The day after: Chris Brown on Larry King
No matter who conducts it, the celebrity interview is always something of a sham. There's too much deference involved, as if fame were some ingrained and noble character trait that a journalist can't disrespect. Anderson Cooper swoons over Angelina Jolie. Matt Lauer goes sockless -- real! -- to interview Britney Spears.
And then there's gentle, barely-probing Larry King, who offered his CNN forum to Chris Brown, the 20-year-old R&B star who pleaded guilty of felony assault for brutally beating then-girlfriend Rihanna last February.
Did you watch the prerecorded interview that aired on Wednesday night? Did you see Brown flanked by his mother and his lawyer, decked in an infantalizing baby blue sweater and bowtie set? The message was clear: He was an innocent, a child, caught up in the equivalent of a hair-pulling incident in the sandbox. King took the bait. At 20, he said, what could Brown and Rihanna have argued about -- "What lollipop are we going to get tomorrow?"
To his credit, King did walk through the specifics of Brown's rap sheet. He talked about Rihanna's bloody face, her bitten hands. King's softball style is a curious thing; it's not that he doesn't ask the pertinent questions, or even, at times, the follow-up questions. It's that he seems completely accepting of the answers, no matter how feeble, as when Brown mumbled that "no one taught us how to love one another," or when his lawyer -- a hired-hand defender of the most unctuous variety-- announced that "I've grown to love this kid like a son or a nephew." (Here, King didn't ask the obvious follow-up: Would you trust your 18-year-old daughter anywhere near him?)
Brown didn't present much to love. He seemed contrite in his inarticulate way, a guy with a public image to protect, who didn't want to be thought of as a monster. But he also seemed to be a guy who didn't want to think, who called three incidents of domestic violence "a mistake," who said he didn't want to recount the night of his arrest "just out of respect for Rihanna and myself," and then later said he didn't remember what happened, anyway.
The calculation seemed to be that he didn't have to be anything more than sorry -- youth and fame and money and short attention spans would take care of the rest. "We may never understand," King declared at one point, and that seemed good enough for him. There's seldom any passion in King's questioning, which is what celebrity defense lawyers must like so much about him. They get their forum, he gets his ratings, everyone involved gets to go home rich, and nobody knows more than they did when the hour began.
But is that what fans want, anyway? Are people looking for a quick way to absolve Brown of his sins so they can buy his records without guilt? Throughout the show, CNN streamed live comments from King's blog, and many were sympathetic: People make mistakes. Sinners deserve forgiveness.
They do, it's true. But as Brown said himself, "everything comes with consequences." What would a fair consequence for repeated domestic violence be? Six months spent picking up garbage on Virginia roadsides? A lifetime ban from riding on P. Diddy's Jet-ski? A music career consigned to playing state fairs and bar mitzvahs? Or, for a start, no sympathetic forums on national TV?
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