Are there times when baring personal details online has helped you connect with others or find community? Are there parts of your life you do not feel comfortable posting about publicly?
Do you think your answers to these questions would be different if you were part of one of Hollywood’s most famous families?
In “Hollywood’s First Family of Putting It Out There,” Jon Caramanica writes about the Smith family, which has shared “unexpectedly vulnerable” conversations with their large online audience:
On the first page of Will Smith’s recent memoir “Will,” the global superstar recounts a gruesome story of watching his father strike his mother in the side of the head so hard that she spit up blood. The early chapters of the book continue in much the same way — a young Will, naturally charismatic and eccentric, takes on the role of family entertainer to save his mother, himself and everyone else.
“I would be the golden child,” he writes. “My mother’s savior. My father’s usurper. It was going to be the performance of a lifetime. And over the next 40 years, I would never break character. Not once.”
That he became a perpetual conqueror in his films starting in the mid-1990s — an alien-defeater in “Men in Black,” a robot-defeater in “I, Robot,” a mutant-defeater in “I Am Legend,” a druglord-defeater in “Bad Boys,” a George Foreman-defeater in “Ali” — might have been a trauma response, but it also turned him into one of the world’s most bankable actors. Off camera, he behaved much as he did on camera, revealing little: an unknowable person beloved by millions.
Over the last couple of years, Smith’s muscles have slackened somewhat. He’s become a loose and only semi-rehearsed presence on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to his uncommonly vulnerable autobiography, he also recently appeared in a six-part YouTube Originals series, “Best Shape of My Life,” ostensibly about losing weight but more about the deepening fissures in the outer shell of his public-facing character. For decades, he became one with his hardened facade; now he’s melting it down.
This pivot to transparency makes him the patriarch of a family that has lately made intimacy its stock in trade. The Smiths — Will, 53; his wife, Jada, 50; their children, Jaden, 23, and Willow, 21 — have become the first family of putting it all out there. Between Will’s newfound chill, Jada and Willow’s cut-to-the-quick chat show “Red Table Talk” and Willow and Jaden’s music, the Smiths have remade an elite old Hollywood unit for the new era of reality-driven celebrity.
Their path has been the opposite of, say, the Kardashians’, the platonic ideal of the reality-TV clan that willed itself into more traditional stardom (forever blurring the lines between old and new fame along the way). The Smiths, by contrast, have downshifted from a conventional style of celebrity into the more fraught and garish one and, crucially, have done so with a kind of grace — shocking, especially given the intensity of some of the revelations at play.
Theirs is a perfectly timed reframing for the age of online confessional and trauma-based personal brands, especially for a family in which the parents are receding from the camera eye, and the children were famous before they ever had a choice to opt out. It is also a profound validation of the power of emotional directness and its destigmatization for the famous, turning the sorts of revelations that would have been relegated to salacious tabloids and unauthorized biographies in earlier eras into the stuff of self-empowerment.
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