We’ve now had expressions of protest from both the violent and non-violent wings of the anti-bad-review movement. The Hanover State Opera’s ballet director Marco Goecke confronted the Frankfurter Allgemeine ballet critic Wiebke Hüster in the theatre foyer and smeared dog excrement in her face. Now the comic and movie actor Seth Rogen has shared his views on criticism in an interview with Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast, declaring how upset he was at bad reviews for his films The Green Hornet and The Interview. “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things. It’s devastating.”
Sure. Many critics are as innocent as children about the effect their negative writing has on the people involved, just as they do not dare to dream that these mythologised stars are actually reading their good reviews – that these A-listers, so far above them in the media firmament, might, for a fraction of a moment, know who they are. My own view is that the people who owe critics the most are the ones who hate them the most. Hollywood blockbuster players, whose career self-worth has nothing to do with broadsheet-press school reports, shrug at bad notices.
But what is Rogen saying? That bad reviews should be suppressed, or the copy cleared with him in advance? Of what value are the good reviews, the (many) raves that Rogen is happy to put on his posters, without the bedrock assumption that the reviewers were free to say the opposite? Well, being criticised or mocked is not an agreeable experience, and – for what it is worth – critics themselves are regularly monstered on social media. And it’s probably even more painful for a comic performer, especially one as brilliant and successful as Rogen, to be mocked by journalists who aren’t as funny as he is, journalists who are sort of trying to do what he does.
So bad reviews can sting. Rogen is right. People can say mean stuff that will hurt people. How about the reaction to that film whose awfulness has become a legend: the live-action version of Cats? I admit it: I joined in with the chorus of richly merited vilification for this feline turkey. It can’t have been nice to have been on the receiving end. But for sheer hilarious cruelty, for pure delicious sadism, all of us snarky critics had to bow the knee to the Master. A certain someone with 9.3 million Twitter followers utterly (and accurately) trashed everything and everyone connected with Cats; he declared himself stoned while watching it, that he didn’t know what a “Jellicle” is, was contemptuous at its attempt to be “Broadway funny”, finally erupting at the news that there was in existence an alternative cut in which the cats’ anuses were visible. “Release the Butthole Cut of Cats!!” he demanded. Wow. How we laughed. How humiliating for everyone involved in Cats, all those hardworking professionals who hoped their work would be appreciated, to be turned into a punchline by this meanie. I bet the director will be haunted by that to the end of his days.
There is no need to say who the author of this criticism was. As for Rogen’s own work outside the field of film reviewing, he’s now appearing in Steven Spielberg’s wonderful movie The Fabelmans: such a smart, funny, poignant performance. Go and see it!
