Quote:
Originally Posted by Gilda
I didn't mean that Schneider's reaction was a personal attack. It demonstrates a thin skin, ignorance, and probably poor judgement, and was factually wrong, but he doesn't actually take personal shots at Goldstein, instead attacking, badly, his job qualifications.
That wasn't what my title referred to.
I was interested in why there were so many comments in the discussion groups I saw about Roger's physical appearnce, mostly his weight, but also his age, the saggy skin that's resulted from his massive weight loss, his recovery from cancer, his sexuality (many posters seem to think he's gay, which is untrue) and so on.
I'm wondering while I'm reading such comments, first what any of this has to do with the quality of his criticism, and second, why people tend to react to criticism of a movie (or book, or tv show) they like as if it were a criticism of them.
I've seen students get into a fight over whether Napoleon Dynamite was a good movie, or which rap artist was better. Being a fan of Rob Shneider doesn't make you Rob Shneider. If a critic takes a swipe at a movie you like, he's not taking a swipe at you.
Gilda
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Many people see critique of things they enjoy as personal attacks, which leads to attacking back in kind. If a reviewer says a movie is stupid/childish/vulgar/etc. and someone who likes it reads that review, they will assume that the critic thinks they are also (insert negative adjective). Because if they weren't (negative adjective), why would they enjoy something that was? And even if the insult isn't implied that directly, at the very least the critic is saying you have bad taste for liking whatever they are saying is bad. And it seems that people are generally unable to separate things into like/dislike, and must immediately quantify which "like" is better than the other.
Reviewers generally don't help this either, they usually only contribute to separating which likes are better or worse. Sometimes I think this is even unintentional. For example, I was doing some surfing on FARK articles, and came to a site by a new york artist. It seemed interesting, so I decided to look around a bit. Apparently, after attending poetry slams, she came up with an "anti-slam" where artists were all given perfect scores for performance (at the regular slams she attended, there were judges picked from a crowd that rated performance. She attempted at several to get the lowest marks possible). She did this because she felt that art shouldn't be rated or critiqued. But in the very next sentence, she went on about how art should be genuine expression, and not clinically crafted, and said how many newer artists were producing sterile art. So in one sentence, she says art shouldn't be rated, than immediately goes on to rate other people's art (just on a creativity/genuiness scale as opposed to a strict quality scale). Crititicizing seems to be human nature, as does the need to set pecking orders for everything, including such things not quantifiable as taste.