Sorry, Seth Rogen: good film reviews wouldn’t mean much if bad ones weren’t allowed
We’ve now had expressions of protest from both the violent and non-violent wings of the anti-bad-review movement. The Hanover State Opera’s ballet director Marco Goecke confronted the Frankfurter Allgemeine ballet critic Wiebke Hüster in the theatre foyer and smeared dog excrement in her face. Now the comic and movie actor Seth Rogen has shared his views on criticism in an interview with Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast, declaring how upset he was at bad reviews for his films The Green Hornet and The Interview. “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things. It’s devastating.”
Sure. Many critics are as innocent as children about the effect their negative writing has on the people involved, just as they do not dare to dream that these mythologised stars are actually reading their good reviews – that these A-listers, so far above them in the media firmament, might, for a fraction of a moment, know who they are. My own view is that the people who owe critics the most are the ones who hate them the most. Hollywood blockbuster players, whose career self-worth has nothing to do with broadsheet-press school reports, shrug at bad notices.
But what is Rogen saying? That bad reviews should be suppressed, or the copy cleared with him in advance? Of what value are the good reviews, the (many) raves that Rogen is happy to put on his posters, without the bedrock assumption that the reviewers were free to say the opposite? Well, being criticised or mocked is not an agreeable experience, and – for what it is worth – critics themselves are regularly monstered on social media. And it’s probably even more painful for a comic performer, especially one as brilliant and successful as Rogen, to be mocked by journalists who aren’t as funny as he is, journalists who are sort of trying to do what he does.
So bad reviews can sting. Rogen is right. People can say mean stuff that will hurt people. How about the reaction to that film whose awfulness has become a legend: the live-action version of Cats? I admit it: I joined in with the chorus of richly merited vilification for this feline turkey. It can’t have been nice to have been on the receiving end. But for sheer hilarious cruelty, for pure delicious sadism, all of us snarky critics had to bow the knee to the Master. A certain someone with 9.3 million Twitter followers utterly (and accurately) trashed everything and everyone connected with Cats; he declared himself stoned while watching it, that he didn’t know what a “Jellicle” is, was contemptuous at its attempt to be “Broadway funny”, finally erupting at the news that there was in existence an alternative cut in which the cats’ anuses were visible. “Release the Butthole Cut of Cats!!” he demanded. Wow. How we laughed. How humiliating for everyone involved in Cats, all those hardworking professionals who hoped their work would be appreciated, to be turned into a punchline by this meanie. I bet the director will be haunted by that to the end of his days.
There is no need to say who the author of this criticism was. As for Rogen’s own work outside the field of film reviewing, he’s now appearing in Steven Spielberg’s wonderful movie The Fabelmans: such a smart, funny, poignant performance. Go and see it!
links it to the precarious economic environment created by late-stage capitalism, with its short-term lets and zerohours contracts.
But since picking up The End of Love I’ve mentally expanded the meaning of “negative choice” to complement Illouz’s own analysis of how, under capitalism, “choice” is now one of the fundamental ways we relate to ourselves and others. “The modern subject,” she writes, “grows into adulthood by exercising her capacity to engage in the deliberate act of choosing a large variety of objects: her sartorial or musical tastes, her profession, her number of sexual partners [...] are all ‘chosen’.”
To flip it: if “choices”, particularly the directly consumerist ones, are now one of the primary ways we construct ourselves, what sort of impact does it have when you devote most of your time to notchoosing? Up until recently, I had a very shaky understanding of who I was, in terms of positive decision making, but I knew what I was not, to a fault. When your sense of a unique personhood is guided by all the things you can’t, won’t and shouldn’t engage with, the world is that bit smaller and less colourful. It breeds contempt and insecurity as well, for those who make choices that offend your own carefully curated superior tastes.
Gradually, though, this attitude has reversed. Perhaps getting older and having other certitudes blasted away made me care less about an outdated concept of “originality” and question everything else as a result. In its wake has come a desire to try things I once dismissed – and it turns out, at my core, perhaps my preferences run a little, well, basic. Yet I’ve never been more relaxed and sure of myself.
Anyway, I’ve come to realise that my understanding of originality was off the mark. I placed too much weight on my choices – or non-choices – to prove a distinct individuality that probably does not even exist, in a world of 8 billion people. Perhaps true singularity is realising it doesn’t really matter, caring less and treading your own path, even if it’s pedestrian in every sense. Either way, if it means I can listen to Weird Fishes over and over and over again, I’ll choose being one of the herd, every time.
Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media
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workers into conditions close to slavery in the United States. Before that, there were other indentured servitude programs to provide forced labor, and of course, slavery. So a Mississippi labor camp is a story as old as America, right? The problem is that every generation forgets these chapters in American history, and goes on to invent the next version.
I finished your book just as Joe Biden announced the return to some Trump-era migrant detention policies – we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes. What makes you believe that things can actually get better?
When I met the workers at the center of this book, what I didn’t know was that they were among the first members of a rising workforce being created because of climate change. At Resilience Force, when workers follow storms, we follow workers, to often deeply conservative places across America where they’re rebuilding. And friendships emerge between the people who thought they hated immigrants, but now are depending on immigrants to rebuild their towns.
There was a family in Florida a few years ago – I watched as a hurricane blew away their roof. While waiting for Fema, they put up a sign that said “strangers will be shot”. Well, strangers did arrive to their home: a band of immigrant workers. We rebuilt their home. And at the end, we got together for dinner, the friendship flourished – and they took the sign down.
The truth is that what I see in real life after disasters is this profound opening to build new social cohesion in
America and across the world. And ultimately, that gives me a lot of hope.
The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America is published by Algonquin Books
the American west through land art, through the iconic works of Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria and all those old white men. I’m interested in what the legacy of that would look like today.”To the credit of Desert X – this year co-curated by Diana Campbell, who has worked in India, Bangladesh and the Philippines – their demographic is a good deal broader than the crusty land art stereotype, foregrounding women and artists of colour, with work that explores issues of social and environmental justice.Tschabalala Self has created a provocative take on an equestrian statue, in the form of a disembodied female torso, legs violently spread out, perched on top of a bronze horse. It represents the “lost, expelled and forgotten Indigenous, Native and African women”, she says, “whose bodies and labour allowed for American expansion and growth.” It is placed in a shady grove of trees off a sandy trail, but it would make a fitting replacement for the rocky plinth outside City Hall – home, until recently, to a horseback statue of Frank Bogert, the former mayor of Palm Springs who presided over a brutal campaign of land seizures and the organised arson of AfricanAmerican homes in the 1960s.Equally poignant are a series of landscape photographs taken by Tyre Nichols – the 29-year-old black man who was fatally beaten during an arrest by Memphis police in January – emblazoned on billboards above a highway. The intent was to contrast the serenity of these scenes with the violence that happens on the side of the road, particularly to black and brown bodies, and highlight the need for traffic-stop reform. They are beautiful, cinematic shots, and they make a refreshing change from the usual parade of injury lawyer adverts.
Many of the artworks are more gnomic, and take a good deal of caption-reading (on an accompanying app) to understand quite what’s going on. Fifteen minutes’ drive south of Begum’s yellow cage stands a big black semicircle, moored in the landscape like an eerie sci-fi monolith. An inverted triangular wedge is sliced through the centre, turning it into an imposing gateway, while recessed steps on either side allow you to climb over the structure. This is Liquid A Place, by Chicagoborn Torkwase Dyson. “How do we go to the water in our bodies to harvest memory?” she asks. “Can this liquid memory help us reconsider scale and distance as critical forms?” You might struggle to read any connection with water, but her black void makes an arresting addition to the barren hills.Forty minutes’ drive to the northeast stands a telegraph pole like no other. Its base has been encircled with salt, as if once submerged in a now dried-out sea, while trumpet-shaped loudspeakers sprout from its top, giving it the look of a flowering desert cactus. Sonorous prayerlike wailing echoes from the speakers, interspersed with a narrator reading a curious tale of an imaginary conspiracy theory about an all-powerful particle of salt, spelling the doom of climate change. Created by the London- and
Delhi-based duo Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser, the piece is inspired by the number of conspiracy theorists that the desert attracts – from UFO-watchers to cybernetic spiritualists, from flat-earthers to chemtrail fanatics – and it adds a poetic, humorous touch to proceedings.Their work is cleverly powered by a single solar panel, unlike an installation nearby, which necessitated the construction of an entire new power line. A row of utility poles now march up the hillside, carrying electricity to feed the artistic vision of the Mexican artist Mario García Torres, who has installed a herd of convulsing mechanical bulls, but replaced the bulls’ bodies with flat reflective sheets (which, ironically, look just like solar panels). It is apparently a comment on macho cowboy culture – inviting us to “contemplate the ‘Wild West’ and our relationship to landscape and our role within it”. But it makes you wonder if Torres might have better questioned his own role in this particular landscape.
While most of the installations take their visual power from being seen against the sublime desert backdrop (ignoring the proximity of suburban streets), local artist Gerald Clarke’s piece happily engages with a local community sports centre. Clarke, who is an enrolled member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians, has built a monumental board game, creating a maze-like path on a woven straw structure, inspired by traditional Cahuilla baskets.“It’s like Native Trivial Pursuit,” he says, handing out packs of cards that test visitors’ knowledge of the use of yucca, deer grass and palm leaves, as well as the purpose of sweat lodges and the number of recognised tribes in the US. Get the answer right, and you can move forward a step. “Your average American is going to have a hard time, and will probably end up cheating,” he says. “Which is what they’ve always done. My community is my primary audience. The indigenous intellectual tradition has answers, if only anyone would bother to listen.”While Clarke’s project highlights erased local histories, further out of town there is a reminder of international global flows – and how they are prone to collapse. Just off highway I-10, as the road branches off to Palm Springs next to a freight rail line, stands a monumental pile-up of shipping containers. At first sight, it looks like another derailment, reminiscent of the recent Ohio disaster. That is until you realise that the 12 containers, propped precipitously on top of each other, form the abstract shape of a lying figure. Still brandished with their Korean, Chinese and Israeli logos, these container-limbs are global trade personified, slumped in the Coachella valley.
It is the work of the LA-based artist Matt Johnson, who first conceived the project when the Suez Canal was blocked by the Ever Given container ship – a Japaneseowned, Taiwanese-operated, Germanmanaged, Panamanian-flagged and Indian-manned vessel, which became an icon of the fragility of global supply chains. As trains of containers trundle along behind Johnson’s commanding sculpture, while thousands of individual private cars roar down the parallel freeway, it is also a stark symbol of this country’s tragic lack of passenger rail – and a painful reminder of the carbon footprint of this car-based biennial.“That has always been a concern,” says Wakefield. “For the 2019 edition we had 19 artists spanning from the very northwest part of the valley all the way down to the Salton Sea [60 miles apart]. This year we have reduced it dramatically in terms of footprint and numbers.” Despite the comparatively compact size, it still necessitates at least an entire day of driving.For all the projects questioning water use, the fragility of the landscape and our multiple energy and climate crises, the wisdom of building numerous substantial temporary structures in the middle of the desert, entailing concrete foundations and electricity supplies, and encouraging thousands of visitors to drive to them, is perhaps the biggest question of them all.
Desert X is in Coachella valley, California, until 7 May.
This region symbolises man’s determination to bring manicured lawns and swimming pools to extreme places
marriage certificates.
When it comes to single mothers, some “discriminatory policies such as the inability to register births, the expulsion of civil servants and even the need to pay fines are changing”, says a lawyer who helps single mothers access their legal rights. But “regulations and practices are still not uniform”.
Many women, married or otherwise, fear the impact that childbearing would have on their career. Employers in China still sometimes ask women about their family planning in job interviews, despite the practice being banned in 2019. In some cases women are asked to sign contracts promising not to get pregnant within a certain timeframe.
Yu Ke worries that her status as an unmarried, childless young woman will make it hard for her to join a new company. “So having a child or not having a child, both will impact women in the workplace. Even if I tell a job that I won’t have a child, they may still suspect me.”
There is still a “pervasive sense of discrimination and inequality in the labour market,” says Zhou.
China’s fertility policies emphasise a “conservative cultural ideology”, says Hongwei Bao a professor at the University of Nottingham. In particular, pronatalist policies are “hostile to young women and LGBTQ+ people”.
If the government truly wants to increase the fertility rate, it needs to protect women’s reproductive rights and interests, says the lawyer who helps single mothers. “Not only for married childbirths, but also for single parents and gay families”. “The limitations are still greater than the support,” for childrearing, she added.
Those limitations worry a generation of urban young women who are increasingly independent, outspoken and unwilling to settle into the domestic sphere. “When I talk to my girlfriends,” says Huang, the lawyer in Hangzhou, “I see an awakening of female consciousness … these women are not like the Chinese women in the past”.