The Pursuit of Happyness (film)

Smith! The name couldn’t be more ordinary, but the family itself – namely, the family of movie star Will Smith and his wife, actress Jada Pinkett Smith – is a thing of sheer wonder. Or so we are expected to believe.

Last year we went into some of the details. As Will and Jada explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2010, they aren’t just any married couple: they’re “two big beings that came together” with a share “vision” of creating a family suffused with “excellence” and determined to “advance and elevate” humanity.

“I don’t want to be an icon,” Will has said. “I want to be an idea….I want to represent possibilities. I want to represent magic, right? That you’re in a universe and two plus two equals four. Two plus two equals four only if you accept that two plus two equals four. Two plus two is going to be whatever I want it to be.” If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably because you don’t inhabit quite as enlightened a plane as Will does.

Will and Jada have two children. Their son, Jaden (19), is named after his mother; their daughter, Willow (17), after her father. Both kids clearly learned at an early age to parrot their parents’ pretentious, self-important blather. Jaden has tweeted: “If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society.” And his sister has tweeted that “ANYTHING that I EVER do is geared towards the evolution and vibrational elevation of this planet through the inspiration of individuals.”

Both of these kids weren’t just turned into amateur philosophers at an early age. They were encouraged to hate their own country and to idolize, of all places, the United Arab Emirates, a country that they’ve visited several times and with which Will has unusually, and mysteriously, close ties. While condemning Islamophobia in the U.S., and, in fact, denouncing the U.S. on all kinds of grounds, Will has consistently remained silent about the UAE’s brutal implementation of sharia law, including its punishment of adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality with the death penalty.

Will and Jada’s two kids have also been tossed into showbiz. Jaden’s first movie performance was in his dad’s picture The Pursuit of Happyness (sic), released in 2006, the year Jaden turned eight. Four years later, he and Justin Bieber dropped the song “Never Say Never,” which went quintuple platinum. Willow, for her part, made her film debut at seven in her dad’s vehicle I Am Legend; a few days before her tenth birthday, she released her solo platinum hit tune “Whip My Hair.”

Given Will and Jada’s belief that they and their kids are on some kind of divine mission to spread their own special beauty or brilliance or benison to the rest of humankind, it was interesting to learn earlier this year that Willow, back in 2012, in the middle of her “Whip My Hair” tour, shaved her head bald as a protest against the career that her folks had thrust upon her. Then 11 years old, she’d already told Will “that she wanted out” of the tour – in response to which he’d ordered her to shut up and stick it out. She had to cut of all her hair to get the message through to him. You might think it would have taught him some humility. Nope.

Willow’s rebellion has continued. On November 24, the New York Post quoted her as saying that it had been “absolutely terrible” growing up in the spotlight. “You can’t change your face. You can’t change your parents. You can’t change any of those things,” she said, adding that “most kids like me end up going down a spiral of depression.”

Will and Jada certainly knew from the beginning that child stars have a lousy record of growing into well-adjusted adults, but, for their own selfish reasons, they forced their kids into the limelight anyway. Let’s hope those kids don’t end up in “a spiral of depression.” And let’s hope that the folly of their family’s massive pretensions teach a lesson to other fatuous Hollywood luminaries who mistake their luck for brilliance, who think their shallow Tinseltown triumphs are accomplishments equivalent to curing cancer, and who smear freedom while exalting tinpot tyrannies.

Will Smith, the movie actor, is a man of solid values, profound thoughts, and high principles. If you don’t believe that, just ask him. He’ll tell you himself, over and over again, just how deeply he’s thought about the meaning of human existence, about how to formulate his personal ethics and put them into practice, and about how to instill those values in his son Jaden and daughter Willow, both of whom he pushed into showbiz at age six.

Along with his actress wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Will has cooked up a whole special language in which to talk about life, goals, and the universe. It’s not just enough, they explained to Oprah Winfrey in a 2010 interview, to marry, have kids, earn a living, and try to make a happy home. No, when “two spirits join together” in wedlock you need a shared “vision” because there is “so much more you have to be dedicated to.”

As Jada put it, she and Will are “two big beings that came together,” and once they saw their kids growing up and becoming “their own beings,” they realized they needed to form a “family business” aimed at scoring cosmic achievements. They needed to encourage their progeny to devote their inborn “excellence” to the high purpose of doing “service to greatness” and of “advanc[ing] and elevat[ing]” humanity.

Just as Will has done in movies like The Pursuit of Happyness [sic] and After Earth – and Willow, in turn, has done in her megahit music video “Whip My Hair.”

But Will and Jada aren’t content with just instilling values in their kids. As Will told Oprah, “I don’t want to be an icon. I want to be an idea….I want to represent possibilities. I want to represent magic, right? That you’re in a universe and two plus two equals four. Two plus two equals four only if you accept that two plus two equals four. Two plus two is going to be whatever I want it to be.” He went on to assert the importance of making choices: “There’s a redemptive power that making a choice has. Rather than feeling like you’re an effect to all things that are happening.” And he asserted his belief “that I can create whatever I want to create….I feel very strongly that we are who we choose to be.”

Okay, some of it doesn’t entirely make sense, some is neither original nor profound, and some is just plain hooey. But what more can you expect from a guy who for years was ranked by Forbes as Hollywood’s most bankable star, and was repeatedly included on its list of the richest Americans under age 40 – and who therefore, one imagines, is surrounded constantly by handlers who won’t stop telling him how brilliant he is?

Anyway, the point is that Smith isn’t content to give the world cinematic masterpieces like I, Robot and Hitch. He wants to enlighten us. He thinks he knows stuff. And he especially thinks he knows a lot about religious and spiritual stuff.

The fact that he’s donated a lot of money to Scientology – and that he sounds an awful lot like a Scientologist, and starred in the horrible movie After Earth, which is packed with themes that, according to many critics, seem to have been drawn from Scientology – has sparked rumors that he’s a secret member of that sect. He’s denied it, maintaining instead that he finds ideas worth using in a variety of faiths.

“I’m a student of world religion,” he said in a 2007 interview, “so to me it’s hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing.”

Which brings us to his recent visit to – of all places – Dubai.

Tune in tomorrow.

Useful Stooges

Useful Stooges

Tag: The Pursuit of Happyness (film)

Catching up with the self-adoring Will Smith clan

Mr. Smith Goes to Dubai