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Rumpus Book ClubWhen a Review Turns Into a Hate Letter—Meanness Will Make You Shrink
Scott Foundas, the film editor for the LA Weekly, has decided to take the release of Away We Go as an opportunity to attack Dave Eggers personally. Scott begins his attack with:
“While I don’t doubt—as multiple friends have assured me—that Eggers is a boon to the publishing industry (through his McSweeney’s imprint), a dedicated public servant (through his 826 learning centers), and an all-around swell guy…”
before launching into:
“The black hole that is Eggers’s navel here takes the form of bearded and bedraggled Burt (John Krasinski), a 33-year-old insurance futures salesman who disguises his voice when talking on the phone to clients to sound how he thinks a grown-up should.”
What Foundas is intentionally not acknowledging here, as he spends a third of his review attacking a screenwriter, is that a screenwriter is only responsible for about 20% of a finished film. And in this case, since Eggers co-wrote the film with Vendela Vida, maybe 10%. If Foundas hates the film so much he should be criticizing Sam Mendes, the director, and true author, of Away We Go. And he certainly shouldn’t spend the entire first paragraph in paroxysms of jealousy dedicated to how much he hated A Heart Breaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book that was published ten years ago. (Foundas doesn’t bother to mention Eggers other works, which include the novel What Is The What and the Voice of Witness oral history series.)
To criticize a film by mainly bashing one of its screenwriters is to not criticize a film at all but rather to cop to a sadness, a failure to achieve, a surrender of sorts. Foundas finishes his review by acting as if Sam Mendes had no responsibility for the film he directed. “After all,” he writes, “this is Dave Eggers’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it.”
Foundas has clearly been seething with hatred for ten years, and his hatred has left him diminished.
June 5th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Many people seem determined to hate anything Eggers is connected with, even if the connection is tangential. Why is that? Considering all the good he’s done, I’ve really never understood the impulse to hate on the guy. What is it about him that gets people so worked up? Are his politics seen as inauthentic? Is it because he is popularly supposed to be a ‘hipster’? Is it his hairstyle? Did the Iceland thing turn them off? Somebody fill me in, please. I’d love to have some kind of answer after all these years.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
I’m proud you didn’t go the Ad Hominem route. There is an oh so fitting and easy cliche for this situation. Screenwriters have so little to do with a finished film, and so much at the same time. Our job is to be the smartest person in the room, and the quietest person at the same time. Writing a screenplay is, at it’s core, writing an outline filled with character sketches.
I don’t personally know Dave, but I wouldn’t judge him based on art he created in a team like environment. Art, whose priority is to be successful first. Especially when his novels are metaphorical open hearts for us to peer into.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Getting Personal is weird.
If someone down the street records a terrible album, I barely feel the need to point it out. People go “How was it?” I go “Meh.” If Morrissey records an equally terrible album, and someone asks “How was it?” I can barely contain my venom. “Morrissey? Are shitting me?”
I think it comes from the feeling that once someone is well-known, “everyone” is taking them seriously–judging them on scales of 1 to 5 in various categories. When you don’t like someone’s work and they’re well-known, your dislike of their work is married to an outrage That You Are Being Expected To Take Them Seriously.
So Getting Personal is an instinctive way to immediately change the terms of the debate–This isn’t an Artist, this is just Some Guy. We have to judge this thing not as an Artwork but as some emanation from the personality of Some Guy. Yes, the artwork has characteristics, but only because the guy who did it does. If the work is highbrow, it’s because the guy is a dweeb, if it’s lowbrow it’s because the guy is a knuckle-dragger, if it’s complex it’s because the guy’s a show-off, if it’s simple it’s because the guy is simple, if it’s about something arcane, it’s because the guy’s “obsessed” with it, if it’s about something ordinary, it’s because the guy has no imagination. Characteristics of the work no longer have to be described as intentional choices by someone in order to make a certain thing–which choices can be evaluated as good or bad choices–but rather as what naturally happens when you put this obnoxious personality in the same room as a word processor.
So: people only get personal when they feel like someone’s successful.
So: it’s a compliment.
June 5th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I mostly agree, and the Dale Peck-style Hatchet Job is a phenomenon that Eggers himself has thoughtfully decimated long ago, in his notorious correspondence with the Harvard Advocate (excerpted):
I think criticism, more often than not, completely misses the point, yes. The critical impulse, demonstrated by the tone of many of your own questions, is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art. I used to tear books apart, and tear art exhibits apart – I was an art and book critic for a few years in San Francisco – but my urge to do that was born of bitterness and confusion and anger, not out of any real need to help or edify. When we pick at and tear into artistic output of whatever kind, we really have to examine our motives for doing so. What is it about art that can make us so angry? Is it healthy to rip to shreds something created by an artist? I would posit, if I may, that that’s not really a healthy impulse… But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors – they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it – “Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing” – hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books. Are there fair and helpful book critics? Yes, of course. But by and large, the only book reviews that should be trusted are by those who have themselves written books. And the more successful and honored the writer, the less likely that writer is to demolish another writer. Which is further proof that criticism comes from a dark and dank place. What kind of person seeks to bring down another? Doesn’t a normal person, with his own life and goals and work to do, simply let others live? Yes. We all know that to be true.
[end excerpt; for the rest of the very uncomfortable exchange, see http://www.armchairnews.com/freelance/eggers.html
That said, it bears pointing out that your write-up of the Village Voice article is itself an ad hominem on Foundas. Of course I wouldn’t disagree that He Started It, and that he has it coming to him, but there’s also something to be said for not fighting lashout with lashout.
June 5th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I hate this shit. I really do. I’ve hit it over and over on my blog. But cruel reviews like that are inexcusable. Seriously. WTF?
XXX,
Alison
June 5th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
That’s a good point.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
I really couldn’t disagree with Eggers more about criticism. Do you know people who write reviews? Are they “by and large,” “impatient people who have axes to grind”? Do they not love books? If you prick them, do they not bleed?
This is a whole other subject from Scott Foundas’s review, which I haven’t even read yet (though I will), but just because Dave Eggers used to “tear books apart” out of “bitterness and confusion and anger” doesn’t mean that every negative review comes out of a “dark and dank place.”
To be passionate about literature, in my experience, means to get angry and be disappointed by writing that is misguided or falls short for some reason or another. Some people who love literature want to be critics and to praise and celebrate and, yes, sometimes to vilify and harangue. This isn’t evil and it isn’t dark and dank and I find Eggers’ argument otherwise based on his own limited experience very, very frustrating.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
I agree. I’m definitely not arguing against criticism. This movie review though is really a personal attack.
June 5th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Well, I’ve now read the review, and I don’t love the it. As for it’s being too personal, though, I’m reminded of the Zadie Smith essay, linked below, in which she discusses how personal writing is — and what that means with regard to failure and success (in literary, not commercial, terms) as a writer:
“Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.”
This is without even mentioning that Eggers’ career-making book was a memoir — not exactly the most impersonal genre. (Though, as you said, just how much credit Eggers — as opposed to Mendes and so forth — deserves for the movie is an open question.)
http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm
June 5th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Some reviews are self-deflating. I read this review a couple of days ago and forgot it almost immediately, mostly because it focused on attacking a single screenwriter–and that seemed odd and unreasonable to me, as I’ve heard there can be, like, up to 20 writers tinkering around with one script.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
David: I see what you are saying but I take Stephen’s point to be that this isn’t a review of Egger’s personal memoir, it is a review of a film that Eggers co-wrote the sceenplay of, so a collaborative project and as a film one that is normally seen as being in the hands of the director.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Melissa, chances are this screenplay didn’t have 20 writers. Most screenplays are single writer joints. Sometimes things are punched up, but often it isn’t an issue of many writer fingers in a pie. Movies are made by a team of hundreds. Those with creative input, and direction paramount to that of the screenwriter number in the double digits. In the case of this film the script was likely only written as credited, however an actor will make a character his own, and a director ultimately adds the voice to a picture. The screenplay is not the “thing.” The finished movie is the thing. Writers, directors, actors, and yes even critics know this.
The review Steve is criticizing here is a strange personal attack where personal attacks do not belong. Especially for a generally well reviewed and received film. The few problems the reviewer have seem to be directed at Mr. Eggers, as if Dave intentionally and knowingly inflicted or parsed harm onto the audience.
This movie review leaves a bad taste. There is a method to film criticism, a respected one. Once the movie is digested, where the script is weak it is acknowledged, so too with acting, directing, etc. Calling out the writer specifically and treating him as the sole person responsible for one’s displeasure is reprehensible.
But in this time of twatting and blogging, I feel bad editorials more often than not replace good criticism.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:40 am
Tyson,
Just to clarify:
I didn’t say this movie had 20 writers (nor did I say chances are it had 20 writers).
What I said was this:
” … as I’ve heard there can be, like, up to 20 writers tinkering around with one script.”
Also–I understand that Elliott’s principal objection to the review is that the reviewer launched a personal attack on Eggers.
My point is that I–and, I believe, many others–take reviews with several grains, maybe even shakers, of salt. Sometimes I look at the aggregate (at Rotten Tomatoes, say) or pay attention to a particular reviewer–but only if I develop some degree of trust in and respect for their judgment.
So I guess I tend to question how much power any one critic wields.
As for this:
“The few problems the reviewer have seem to be directed at Mr. Eggers, as if Dave intentionally and knowingly inflicted or parsed harm onto the audience.”
– I can only speak personally: I’ll don my movie-harmproof vest and take my chances.
Melissa
June 6th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Okay. I’m going to be the guy that no one at the party likes; I’m going to side with Foundas. In the case of this film, I think he’s correct to put most of the blame on the writers. I also understand and sympathize with his harsh critique of Eggers. The review was not an ad hominem attack; he didn’t go after Eggers personally; he didn’t criticize his haircut, or allege that his charity work is insincere. He critiqued the lack of breadth in his authorial output. Was Foundas harsh? Of course. Is that wrong? No.
As for who authored the film, in what percentage, and thus who should take the blame for a rotten work:
The screenplay was written by Vida and Eggers. They’re married. I don’t think there’s harm in thinking that it was a balanced collaboration. The film – Foundas is right – was wordy. Excessively so. Tons of dialogue. Dialogue that was written not by Mendes – but by Eggers/Vida. It was written almost like a stage play. By film standards, it’s an incredibly writer-dominated piece. In the same vein as a film like My Dinner With Andre.
Go back to The New York Times review of My Dinner With Andre:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E03E6DF153BF93BA35753C1A967948260
Personally, when I read this review by Canby, I was furious. Because – for a movie that’s essentially two people talking for 110 minutes – Canby hardly tips his hat to the goddamn writers. It’s all credited Malle, who – yes – did a fine job keeping interest up with his direction of camera work, but should not be credited as the film’s author. MDWA was a film by Gregory and Shawn.
In the same way that Away We Go is a film by Eggers and Vida. Mendes was there to shoot. He’s secondary.
As for Eggers-As-Author:
I think part of the problem in criticizing Dave Eggers is that it’s difficult (in a very post-modern way) to separate Eggers the Person from Eggers the Author. His work is very autobiographical; he recycles major themes time and again. Now, as a person, it’s difficult to dislike the guy. He opens writing clinics for underprivilaged children, he’s active in the publishing community, he’s concerned about genocide. He’s a total mensch.
That said – in part, I feel, because of his big heart – his aptitude as an author is grossly overrated. He’s less a Tolstoy than a Harriet Beacher Stowe. His heart is in the right place, and his soul is pure, but I feel like someone close to him needs take him by the shirt collar, shake the shit out of him, and tell him to stop – just like I wish someone had been there to do the same for Stowe after she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While eminently decent, neither he nor Stowe are good writers. He said everything he needed to say (and more) in AHBWOSG. That Foundas didn’t mention What Is The What is fortunate; while it’s admirable that Eggers has a deep interest in humanitarian issues, the book – as literature – is mediocre at best.
As for Away We Go? Frankly, I think it deserved that review. Even if Fuenes was harsh. Someone needs to tell Eggers to stop.
Finally, as for mean reviews:
This ‘let’s all be nice to one another’ business has to stop. It’s not helping literature, it’s not helping film – it’s just not truthful. The truth, as the cliche goes, hurts. If it helps people grow, pile on those blows, baby. It’s time for everyone to start bucking up.
June 6th, 2009 at 9:52 am
That said – in part, I feel, because of his big heart – his aptitude as an author is grossly overrated. He’s less a Tolstoy than a Harriet Beacher Stowe.
Can’t say I agree with this in the least. Not because I think Eggers is a Tolstoy but because he isn’t rated very highly.
At least in my experience, the near universal opinion of Dave Eggers is what you’ve laid. Great dude, does a lot of good, seems like a so-so writer. I know plenty of hipsters and navigated an MFA program, yet I’ve never heard anyone talk of Dave Eggers as one of the best writers in America. At most I hear a “YSKOV was pretty good.”
I’m sure he has his fans somewhere, but in the generally literary community and amongst critics I hardly think Eggers is thought of as the next Tolstoy…
June 6th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I just read A.O. Scott’s NY Times negative review of the film ( http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/movies/05away.html?scp=1&sq=eggers%20scott&st=cse )
and really thought it touched on a lot of good points about the preciousness and superiority that is the flipside of the good stuff that comes from the much-maligned, equally muchly idolized D.E. and his universe. Wondering if you find (A.O.) Scott’s review equally ad hominem and unfair. I always felt that the whole anti-snark thing was more a means to deflect criticism (which can really hurt, granted, but that comes with the territory) than a valid critique of it. And while the L.A. Weekly review may unfairly attack D.E., don’t you excessively let him off the hook? On any movie (or any project) he’s involved with he will surely have much more input than the average, semi-anonymous-but-for-a-very-few screenwriter because of his celebrity? Beyond that, you seem to be trying to convince that the writer bears no responsibility whatsoever for the film, whereas I’m sure, as a writer, you’ve certainly been critical of movie scripts in your day. Not saying your defense is wholly unfounded, just that it seems over the top to me.
June 6th, 2009 at 11:13 am
Whether or not Getting Personal is tempting in the case of a highly autobiographical author or an author that you think just isn’t that good, the question still remains: Who does it serve when you criticize the personality of the author rather than the construct created by the writing?
Criticism is useless unless, in some sense, it’s advice to someone reading on how to write (or find) the next great book/movie/whatever. Advice framed in the form of: “Don’t be this guy” isn’t nearly as effective as: “Doing X makes the book feel like Y which is good/bad.”
It’s not that someone Getting Personal never has a point, it’s that delivering a point by Getting Personal is the least effective possible way to communicate that point in a useful form to the author or the audience.
June 6th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Okay, I wrote the above w/o reading the Foundas. I just read it. It is *weirdly* directed at the one feller, to be sure. Just to be clear.
June 6th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
What the f. Harriet Beecher Stowe helped write the Emancipation Proclamation! What did Tolstoy ever do?
June 7th, 2009 at 9:27 am
you are a smug hipster dork who listens to twee, whiny indie rock and rides a fixie. i want to yank on your beard.
this film, along with the snide hipster defensiveness surrounding it, are the reason why most people, even film critics, hate culturally regressive indie nerd culture.
recommended reading:
Why the hipster must die – Time Out New York
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization – Adbusters
June 7th, 2009 at 9:33 am
I don’t ride a fixie…
June 7th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Aaaaaaand scene.
June 7th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
Oh, come on, Sloan, this’ll be fun! Let’s check it:
1-”Beard”‘s comment is anonymous.
Rock on. Attack from a point of total safety. You are clearly brave in the face of dangerous Indie Hipsters, beard.
2-”you are a smug hipster dork who listens to twee, whiny indie rock and rides a fixie.”
Now we have an irony problem. Is this a personal attack + a spammy comment directed at an article that was attacking personal attacks and (in another recent article) spammy comments and therefore ignorant and stupid? Or is it ironic and clever? Difficult to say.
Let’s be Benthamite about it: In the end, what purpose did it serve? Well it was boring. This then, is “beard”‘s legacy.
Plus Stephen doesn’t apparently even ride a fixie.
3-”i want to yank on your beard.”
Plus, last I knew, Stephen didn’t have a beard.
4-”this film, along with the snide hipster defensiveness surrounding it, are the reason why most people, even film critics, hate culturally regressive indie nerd culture.”
Umm…”Most people” (including me) haven’t even seen this movie and even less of them have read any of the defensiveness around it. So “most people” started hating indie nerd culture this month?
Actually most people started hating whiny indie nerd hipster culture at least fifteen years ago when people started wearing those thick-ass emo glasses. It was a good idea to hate it, too.
Actually most people live in Asia and can’t affords to go to movies and have no idea what you’re on about.
5-”recommended reading: Why the hipster must die – Time Out New York
Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization – Adbusters”
See, now that is something remotely resembling a point. But, still, the article you left this comment under isn’t at all about how Indie Nerd Culture is Not Actually As Annoying And Bad as we know it is, or EVEN (grasp the subtlety here…) about how this movie is actually good despite someone saying it’s bad, what it actually is is an article about how a film critic failed to achieve his purpose by writing about the wrong thing.