It all took place over about a minute.

The sound on the American feed stays up longer than you might remember. The muffled smack across Chris Rock’s face is audible, as is everything up until Rock says “Will Smith ju—“. After that, the audio drops, the camera dollies slightly in on Rock, and the broadcast stutters for a moment. Rock has gathered his composure, improbably. He stands in place, center frame.

Confusion reigns. What have we just seen?

Then, the image of a very, very angry Smith fills the screen.

What momentarily looked like it could be a gag snaps into focus. Then Smith begins to shout, and the implications are clear. There is no sound, still. It doesn’t matter.

Mid-shout, the camera jars back to Rock, leaping forward a few moments, and the sound returns. “Oh, I could—“, Rock says, half-chuckling, before stopping himself. He turns left, looking for stage direction, it appears.

He turns back to the camera, a devastating grin on his face.

It’s remarkable poise. Rock just took a hard, hard slap to the mouth from a man much bigger than him—on stage, on camera, during a global television broadcast—and he’s got it in him not only to stay on the defensive, but to unleash the now-famed “Greatest night in the history of television” line. It’s a testament to Rock’s steadiness that many viewers are still uncertain whether the whole thing was a bit.

Before he launches back into his assigned spiel, though, he does have to reassure himself.

“Okay,” he exhales. “Okay.”

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It made for riveting viewing and reviewing. Was this real? Did Will Smith really just do that?

He did.

This isn’t Ukraine. It’s not the pandemic, nor “Don’t say gay,” nor democracy on the wane. Within a grander context, what happened Sunday night appears inconsequential.

It’s not inconsequential. When Will Smith struck Chris Rock on stage at the 2022 Academy Awards, he forever changed American pop culture. By extension, then, he altered plain culture itself. That statement might sound dramatic at first blush, but the feverish all-hands-on-deck debate ignited on Sunday night only makes the drastic shift startlingly clear. Smith’s assault of Rock has Americans divided on issues of race, of privilege, of wealth, and fame, and gender, and religion, and so on ad nauseum. It’s a cultural flashpoint, and not a dim one.

And, as the Academy revealed just today in an astonishing concession—“We…recognize we could have handled the situation differently”—Smith was asked after the slap to leave the ceremony and he refused.

From there, the evening took yet another catastrophically surreal turn, when Smith was announced as the winner of Best Actor. He received the honor for his portrayal of Richard Williams, the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena, and, in the very first sentence of a wretched, defiant, self-martyring acceptance speech, Smith likened himself to the man. “Richard Williams was a fierce defender“—emphasis Smith’s—“of his family.”

Of course, Smith’s outrageous conviction that he had defended his family came from the notion that the slap was in defense of his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Before Smith accosted him, Rock took note of Pinkett Smith’s shaven head, and made a rather dusty reference to the 1990s Demi Moore vehicle G.I. Jane. “Jada, I love ya, G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait to see it, alright?”

As has been discussed since the incident, Pinkett Smith has alopecia. She’s been open about it with her sizable audience of fans, and much attention was immediately paid to whether Rock knew about the condition when he made his joke. It’s a fairly ludicrous suggestion to make—Rock, while acerbic and devastating, is not a malicious comic, and his off-the-cuff retort to Pinkett Smith’s eyerolling response was an unsuspecting description of the joke’s intentions: “Oh, that was a nice one!”

Not nice enough, clearly. And so here we are.

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This isn’t going away any time soon. In the announcement today, the Academy gave a timeline of weeks, not days, when outlining its disciplinary plans. Smith released a hollow public apology Monday evening, not too many hours after he danced and rapped to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” at the Vanity Fair post-Oscar party. Rock, meanwhile, began a months-long tour in Boston just tonight, emotional in the face of two standing ovations, acknowledging the incident at the top of his first set:

“I don’t have a bunch of shit about what happened, so if you came to hear that, I had like a whole show I wrote before this weekend. And I’m still kind of processing what happened, so at some point I’ll talk about that shit. And it’ll be serious and it’ll be funny, but right now I’m going to tell some jokes.”

Rock’s reserve is smart. He’s got a show to do. Smith’s silence, on the other hand, will grow damning, until he reemerges to share his side of the situation. Even then, there will be little reason to believe whatever remorse he puts on display. It’s a sad thing.

Also sad is that Smith’s career will survive, even thrive. His defenders in the wake of Sunday night have been plentiful. Many see nobility in his actions, a kind of chivalry. They believe the crocodile tears, they admire the intention. It’s unfortunate. There’s a Trumpian air to all of this, the trampling of decorum, the profane verbal aggression, the threat of violence made very real. In the wake of this event, we will see further comedians subjected to physical attack. If Will Smith can do it—and it’s noble—then why can’t, why shouldn’t anyone?

It’s so dangerous. We idolize and emulate our celebrities, and one of our biggest just hit a fellow human being in the mouth. Unapologetically, with grave self-assurance.

“Keep! My wife’s name! Out your fucking mouth!”

That will be the defining line of his career. A long career, well over three decades, spanning from early days as an impish rapper to heady days winning Oscars after all those years. There’s so much work there, so many quips. Nothing, though, none of them, will resonate as much as those Oscar-night yells, guttural and unhinged.

And oh, the irony.

For once, he wasn’t acting.

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