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Friday, Dec 18, 2015 12:00 AM UTC
Dear “Star Wars” fans: I’m super sorry I ruined the whole thing for everybody
Having been urged to die and singled out on social media as an Enemy of the People, I come to beg forgiveness
Topics: Movies, Star Wars, new Star Wars, Star Wars the Force Awakens, The Force Awakens, movie reviews, spoilers, aol_on, Entertainment News
After Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, a mysterious note was found among his private papers. It had been sent by Nikolai Bukharin, Stalin’s revolutionary comrade and for many years the Communist Party’s intellectual figurehead, while awaiting execution after his 1938 show trial for numerous imaginary crimes. Using a nickname only known to the dictator’s oldest friends, Bukharin wrote: “Koba, why is my death necessary for you?”
I would like to ask the same question to the guy who wrote to me on Wednesday – from his work email! In Canada! – in response to my review of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” “Dear Mister O’Hehir,” he wrote. “Please just die (like Roger Ebert did) and leave us alone.”
I got a number of other angry responses from “Star Wars” fans through various channels, and was identified in a Twitter meme as one of the “Hateful Four” — the only four critics, at that writing, who had supposedly rendered negative verdicts on “The Force Awakens.” (That number is quite a bit larger now.) I considered writing to the Rotten Tomatoes people to say, “You know, I honestly think that review is 53 percent positive.” But fame is hard to give up, even when it’s the fame that comes along with being an Enemy of the People. But no one else came close to Mister Angry Canadian.
Now, I have been doing this for a while, and weird hate mail comes with the job. I have gotten way worse emails than that from right-wingers over my political columns. (I especially hate it when they call me a “liberal.” Such a burn.) Last year someone described in graphic detail what would become of me and my family after white patriots seize power in the Second American Revolution. My recent article about a tepid press event promoting Michael Bay’s forthcoming Benghazi movie – jocular and lightweight in tone, I thought – attracted numerous incoherent tweets from people whose profile photos involved American flags and semiautomatic rifles.
I know that dude in Canada is not actually going to kill me. For one thing, he’s Canadian, so if he owns a gun at all it’s his grandpa’s single-shot hunting rifle. My analogy with Josef Stalin is totally facetious, although I am, in a roundabout fashion, hoping to make a point there. No doubt he was having a bad day at his real estate office or whatever. (I’m serious: This guy is in the sales profession.) But the thing is, he felt angry enough about a movie review that he told a total stranger to please go die, and for good measure threw in a drive-by assault against the most beloved figure in Internet history.
Roger Ebert would probably have written back and tried to engage that guy in an actual discussion – Have you seen the movie? What did you like about it? Why does it make you so unhappy that I had a different reaction? – and somehow drag the exchange back to the ground of human decency. Roger was without doubt a more generous person than I am.
But still: Why is it important to fans of a hugely popular movie, which has already dominated the entertainment media for weeks and will surely wind up among the top-grossing releases of all time, that no one disagrees with them or adopts a more detached perspective? Why are dissenters from a mass-culture wave phenomenon like “The Force Awakens” or the “Avengers” and “Dark Knight” movies so often subjected to venom and name-calling, as if they had simultaneously run over someone’s dog, spat on a wounded veteran and begun a conversation by loudly saying, “Not to be racist, but …”?
I’m not claiming that kind of exaggerated rancor is unanimous, because it definitely isn’t. I’m sure the vast majority of “Star Wars” fans could not care less what I or Stephanie Zacharek of Time or Kate Taylor of the Toronto Globe and Mail or the authors of the other “splat” reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes have to say about the franchise reboot they have awaited so long and embraced with such enthusiasm. Why in God’s name should they? Have we dampened their enormous collective love-fest with our complaints (many of which are exceptionally mild in nature) or our attitudes of irritating intellectual dispassion? Have we cast doubt on the movie’s box-office prospects, or endangered the production of future sequels?
The answers to both of those questions ought to be “no,” and the answer to the second one is NO in boldface and capital letters with a whole lot of exclamation marks and 1’s after it. That throws us back toward an irresistible conclusion that is likely to make me even more friends than that “Star Wars” review did. When some subgroup of fans becomes enraged about a few critics pissing in the punch bowl at the super-fun party to which everyone in the world was invited, that isn’t really about the critics.
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