself to understand that not the whole world is his father. First, he attributes his skill at becoming a celebrity to coping mechanisms he developed in his family: his need for approval and his hypervigilance made him unusually attuned to what audiences wanted. He was literally a crowd-pleaser. Second, he discovered, when he first heard rap music, that he had a talent for crafting words and an affinity with a form that was taking off when he was a young man. Most big stars coincide with a new medium or technology that fits their skills. The 19th-century French global celebrity Sarah Bernhardt was not only a great actor; her career also coincided with the moment when photography, steamships, and train travel made it easy for the world to learn about her. I began to listen to rap music in the 1980s and reading Will helped me to organize that piecemeal listening into a historical narrative. I’d forgotten how stigmatized rap was in those early days. Smith reminded me how radio stations would have taglines like ‘all music, no rap.’ When the Grammy Awards first instituted an award for rap music, they didn’t televise that particular segment of the ceremony. People who performed rap were threatened with jail, especially in the South, and had to go to court to be able to exercise their First Amendment rights. The Four Seasons wouldn’t let touring rap artists stay at their hotels. At one point, he describes someone who broadcast 2 Live Crew from offshore to get around an FCC ban on profanity. “In the United States, celebrity often fuels a myth of upward mobility and equal opportunity for all” Will Smith realized there was a spot for a rapper who was goofier and more clean-cut than many of the biggest stars. Because people weren’t afraid that he was going to start cursing, he got more radio spots. Even as a teenager, he combined musical talent with business acumen. Celebrities are not just singers, actors, athletes: they are also entrepreneurs whose product is themselves. Every big star is as good at being a celebrity as they are at dancing or playing a sport or rapping or acting. Smith was even more strategic about maintaining and increasing his celebrity. Who becomes a star is fairly arbitrary. But once celebrity is attained, what separates the megastars from the flashes in the pan is their ability to analyze and leverage how celebrity works. Smith is very upfront about being extremely ambitious and wanting to be the biggest star possible. That’s why, in the 1990s, he shifted from TV to movies, at a time when movie stardom mattered far more than TV stardom. Before shifting to film acting, he analyzed the highest grossing movies of all time. All of them had special effects, creatures, and love stories. He decided to do Men in Black because it had all three elements. Similarly, he describes being at an event where he sees Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, all at the height of their movie star fame. He went up to them and said, ‘I want to do what you do. What’s your secret?’ Schwarzenegger responded, “You are not a movie star if your movies are only successful in America. … Think of yourself as a politician running for Biggest Movie Star in the World.” Smith saw Tom Cruise doing global publicity and thought, ‘I want to be bigger than him. What can I do that Tom Cruise can’t?’ He realizes that he has something Tom Cruise lacks: he can sing. Tom Cruise couldn’t promote his movie in Spain and say, ‘I’m going to do a live concert outside the theater for people who couldn’t get in because the movie sold out.’ Will Smith did that. He notes that those crowded live performances then got covered in the news, which further extended his stardom. As he puts it, “In my mind, I was never promoting a movie – I was using their $150,000,000 to promote me. ” After he established himself as a star of comedies and action films, he shifted to more dramatic roles. And then, in middle age, he realized that none of what he had achieved as a celebrity was equivalent to personal growth. In fact, it was often detrimental to it. He had substituted making money for his family for being there for them. The end of the memoir focuses on how he finally learned not to define himself only in terms of work and success. Some may say, ‘Oh, boohoo, you’re a multi-millionaire, how tough for you to have to have to learn not to define yourself by work.’ I disagree. I think that the United States is overly obsessed with work and that is most visible when we look at those who actually could afford to take it easy. I find it dispiriting to see privileged, wealthy people not know how to find meaning or self-worth outside of work. Good for Will Smith for sharing how challenging it was for him to learn how to stop working, even for a day. Finally, some readers feel that Will overshared about Smith’s sex life, but I say it’s not really a celebrity memoir until someone overshares about their sex life."