One Star Reviews
Like a lot of people, there are times when I worry about what other people will think of the work that I do. I worry about whether my participants will find my workshops utterly transformative, I worry that those few brave souls who read my blog will like what I write and think I’m both very clever and exceptionally funny, and I worry about whether the partners and clients I work with will think my work is dazzling and brilliant. Simple aspirations.
I also know, in the small, obstinate, rational part of my brain that not everyone will like everything I do. Not everyone can like everything I do. That is just not how the world works. It’s hard, though, to reconcile knowing that not everyone can like your stuff with the feeling that somehow everyone should. Between those two poles can come a great deal of self-generated stress and anxiety. In Rick Rubin’s book on creativity he talks a lot about the role of the creative person being to create, and then letting go of the thing that’s been created. What comes after that - acclaim, condemnation, indifference - is out of our control. I subscribe to that, to a degree, but there is lots of work we might find ourselves doing where the responses of other people - participants, partners, colleagues, really do matter and are something that can be used and meaningfully folded back into the work.
So how do we handle the abyss that lies between knowing we can’t please everyone, and wanting still to do so?
Let me show you the revivifying, restorative, rejuvenating world of the One-Star Review.
Amazon.co.uk review for Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica - the foundational work of all modern physics.
One Star Reviews
The game is very simple. Think of something you love - a book, a film, a TV show, an album - ideally something that also has a pretty wide degree of critical acclaim, and then go dig up the one-star reviews for it. Amazon, Goodreads, Letterboxd are all great places for this, but anywhere that solicits and aggregates reviews for readers, watchers, and listeners. In my experience, something that generally has high critical and social acclaim will be sitting at 1% - 2% one-star reviews and maybe 5% - 10% total for one and two stars. That means that, on average, 1 in 10 people think it’s shit.
It doesn’t matter what it is. The Sopranos, 12 Angry Men, The White Album, La Boheme, Seinfeld, The Great Gatsby. All of them will have a few percent of one and two-star reviews - often scathing reviews - despite being some of the greatest works of film, literature, music, and TV.
There is nothing creative that everybody likes.
Nothing.
Of course, I’ve curated some examples here, all of these are entirely, absolutely, genuine.
Starting with the father of all fantasy fiction, The Fellowship of The Ring;
That’s a bold 51,000 one-star reviews for JRR.
I have never in my life read something so incredibly boring. I don’t care about any of the characters because all of the book is dedicated to histories and tales that happened long before the characters lived, and very little is dedicated to developing the characters inter- or intra-personally. Honestly, reading this book was a miserable, torturous experience for me.
There’s also plenty of unimpressed readers for Austen’s Pride and Prejudice;
No sense or sensiblity for the 100,000 one star reviewers.
Flowery, pretentious writing does not a good story make. Austen created stiff, one-dimensional characters, brought them to life as much as she could in a boring plot, and had two of them fall in love somehow. No one writes romance colder than Austen did.
And…
Jesus Christ, just have sex.
In cinema, Kubrick takes a kicking for 2001: A Space Odyssey;
The visuals suck, the music sucks, the performances are still and lifeless, I think the robot had more expression than Dave and whoever the other guy was. And my goodness, was this movie BORING. Nothing happens. This is just a pretentious piece of horse manure that people hype up to be something it’s not. The only mind-blowing part of this movie is you wanting to blow-your-mind while watching it. It gets one star because of the monkey scene, but that’s it.
Even the darling of the Emmy’s, HBO’s Succession;
I just finished season 1 and have no idea how or why I finished it. I am no prude but the foul language for sheer shock factor was neither shocking nor interesting. I hate every character. If they all died in a fiery crash I would merely shrug. Episode 10 was the only interesting tidbit but not worth the effort. Whoever wrote this garbage should be ashamed.
There’s a long history of the bad review
But let’s not think this is a modern phenomenon - a product of the open review culture of sites like Goodreads and Amazon. If Kubrick, Austen, and Tolkien came in for such ire, their predecessors were no better off. I’ll skip Plato laying into Homer in The Republic and so here’s a hot take Beethoven received after previewing the Seventh Symphony:
It is a composition in which the author has indulged a great deal of disagreeable eccentricity. Often as we now have heard it performed, we cannot yet discover any design in it, neither can we trace any connection in its parts. Altogether, it seems to have been intended as a kind of enigma—we had almost said a hoax.
Shakspeare gets his comeuppance too, from Ben Jonson and Samuel Pepys:
I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand,' which they thought a malevolent speech. [Ben Jonson]
This day my oaths of drinking wine and going to plays are out, and so I do resolve to take a liberty to-day, and then to fall to them again. To the King's Theatre, where we saw "Midsummer's Night's Dream” [sic] which I had never seen before, nor shall ever again, for it is the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life. I saw, I confess, some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure." [Samuel Pepys]
Why do we hold ourselves to impossible standards?
These sorts of reviews are interesting for a whole host of reasons - though it’s certainly not because we should look down on the views and thoughts of others. I think it’s absolutely fine that someone finds The Lord of the Rings or 2001 unbearably slow, or that they can’t connect with Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy. What interests me is that even works of literature, music, film, and TV that are hailed, sometimes for decades or even centuries, as works of genius cannot please everyone.
I’ve often found it very hard to deal with anything less than five-star responses to the work that I do. That’s been the case all the way through my career - with student surveys, lesson observations, workshop feedback and participant responses. For a long time, I thought it was rooted in a lack of self-confidence. I felt, or so I thought, that anything less than 100% positivity was revealing all my failures and faults. That it showed how I hadn’t been good enough and needed to be better. Now, I think that it may actually be a sort of inverted egotism. I’m totally fine with the idea that people can’t be perfect, that nothing we do can please everyone, and that you can’t control other people’s reactions. Except, some part of me thinks I’m an exception to that. It thinks if I just think hard enough, work hard enough, and try hard enough, I’ll be able to get a clean sweep. Everyone will love what I do.
Reading these one-star reviews helps to take the heat out of that wrong-headed belief. It tells me that not pleasing everyone isn’t a failure because pleasing everyone is an impossibility and it can never be a failure if the thing is impossible. It would be like thinking my inability to fly is some personal failing rather than being something that just isn’t possible. I can’t disregard what other people think, in the way that Rick Rubin urges artists to do, that just doesn’t work for the sorts of things I’m involved in. What I can do is stop thinking that I can and should push myself to reach some standard that is simply impossible to reach and temper the ego that makes me believe that, unlike other people, it’s something I can actually attain.
I worry that when we say to people, especially young people, that the most important is for them to try their best what they hear which is the word best rather than the word try. Understanding that what our best is shifts and changes from circumstance to circumstance and that what we need to hold on to is not the outcome but the attempt.
From now on I’m going ask myself not how did I do but how did I try?
Oh, and you can play the reverse of the one-star review game too. Find something awful and look for the five stars. There’s hope for us all, as this review of Cats (2019) proves:
This movie is so much fun. i cannot believe people didn't love this movie. this movie fucking rules!!!!!! i got a bunch of things to say about this. i love that this movie exists. oh my god. going for watch number 2 now.
