Touched a nerve, did I?” Some Quick Thoughts on One-Star Reviews

There’s a writer I love and admire, with whom I was once friends, and with whom I am friends no more. I’ll leave the nature of our falling-out cast to the side for the night, since it’s not the subject of this post. Suffice it to say, though, that the break was mostly my fault.
Anyway, this writer (let’s call him James Sherman) once told me that he’d rather someone hate his book than have a middling opinion of it. In fact, he said he downright enjoyed it when someone hated his work. “Touched a nerve, did I?” He would say, smiling.
Years ago I remember reading Roger Ebert’s review of Tom Green’s anti-comedy magnum opus, Freddie Got Fingered. I had never seen someone so enraged by a creative work in my entire life, and in fact Ebert seemed to unintentionally bestow the mantel of genius on Tom Green when he suggested that, a la a Dadaist provocateur who feared one of his productions may have gone too far, Tom might want to load his pockets with rocks if his movie was screened while he was present just to defend himself from the audience.
And still, Roger Ebert acknowledged that Freddie was benchmark of some kind, that it was the movie he hated against which all others he hated must be measured.
I remember once getting a one-star review for one of my books from a young lady, who also started an angry letter campaign to my publisher, and sent me an email telling me that I was vile. She went on to berate and insult me in myriad ways, and, since I’m somewhat masochistic, I naturally got an erection and hoped she would continue to bombard me with screeds, demeaning me and my work. Alas, however, she relented.
And I’m forced to conclude that maybe, perhaps, I have had a greater effect on her than I have had on anyone else who has read my books. I’m not a troll, and have never derived any satisfaction from pissing someone off or upsetting them with my books. I’m alone when I write, so there’s no one to antagonize except my dog, slumbering behind me on the bed while I type, and she can’t read. An immature desire to thumb someone in the eye is just not a strong enough impetus to make me write eighty or one-hundred thousand words.
That said, every time I think about this young lady’s rising gorge, her concerted effort not just to tell other people I’m a piece of shit but to tell me, too …well, I’m embarrassed to say, I smile and get a little extra bop in my step.
I’ve heard that incredibly excoriating reviews have sometimes devastated artists, that they’ve felt so wounded by critique (admittedly from someone higher on the food chain than an online random reviewer) that they’ve ceased to produce, or at least produce work for public consumption.
A rumor I encountered sometime back had it that the legendary director Terrence Mallick hung his gray Stetson on a peg after getting an incredibly bad review somewhere. Considering his post-hiatus output (in comparison to Badlands and Days of Heaven), I think that critic may have done the world a service by sending Mallick into seclusion for a couple decades (assuming the rumor is true, and it probably isn’t).
My personal view toward negative attention is that it is to any artist what the medicine ball to the gut is to the boxer. It’s a chance to gain another accreted layer of toughness, indifference to those forces against which you worked from the beginning, and which frankly probably did much to hone you as an artist and strengthen your resolve in the first place. Let the fires of another (wo)man’s hate scorch them while warming you.
Understand that the kind of negative attention I’m talking about is not just a reasoned or well-explicated critique. I’ve read negative reviews of my work that were well-articulated, and thought, Yeah, I get why this person doesn’t like what I did. I’m talking about someone you don’t know personally who seems to have some sort of personal rancor for you, and is seemingly baiting you in the hopes that you reciprocate, and can thus marinate together in some kind of comingling misery stew. To which I say, “No thanks. If I wanted to do that, I’d get married.”
Conversely, effusive praise can be fatal. The director Tim Burton talked about the reception that his now-canonized Pee-Wee Herman film got when it debuted. He said some people liked it, and a lot of people didn’t, but that in the end he was grateful for the raking over the coals, saying words to the effect that A lot of guys get this, ‘He’s the next Orson Welles’ and then they collapse under the barrage of flattery and heightened expectations.
I remember shortly after Richard Kelly made the quirky, cryptic, and frankly brilliant Donnie Darko, there seemed to be quite a few people who said he was the next David Lynch. When Kelly made a misstep with his next picture (the overly-ambitious Southland Tales), his defenders shrugged and said, Well, Lynch tried to paint on a massive canvas once and came away with Dune, and the comparison seemed to remain apt.
Then Richard Kelly made The Box, a film based on a Richard Matheson short story, whose intriguing premise was stretched, reworked, and molded around personal elements from Kelly’s life (his father worked for NASA in Langley in the 70s and 80s). The movie had strong atmosphere, but it built only to a steam that finally exhausted itself and evaporated in the third act. Richard Kelly hasn’t directed another movie since The Box, and I think that was like a decade ago, give or take a year.
The point is, I guess, there are worse things than people telling you that suck. Like, for instance, people telling you how great you are.