Opinion | Will Smith and a Pound of Flesh

“Listen, I saw the Oscars, and Will Smith walking up onstage and punching somebody,” the actor replied. “I couldn’t believe it. There is no place for that. It does seem to be some sort of thing that’s happening out there in America. As we become more tribalistic, certain behaviors are now normalized. Violence, revenge, vengeance, and there’s just got to be a better way to handle these things. We’re just going to kill each other.”

Bill Maher told TMZ that Smith’s attack was redolent of modern mores. “It was sort of like cancel culture encapsulated, because at first you saw he was laughing at the joke, right?” And then there’s the I’m-supposed-to-be-offended moment and the wild overreaction. “He was like the Twitter mob come alive.”

It was also redolent of the mores of yore. The quality of mercy was strained, to say the least.

“Will Smith and Shylock, they’re both after a pound of flesh,” Godwin told me. “Indeed, Shakespeare is fascinated by characters being undone by their need for the pound of flesh. Freud calls it the ‘death drive,’ the annihilation of the self or the reputation, which hovers over all of these characters. We are still the same human animals that Shakespeare was describing 400 years ago, and we’re still led by the id or the primal drive to fight, to hate, to be violent, to self-destruct.”

Thompson told me that Shakespeare shows you what happens at the moment you become your own worst enemy, a vertiginous moment Aristotle called “hamartia,” or missing the mark (an archery expression).

It is, he said, “a dangerous place to be.”

“There’s a point,” the actor added, “where you cannot reach Shylock anymore. He says, ‘I will have my bond’ and ‘There is no power in the tongue of man to alter me’ from this path that I’ve chosen.”

Smith himself seemed to realize the danger when he talked to Rolling Stone back in 1998 and said he could be “a laser-guided, intergalactic, space-molecular air-dispensing module” for finding someone’s weakest spot and “ramming an ice pick into it.”

“When you stab someone you didn’t have to,” he said, you could damage them. “Someone catches you on the wrong day, says the wrong thing, and you lash out. Then you think, ‘I didn’t have to do that.’”

No, you certainly didn’t.