Just about anyone who watches TV knows who Simon Cowell is. The sultan of snark has achieved heights of notoriety that neither of his co-judges, each of whom is well-enough-known in his or her own right, can quite aspire to achieve, at least as judges of the show (considering that Paula Abdul was already quite popular on her own independently of the show), and it isn't just because he was responsible for (or at least instrumental to) bringing the show over to the U.S. from across the pond. It's because of all the four (formerly three) judges, he is apparently the hardest to please, and of four judges, all of whom are perfectly capable of giving an aspiring idol a thumbs-down, his negative remarks are easily the most biting, the most caustic, the most likely to break hearts and crush spirits. Pleasing Cowell has therefore become something of a Holy Grail, with many aspirants, including the really, really awful ones that kick off any given season, often proclaiming that they WILL win him over. Never mind, Paula, Randy and the other new judge whose name I have yet to remember. Simon, in many people's eyes, is the big cheese, even though, during auditions, there are three people who could (and often do) outvote him, and even though during the actual contest, the voting is entirely in the hands of the audience.
It's the same thing with Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson, who, to those who follow the show, is rather famous/infamous for his virtually all abiding intolerance of two things: 1) American cars; and 2) almost all variants of the Porsche 911. Over the years, the BBC program has by and large been more about entertainment than journalism, with Clarkson and his co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May having gotten their facts wrong about the cars they were reviewing on more than one occasion, and rather than give straightforward reviews of the vehicles they drive the reviewers, particularly Clarkson, invariably resort to hyperbole, quite often in lambasting the subjects of their review. In fact, in one episode last year, Clarkson, rather than actually review the Porsche 911 GT2, had a series of shots of him smoking the wheels with him wailing behind the wheel to signify how unruly a car he found it to be. Between his hatred of the 911, which can sometimes border on the irrational, and his repeated fudging up of the facts of the cars he drives, Clarkson is hardly the world's most professional automotive journalist, but I defy anyone to name someone in the same line of work who is anywhere near as well-known (at least in the English-speaking world).
While he is nowhere near as well-known as either of the foregoing gentlemen, Armond White, a film critic for the New York Press whose reviews appear online at the popular website rottentomatoes.com, appears to be gaining a bit of notoriety for his apparent determination to give otherwise critically acclaimed movies failing grades and to do the exact opposite for a lot of movies that get critically panned. As absurd as this sounds, allow me to give examples: last year he panned films like The Dark Knight, Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler and Milk, all of which scored at least 93% or higher on the "Tomatometer" or the site's collective score based on all of the compiled reviews. This year, his was one of the eight negative reviews of the new Star Trek film, which so far has rated an astonishing 96% on rottentomatoes.com out of more than two hundred reviews so far (though to be fair, he was in good company this time, with renowned film critic Roger Ebert posting a rather negative review himself). With this guy the rule of thumb seems to be that if everyone else seems to like it, it's almost a given that he will hate it.
But that's not the astonishing thing.
What really killed me was how, of the more than two hundred reviews currently tracked on rottentomatoes.com, White's review, far and away, has the most traffic in the form of user comments, with RT users having posted well over TWO HUNDRED COMMENTS on his review alone at last count. Sure, the comments were basically buckets of venom, some of them racist, some of them calling for his job, threatening his life, or that of his family, while some of them posited conspiracy theories about why he likes to give bad reviews to otherwise well-reviewed movies, but the point is, the comments were THERE. NO OTHER review generated anywhere NEAR as many responses. I never even bothered to read the review, and my previous experience with White's reviews had gotten my blood boiling; the comments were more than enough reading for me.
And it hit me: a GREAT many people in this world, whether they are followers of Simon Cowell, or of Jeremy Clarkson or the people who just want to pull down their pants and crap on Armond White, are profoundly addicted to negativity.
I'm sure someone with a better understanding of the human psyche could articulate this point a lot better than I am trying to do here, but since a dear friend of mine pointed out (on this very space) that I seem to seek out things that annoy me I've been trying to understand why. I haven't yet succeeded, but I've at the very least determined that I'm not alone.
And that isn't a good thing.
Maybe it's part of our nature because we aim to please, therefore we seek out the people hardest to please. Or maybe it's because when we see a red stain on a white dress we have to keep rubbing and rubbing it until the entire dress is stained.
Or maybe it's because we love bad boys/girls. I mean, when talking about Star Wars, one has to ask: who's more iconic, Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader? And is it coincidence that Hannibal Lecter has been featured in five movies as opposed to Clarice Starling's two?
I don't pretend to understand why it is that so many people gravitate towards things that upset them, irritate them or make them varying degrees of unhappy, but it seems like an inescapable truth that people do just that, even when they know better.
We really are a bunch of total basket cases that way...
So the next time Simon buys another mansion or shacks up with some other impossibly gorgeous ingenue, or the next time Jezza smokes the tires of some unconscionably expensive, million-horsepower monster with Alcantara leather and gets paid for it, or the next time Armond White basks in the thousands of negative comments from his anti-fans, each of these men should take pause and give thanks for many people's inordinate fondness for dwelling on the negative.
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