In Praise of Mean Reviews: Nobody cares about your life

By mike (from Barrelhouse)

In her New York Times review of the documentary “Phyllis and Harold” — a movie about the filmmaker’s unhappily married parents — Jeannette Catsoulis raises a point that any sort of writer or storyteller would be well-served to keep in mind when mining their own experience for their work:

The problem with these my-family-was-messed-up-and-I need-to-share projects is that they require an audience of complete strangers to give a damn. And while we sometimes do, it’s usually because the material is inherently compelling (“Tarnation”) or the filmmaking uncovers truths beyond the template of family therapy (“51 Birch Street”). Sadly, “Phyllis and Harold” fulfills neither requirement.

A little acidic, yes, but also very, very true. And, as I’ve said before, the real purpose of a mean review is to instruct: to turn a piece of bad art into a model for what good art should be, to warn people away from common artistic missteps, to give a reader the tools of criticism.

Frederick Barthelme, in his “39 Steps: A Primer on Fiction Writing,” made basically the same point Catsoulis makes, though in a pithier way: “Remember: Many things have happened which, to the untrained eye, appear interesting.”

So much fiction falls into this trap. I teach undergraduate creative writing workshops, and it often strikes me that people are not very good judges of their own lives. The trick, I think, is to at some point in the writing process, truly make yourself — if you’re writing about yourself — into a character, and to think of that character as a character (if you start jotting down notes about the story that refer to the main character in the third person, that’s a sign that you’re on the right track). And, similarly, to start thinking about the story as a story, instead of an anecdote. Mess with the facts. Give it a shape. Play around with the point of view. At every turn, ask yourself: Why should anyone give a shit?

I call it the So what? factor, and I would expand its bailiwick waaaaay beyond undergraduate attempts at memoirs. At Booth, we get a lot of fiction that is technically proficient, but leaves me thinking, "Who cares?"

A while back, I tried watching Battlestar Galactica on the advice of a friend who was sick of hearing me rave about The Wire. I gave it a game effort. I got about halfway through the first season before I stopped. I didn't stop out of anger, or because I thought it sucked; I just got distracted by other stuff and never went back to finish the season. In other words, nothing compelled me to keep watching. But what was it missing? Why did I fantasize about The Wire like I was carrying on some illicit affair, but let the Battlestar DVD's collect dust on the end table for a month before sending them back to Netflix?

Here's my theory: shit happened in Battlestar, but I didn't care about the people it happened to. Early in the first season, the President faced a horrible choice: either risk the entire fleet to try and rescue a ship with, like, four hundred people on it, or abandon that ship and safeguard the fleet.

They abandoned the ship. Those people died. I did not care.

I'm not some hard-hearted s.o.b. I'm a guy who cares, probably too much, about fictional characters. A grown-ass man should not spend his lunch thinking, "Man, I can not believe Omar is dead. I just cannot believe it," and secretly hoping that the next episode would start with Omar coming out of brain surgery. The reason I didn't care about four hundred dead people on Battlestar was because I didn't know any of them. These weren't characters, they were abstract constructs; the President's dilemma was a philosophy problem. The genius of The Wire is that it made you get really close to a character before tearing him away (R.I.P. Omar. I loved you, man).

So with all due respect, Barrelhouse and Jeannette Catsoulis, maybe it's not so much about what happens in a story, or the truths that are revealed. By that equation, Battlestar should have been really compelling— the events were hugely important within the universe of the story, the stakes could not have been higher, and interesting questions were raised about the human condition—but it wasn't. In the end, what matters most are the characters. Make me love them, in all their flawed complexity. Make me miss them when they leave. Make me care. And I'll never say so what?