Yes Seth Rogen, Negative Reviews are Hurtful

Alas, in the media universe the most banal remark of a famous person is treated as so earth-shaking as to be worthy of headlines.

One can count as one of this week's examples of such banality-that-makes-the-headlines-because-a-famous-person-said-it (carried in Variety, and Vanity Fair, and on the Google News aggregator's "front page!") Seth Rogen's remark that "negative reviews" can be "devastating" for an artist, some of whom "never recover."

This should not be news to anybody--while the same goes for this: if rich and famous celebrities, with their wealth and their prestige and their careers and all they bring can suffer so much, just how much worse is it when negative reviews are directed against people who have none of those supports? Against, for example, those who are just at the beginning of their careers? Those who after much trying and trying--maybe decades of trying--find themselves still at "square one" in those careers, or as close to it as makes no difference (like "one of those actors who's 45 years old, with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much")? Or who, managing to get something out there, still at a stage where not only their ego but their prospects of ever making a living through their craft are very vulnerable to criticism, go out and get treated brutally--with the brutality the worse because the critic, who ordinarily acts the part of shameless claqueur, and probably feels degraded doing it, made full use of the chance to indulge their meanness at the expense of someone who could not hit back, absolutely living down to the "Tin Rule?"

Also something that should be news to no one is that being ignored can be more painful than being insulted. How much more painful, then, is it for those who have none of those supports, and are being ignored? Who experience that particular combination of being negatively reviewed and ignored that is, for example, the form rejection letter--such as, for example, writers routinely "collect" hundreds, even thousands of, before publication, if they ever attain that goal?*

That no one thinks of all that--that no one ever addresses that properly--is just another dimension of the same collective stupidity that makes the most banal celebrity remark a headline-maker and anything and everything said by persons not "in the club" has to say unworthy of anyone's attention.

*The only really satisfying treatment of what that side of the "writing life" is like I have ever encountered is to be found in Jack London's Martin Eden--tellingly published over a century ago. By contrast more recent content just gives us those stupid scenes where the writer sits autographing copies for fawning fans in a bookshop.