Spitting mad

What's a work of art that didn't just bore or annoy but actually pissed you off?

I’m behind schedule, folks, and so will be brief. We’re back to art stuff with this week’s Fun Friday, and our prompt has a resemblance to a previous one, but I think there’s a meaningful distinction and I hope you will think so too when I explain.

A year ago, we talked about movies or other performances that we had walked out on. Readers cited all kinds of reasons for doing so — I particularly liked rfc planning to bag Carmen at intermission “because all the good tunes are in the first act and I am not going to sit through yet another bad relationship that culminates in a man brutally killing a woman.” Most, though, cited varying degrees of boredom and annoyance.

But I’m guessing some of you have gone to movies, plays, shows, or whatever and, whether you left in media res or stayed all the way through, emerged from the experience actually angry at the perpetrator.

Speaking for myself, I very rarely have strong feelings against movies the way some prominent critics have had, as Pauline Kael had against A Clockwork Orange (an outrage, I’ve always thought, that evinced a guilty conscience over her own Kiss Kiss Bang Bang aesthetics) or, funnier still, as John Simon had against everything Ken Russell ever did. (I remember, or hope I do not misremember, the end of Simon’s very brief review of Tommy, in which he said anyone who found anything to like in it “has nothing to say to me, nor I to him,” which I’m sure was quite true.)

Sometimes my irritation with something that is unaccountably popular will rise to the level of mild indignation, as is the case with a movie I saw recently that I expect I’ll have occasion to review during my Oscar spree in a month or so, so I’ll keep my powder dry on that for now. And I do get a little hotter when the film in question seems to prey on the reliably bad taste of the mass market, as with Joker.

But mad about it? That was something I did a lot more when I was young and a jacked-up little shit who booed the Rubinoos whenever I saw them just because they rubbed me the wrong way. I would adopt all kinds of absurd postures and get mad at works of art. What is this guy trying to pull? I would think. How dare he! Often this was pure defensiveness, as I hadn’t sorted out my own aesthetics and an objet d’art that obviously had something going for it but didn’t fit my crude idea of the True and the Beautiful would provoke my hostile reaction.

But sometimes — sometimes it really was What is this guy trying to pull? and I will stand by it to this day. Here’s one: Stardust Memories. I went to see that piece of shit on opening weekend and began to seethe in the first reel. It’s a Woody Allen movie that makes Woody Allen fans (this one anyway) understand what it is people hate about Woody Allen movies. It has stupid caricatures (“stupid” as in “shot with fisheye lens”) of critics who don’t understand the genius of the Central Character Who Is Just Like Woody, who sometimes veers toward self-deprecating humor but is always excused from it by the awfulness of other characters who are there just to be awful. He seems to get on very nicely with Marie-Christine Barrault, probably because she can’t understand English, but all the other women are whores or pains in the ass. I came out of that thing spitting mad. In fact for days afterwards when I came across posters for the movie I would ostentatiously spit on them.

There are a lot of things about youth that I miss, and outrage over small things (as opposed to the really important things that outrage me now like that there Tikkety-Tok and potato chip “variants” like cardamom or Oreo-flavored) is, like many follies of youth, just kind of cute and funny to me now. But that movie really did suck.

How about you?