Culture

Russell Crowe Had An Existential Crisis On Twitter As He Watched A Guy Kick A Fedora Down The Street

Russell, mate, it's just a hat. Get it together.

by Alex McKinnon  30 March 2015

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Someone needs to go over to Russell Crowe’s house and see if the big fella’s doing okay. A couple of days ago the star of Gladiator and Mumbly Unshaven Brooding 5 was in Madrid when he started sending out strange, disquieting missives on Twitter about a guy kicking a hat down the street.

“It was a nice hat, jaunty, white.” Clearly a reference to the opening line of Hemingway’s unpublished short story The Man Who Kicked The Hat, but otherwise unremarkable. But something about watching that man kick that hat stirred something in Russell. Something he had never felt before.

Enthralled by the spectacle, tormented by phantom emotions he could not name, Russell silently watched on as the man kicked his hat.

Then the man and the hat were gone, leaving Russell alone. Truly alone.

Shaken as much by the violence of his response as by the event itself, Russell was moved to ponder, and his musings took on a heartbreaking gravity.

For the rest of his days, Russell will ask himself this question. It will come to him as he lies in his bed, in the moments between wake and sleep. “What kind of man?”, he will whisper to himself in the dark. But the dark will not reply.

And are we not all, in the end, like the white fedora? Who among us has not felt the sting of rejection, the quiet ache of loneliness? Who has not been cast aside, like the Spanish man’s hat? These are the thoughts that furrow the brow of Russell Ira Crowe, Academy Award-winning actor and frontman of iconic Australian rock band 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts.

Finding that words were not enough, Russell took to his other love, avant-garde photography, to soothe the turbulence within him. The piece above, tentatively titled That Spanish Bloke’s Hat, is a true high point in his work.

This one is untitled. It does not need a name.

Seemingly unable to quiet the roiling turmoil inside him, Russell then turns his suspicions on to the hat itself, accusing it of some dark design.

The hat is not to blame, Russell. The hat is within you. Within all of us.

All was silence. All was dark. All was hat.