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I need to talk more about Cosby because I’m still trying to get a grip on how such wildly different personas could co-exist in the same person. Bell creates a potent context for Cosby’s deviance. Better than anyone has done before, the series fleshes out the depth and breadth of Cosby’s impact on mainstream culture. Cosby became a colossus astride the racial divide, across many decades and multiple mediums—stage, screen, the written word—and as an entertainer, author, educator, academic, political activist, moral authority, father figure. Perhaps most significantly, he reconfigured representation in primetime for what an all-American family looked like: Black, upwardly mobile, smart, wholesome, sophisticated, professional. His public and private personas were merged in the mind of the public. Not our only mistake.
What struck me most, and as Brian Tallerico notes in his review, is that Bell’s series makes a stunning reality graphically clear: Cosby was traveling two concurrent trajectories. In every decade on his journey to becoming a beloved pop cultural icon and the apotheosis of racial equity, he was simultaneously drugging and raping women. How could this all be true of one and the same guy?
One answer lay in his unique gift for reading an audience. He could see and understand us, reach us, put us at ease, and tell us a story in such a funny, vivid, relatable way that we’d follow him anywhere just to see where he might take us. It’s a manipulation, a seduction of sorts, to achieve a desired effect. It’s what any skilled actor, comedian, writer, performer does. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, even when you know better, even when it’s in service of a deviant personality.
Cosby also put those skills in service of an aberrant fetish which coupled complete domination (an unconscious woman) and sexual stimulation to make him an ungodly predator of biblical proportions. Was that fetish an extension of the kick he got from holding an audience in the palm of his hand? A perversion of his need for control? A permutation of the sex and drug culture of the swingin’ ’60s? We’ll most likely never know. Bill Cosby himself is not talking about Cosby.
Even more disturbing to me was watching brave women unsparingly describe, direct to camera, what Cosby had done to them, and then, almost without exception, blame themselves first for what happened! It struck me like a cold wind. It was a troubling throughline in all of the hideous stories they told.
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