From Franzen to Fieri, the five rules of the review as takedown
Version 0 of 1. Among the terrible reviews of Liz and Dick, this week – "stunningly cynical" (TV Guide), "unbearably hilarious" (Hollywood Reporter), "badly paced, cheap-looking and encrusted with a tinkly, preposterous soundtrack designed to make viewers go insane" (Huffington Post) – none was quite brutal enough to ascend to that category of criticism that sweeps the internet now and then, and warms the darkest recess of the heart: the magisterial takedown. (David Wiegand in the San Francisco Chronicle gave it his best shot with "It's so terrible, you'll need to ice your face when it's over to ease the pain of wincing for two hours." but there wasn't quite enough artistry in his bitching.) No. For a negative review really to fly, it must meet five broad criteria. <strong>1. Have about it the ring of true grievance</strong> The most recent example of this, of course, is Pete Wells' assault on Guy Fieri in the New York Times, which generated so much commentary the paper's public editor was obliged to get involved – ruling, in the face of the Poor Guy backlash, that it had, in fact, been fair. It wasn't just the creativity of the approach, delivered in a series of rhetorical questions ("Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?") that went on for so long they pushed past the joke into a kind of crazed, Joycean stream of consciousness; nor the spot-on descriptions of the offending items, most notably the blue drink and the Donkey Sauce. It was the unfakeable sense that Guy's American Kitchen & Bar in Times Square had some quality of awfulness about it that struck the reviewer like a personal attack. For all the cuteness of his questioning, the review was powered by real anger at what Wells' perceived to be Fieri's naked disrespect towards his customers. <strong>2. Originality of insult</strong> Negative superlatives aren't enough. The bile must be fresh. AA Gill, the Sunday Times restaurant critic with long form in this area, once referred to an offal dish at Bar Shu, in London, as looking "like nothing so much as the bucket under a field-hospital operating table". Matt Taibbi's work on Thomas Friedman is worth a mention here. In his review of Friedman's book Hot, Flat and Crowded, Taibbi quoted one of Friedman's famously convoluted analogies – "the first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels" – and, in what might be seen as the apex of hysterical negativism, really went to town: "First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you're supposed to stop digging when you're in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It's stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.") Finally, at the old school, thank-you-I'll-be-here-all-week-have-you-tried-the-veal end of things, the Canadian critic and comedian Milton Shulman really put his back into this setup-joke-punchline approach to restaurant criticism: "A customer … called the waitress after sniffing the food she had served him. 'Do you know what the cook did to this fish? He asked. 'Sure,' said the waitress, 'she grilled it.' 'So now you can take it back to her,' said the customer. 'It's ready to talk.'" Ba-boom! <strong>3. Target someone who is usually taken seriously, even if only by themselves</strong> Lindsey Lohan is too risible a figure at this stage to generate the frisson that comes from negatively reviewing more pompous targets. The best bad reviews are reserved for those who, in the eyes of the reviewer, should know better. Which brings us to Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times book reviewer, who has been known, now and then, to express a dislike. (Kakutani's own work was attacked this week in a pastiche of Wells' Fieri review by David Daley in Salon: "Didn't you think reviewing an actual poet in verse might make your own effort look silly by comparison? Do you sometimes go to a museum and think, "I could do that?" Was your goal only to use the most obvious rhymes? Pages and ages? Fears and jeers? Game and lame? Chump and Trump? Hey, what rhymes with limn?") Over the years, Kakutani has taken on a lot of big beasts – John Irving, John Updike, Martin Amis, Philip Roth – but it was Jonathan Franzen who gave her the pretext to show off just how much can be achieved with a single swipe of the knife, describing his book of autobiographical essays, The Discomfort Zone, as "an odious self-portrait of the artist as a young jackass." After which, there was nothing much left to say. <strong>4. Be on the edge of helpless laughter</strong> The problem with Liz and Dick is that it wasn't quite <em>bad enough</em>. Now and then, something comes along that prompts commissioning editors to send their journalists to a gig, play or restaurant not quite in the spirit of open-minded curiosity. I remember Helen Pidd, a colleague at the Guardian, being sent once to sit through the West End musical, Behind the Iron Mask, which half the audience seemed also to be attending for less than generous reasons. ("There are hoots of laughter at all the wrong places," she wrote, "and the kind of heckles that would cause cracks even in cast-iron egos. "Don't say anything else!" says a character at one point to the eponymous masked man. "Please don't!" quips a wag in row H.") Psychological point of interest: at some stage, in these types of productions, a corner is turned and the jeering proves so enjoyable, it inspires almost as much warmth and gratitude towards the cast as a hit show. <strong>5. Provoke a fightback from the injured party</strong> It's never a good idea, but most can't resist. Guy Fieri took the red-eye from LA to New York to appear on morning TV and accuse Wells of pursing an agenda. Franzen referred to Kakutani as "the stupidest person in New York". (Salman Rushdie just called her "weird".) The only fightback that works is one that is smarter or funnier than the original review, for which we have to look to the late Nora Ephron, in the wake of Alec Baldwin's scathing review of her role in the launch of the HuffPost's divorce section. "Thirty years have passed," blogged Baldwin, "and this woman … seems incapable of one of the most essential components of a 'successful' divorce, and that is forgetting." To which Ephron, naturally and effortlessly outclassing her attacker, replied: "I'm afraid that Alec, whom I love, has confused me with Kim Basinger, which is the first time anyone has ever done that." Therein the last word. |