My Five Year Plan

As a semi-regular feature of this blog, I’m going to highlight moments in the popular culture of my youth that helped signal for me my desire to enter the world of filmmaking. Though the following clip is by no means a preeminent one in causality, it nonetheless stands out as a defining moment in my recognition of the power of the actor’s performance, and a recent posting on a message board reminded me of the impact the scene had on me at the time.

The scene in question is from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a cherished source of youthful hijinks that milked a six-season run out of one of the most genial (if banal) leading actors of the ’90s. Mixing fourth-wall-demolishing direct address with broad comedy, the series was among the more creative of the ’90s, and certainly a cut above (both on a formal and narrative level) than any number of hallowed banalities about white New Yorkers who manage to know no black people (read: Friends, but the rest of the NBC Must See TV lineup from that era also fits). On May 9th, 1994 the show went for all the melodramatic marbles with “Papa’s Got a Brand New Excuse,” wherein Will meets his deadbeat father, played by Ben Vereen.

(Until I figure out how to embed objects with Wordpress, the scene in question is here.)

The summer of 1994, in a way, was a pretty formative time for my appreciation of film as a medium - I saw Forrest Gump that summer and thought it was the greatest thing I could imagine from cinema, and I probably viewed A League of Their Own on HBO at least a dozen times (a future post will be dedicated to this incredible melodrama, surely in need of a major critic reevaluation), but this came before either of those, and features Will Smith and James Avery giving two of the best performances I’ve seen in a sitcom to this day. It’s a remarkably strong moment that brings chills, pulling back the apparatus of the sitcom (notice the lack of laughtrack and the pointed formal construction of shots, wherein figures are isolated within the frame by architectural elements and negative space) and revealing the deep cultural hurt underlying much of the series’ exploration of the African American condition. (Stop me if I’m getting too Klosterman for you).

Suffice it to say that if I ever get a performance out of an actor like the one Shelley Jensen gets out of Smith here, I’ll feel extremely proud of myself.