CUTAWAYS: THE TOOTH FAIRY

Today is National Tooth Fairy Day! Now, like most of you, I am at  a loss to explain why any single person, let alone the whole nation, would want to celebrate one of Dwayne Johnson's worst movies ever. In fact, Tooth Fairy was so bad, The Rock was worried his acting career was headed, well, right down the toilet...

Johnson spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about this phase of his career...

"I was told that I had to conform to a standard in Hollywood that would beget me more work, better roles," he explains. "Which meant I had to stop going to the gym, which meant I couldn't be as big, which meant you had to distance yourself from wrestling. You essentially had to deconstruct yourself." 

For a while, he says, he bought into that, in part because he did not have the high-level industry contacts he could turn to for advice. "Then that started to not feel good to me. It reached a point of, 'I'm not feeling authentic."

"After [2010's] Tooth Fairy," says [manager Dany] Garcia, "we recognized that Dwayne was moving away from his core of who he was."

Judging from recent box-office results, it looks like The Rock course-corrected his career pretty well since his Tooth Fairy days. There's a lesson to be learned in that. While there's nothing overtly spiritual in The Rock's statements, that doesn't mean we can't recognize some deeper truths in the actor's decision to abandon false self-images and return to an authentic vision of himself. Author and speaker Fr. Jacque Philippe notes that we Christians should strive for such epiphanies in our own spiritual journeys... 

“We have tried to construct a personality for ourselves... and yet a part of us is still empty, unsatisfied, perplexed: Who am I really? Does what I have lived through up till now really express what I am?... Everything we may learn about ourselves by human means (experience of life, psychology, human sciences) is not to be despised, obviously. But that provides only a limited and partial knowledge of our being... That deepest part comes to light only in the encounter with God, which strips us of everything artificial in our identity to bring us to what we really are, at the heart of our personhood. Our true identity is not so much a reality to be constructed as a gift to be received. It is not about achieving, but letting ourselves be begotten... We human beings can only know ourselves truly in the light of God. "

So, by being who God wants us to be, we actually become a fuller version of our true self, we... what's that? You say National Tooth Fairy Day is actually about dental hygiene awareness and not at all about The Rock's terrible movie? Oh. Okay. Well, I'm sure God wants us to take care of our teeth too.