The slap that was, or wasn't

Indian Express

01-06-2025

Move over Will Smith, who had the audacity to slap Chris Rock at the Oscars, post which the clip became the most famous slap in YouTube history. That record might be broken by a similarly viral video that suggests French President Emmanuel Macron was smacked by the First Lady, Brigitte Macron. The President scoffed at the latest 'disinformation' being put out by 'crazy people' that he was pushed in the face by his wife while they were about to disembark in Hanoi, Vietnam. The footage certainly shows him looking stunned but he recovered quickly to wave to the crowd. This incident or their 'bickering and joking around', as Macron called it, spawned think pieces across the international press, with men's rights groups piping in that males can be victims of domestic violence, too.
Is it, indeed, as Macron says, an ordinary moment in the lives of spouses, blown out of proportion and spectacularly distorted into something vile by the cesspool that is social media? Likely, since he says so and deserves the benefit of doubt, but cynical sceptics abound. It's an unbecoming and all-too-prevalent human trait, to interpret others' intentions in ambiguous situations, as hostile. Evolutionary biologists put the widespread attitude of assuming the worst down to self-preservation, a way of staying aware of potential danger. We survived as a species by being suspicious of odd behaviour. But it's also true, seeing others' worlds come crashing down has an element of malicious voyeurism that feeds the ego and provides welcome distraction from our own problems. It's all perspective. If we believe the French President is getting slapped around, are our mundane and far less successful lives all that bad?
We come around to having a particular set of values from an abstract, messy space in our heads based on how we grew up, past regrets, future plans and pointless rumination about stuff that might or might not happen. Often, we doubt ourselves and, as a result, gravitate towards the noise of popular opinion. Watching others' lives play out is one way of understanding our own. As if all this isn't a dangerously misleading way of drawing any conclusions, our own negative experiences further colour our perceptions of reality.
Chances are, someone who's in a physically aggressive relationship will gloomily believe there's more to the French President's harmless scuffle than meets the eye; while someone happily married may take a more charitable view of it. Alas, however rigorously we believe we're critiquing our thoughts and ideas, our judgement can't be divorced from ourselves; so, one, absolute truth about anything is impossible. Answers, usually in multiples, are arrived at through an ongoing process of inquiry. Only someone living in fairyland will fully believe the playful banter story between long-marrieds but that doesn't mean the opposite is true, that the first couple of France are violent codependents.
In Akira Kurosawa's legendary film from the 1950s, Rashomon, the story of a rape and murder is told from the viewpoint of several characters who all provide different accounts of what happened. Recall, it turns out, depends on where you stand in relation to a situation and the movie has become a metaphor for the unreliability of memory. The 'Kurosawa Effect' suggests that we're all slightly deluded about ourselves, and the larger world. Making sense of things, while being bombarded with a relentless torrent of contradictory information, is one of the biggest challenges of the social media age. The Macrons' emotionally charged exchange, friendly or not, reveals mainly that when it comes to romance and marriage, only the two people involved know what's actually going on.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films