Showing posts with label opinions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinions. Show all posts

Superior Spoilsports and Rotten Reviews

Straight from the horse's mouth! 


Way back in the days when newspapers had reasonable circulations, and therefore paid - albeit not much - for reviews, I used to do some professional reviewing. It was never really my thing, and I mostly did it for the money. Like all writers, we do what we can to survive. Sometimes I enjoyed it, and sometimes I didn't. I always took time and trouble with my reviews. 

Once or twice, I'm sorry to say, I indulged in what I now think were fairly   mean spirited reviews of books I hadn't liked. I cringe now, when I think   of it and I'm sorry about it. My excuse is that I was young, and hadn't had   my fair share of mean spirited reviews myself!

 I still, occasionally, review a book on Amazon, but only if I've liked it or   at the very least appreciated something about it. Then, I can   honestly say nice things about it. The better the book, the more I enjoy trying to   analyse why I've liked it so much. If I've hated it, or read 50 pages on   my Kindle and asked for my money back - as I've done a few times - I   won't review it at all, even though I will be pretty certain about   why I've   disliked it. 

We all get bad reviews from time to time. Sadly, a single bad review will stick in our minds and keep us awake being indignant for far longer than ten good ones. I don't mean mixed reviews, or thoughtful reviews that analyse a piece of work on its own terms. Those can be incredibly helpful. It means somebody is taking us seriously, debating with the piece of work, if you like. But they don't have to like everything about it. 

I mean those one star, bald and bold 'I hated this' kind of reviews that you look at and wonder if they've actually read the book, or seen the play or film. 

One of the wisest things somebody wrote about these occasional terrible reviews was to try not to take them to heart, but to simply imagine yourself saying to the reviewer, preferably with a shrug, 'then it's not for you. And that's fine.' And then mentally walk away.

You have to practise doing it, but honestly, it works.

Social media, however, seems to have encouraged the phenomenon of the superior spoilsport, especially where a popular book or film or TV show is concerned.

Here's how it goes. 

A group of people will be on, say, Facebook, happily discussing something they've enjoyed. Let's avoid getting embroiled in book critiques by using an example from the world of music. I've seen it happening twice recently, once with Abba and once with the Beatles. In both cases, people were having a good time sharing what these bands and their music meant to them, debating songs and memories, disagreeing a little, but enjoying the chat no end. 

And then along comes somebody who posts 'I hate Abba.' Or 'The Beatles were rubbish.' 

I wouldn't mind if they ever gave a valid reason why they think this. But they hardly ever do. I can give you dozens of reasons why I love the Beatles, and Abba too. Some of them are extremely personal, but some of them are to do with my appreciation of the music itself. If you try to pin them down, ask them why they think this - which they're perfectly entitled to do - they just dig their heels in. 'I hate them because they're rubbish' they say. Which doesn't make a lot of sense. 

There have been a couple of widely praised TV shows that I've disliked recently, but I know why, would be happy to say so, and equally happy to acknowledge that this may be down to me, and not necessarily a fault of the programme itself, which I know other people have enjoyed. If pushed, I could analyse this further, point out faults in the writing and direction. But in my experience, you can forgive a whole lot of faults if you find something entertaining. 

I've encountered the spoilsports so often now, that I'm forced to the conclusion that there's a kind of superiority about it. They don't ever want to be seen appreciating something that lots of other people like. So they'll pretend that they, and only they can see through it. 

They are spoilsports. What I really want to say to them is just leave us to our enjoyment. It's not for you, and that's fine. But you don't have to be here right now, telling us how much you loathe the thing we love. We don't care. It's not going to change our opinion.

So just for once, go play on your own page, write an online one star review if you like -but leave us alone to wallow in our fandom.  


The Beatles, The Brontes and Opinionated People.

 


It's an odd feature of social media - I notice it particularly on Facebook, but I suspect Twitter is much worse - that when somebody posts an interesting conversation starter, and people weigh in with reminiscences and contributions and disagreements, some individual will occasionally add an opinion that simply amounts to 'you're wrong' - but often couched in much more robust terms. It happened recently, not to me, but to somebody else. It's so commonplace as to be instantly recognisable. I've deleted whole threads because of it - not because I dislike a good debate, but because I'm damned if somebody is coming onto my page to browbeat my friends. It is, let's face it, deliberately designed to do two things: draw attention to the person posting it, and close down any further debate. Like those exclamations in CAPITALS with FACT written after them.

This particular conversation was about the film A Hard Day's Night, and the music of the Beatles. It reminded me that I first saw the movie with my late mum. We had moved to Scotland a year or two before and the Beatles were my saviour during a time of intermittent misery. I loved Scotland, but hated my school. My mum and I went to see the film, and stayed in to watch it all over again. 

Even at the time, and young as I was, it seemed extraordinary; it seemed utterly unlike anything we had ever seen before - and when you look at other British 1960s movies, you can see why it was so striking, both musically and visually. I didn't know why I found it so wonderful, I just knew that it was. 

Many years later, I started to try to analyse why so many of us were so captivated and and why we remain so, watching it all over again. But because there's no point in trying to reinvent the wheel, here's a superb analysis from Colin Fleming in the Atlantic, from 2014, of The Deep Art of A Hard Day's Night.  'No band, maybe no artists ever, had a greater capacity for displaying and inducing wonder. And here we have that wonder made visual.' 

As Fleming points out, citing reasons, this isn't just any old rock and roll film - it's a Dick Lester film. A Dick Lester film that manages to capture the magic that was the Beatles. 

Pondering the phenomenon of the aggressive take down, though, it struck me that it existed long before social media. I remember a literary agent writing to tell me that one of my novels (this one, in fact) was 'a library novel fit only for housewives' He could just have said 'not for me, sorry' - but this grossly self entitled old man felt the need to take down a woman for writing a love story, while insulting other women and libraries along the way. What a tosspot. (More about this odd contempt for the love story as written by women in future posts.) 

In a similar vein, I vividly remember a certain middle aged male Scottish writer telling me loudly and angrily that the Bronte sisters were 'a bunch of daft wee lassies, with a crush on Byron'. It was one of those occasions where you spend several days afterwards thinking of suitable rejoinders, but it also coloured what had, until then, been an amicable relationship. I had considered him a friend. Afterwards, I never felt the same way about him. It wasn't just his misogyny showing as clear as day. Of course he didn't have to enjoy the books. Not everyone does. And there were many arguments he could have made. But it was the way in which he thought that his opinion mattered far more than mine, and was - moreover - indisputably right. Nothing I said would have made any difference. 

I'm happy to debate the relative merits of the Brontes and their various novels till the proverbial cows come home - as I'm happy to debate the extraordinary phenomenon that was the Beatles, especially since I experienced it at first hand. 

But sometimes the only response to an aggressive 'this is shit' is to shrug and walk away. 

Which is fortunately, easier to do on Facebook than in real life. 

Meanwhile, here's something to wake you up!