We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Finished a book, a film, a TV series – or stopped partaking in it part way through – furious at it.
It doesn’t matter why. Perhaps the plot was bad, or the writing poor. Maybe the characters were unlikable, or did something we just couldn’t believe. Whatever the reason, there’s no doubt that really bad art provokes some really strong feelings in us.
But why does art have this ability to enrage us so? If we don’t like a book, shouldn’t we just close it and get on with our lives?
Broken promises
We very rarely begin a relationship with a piece of art without any prior context or expectations. In the case of a book, it’ll often be the blurb, the front cover, the author, reviews, or a combination of all of them, that get us interested in reading it in the first place.
It could be that the plot sounded gripping, the characters exciting and nuanced, the world rich and vibrant, or simply that the author in question has entertained and enthralled us before. Whatever it is, we’ve been given a reason to expect something good.
So when it doesn’t deliver, it feels like a broken promise. Often, it can feel like we’ve been tricked – especially when what the story delivers is very different from what it was made out to be.
Wasting our time
It’s not just our emotional investment that fails to produce dividends when we read a bad book. It takes time – in my case, about 4-5 hours for a 400-page novel. The ‘bad’ isn’t always evident at the beginning, either.
Sometimes it takes until later in the book for a twist, reveal, character decision or plot development to change the course of the story and undermine everything that went before. Stories sometimes fall at the final hurdle (just ask Game of Thrones), in which case you’ve invested hours of your time. It makes you feel tricked.
There’s a big opportunity cost to reading a bad book – that is, the things you could have been doing instead. Like reading a better book.
Squandered potential
The falling at the final hurdle mentioned above does something else beyond simply wasting our time. It’s like we can see an accident happening in slow motion. The author has put so much hard work into building an incredible story and bringing us along on the characters’ journey, only to throw it all away in one clumsy or misguided move.
As the reader, we can see the direction events could have gone in, but instead we have to watch in horror as the narrative swerves off the road and ploughs into a tree. Only this was no accident: this happened by choice.
Insulting our intelligence
Sometimes events of a story are so poorly developed or illogical that it seems the only way the author thought it would be OK is by assuming that us – their readers – would be too stupid to know any better. That we’d just buy into anything fed to us, like some kind of narrative pyramid scheme.
But it’s not just how the story develops – it can be the way in which the writer tells the story. For instance, falling back on worn-out tropes or cliched scenarios. Bluntly telling us every detail instead of layering in subtext. Deliberately and clumsily holding back key information just to keep the suspense going. Expecting us to bend over backwards to accept the logic of a situation where there is none.
Art is emotive
Of course, one of the key reasons why bad art makes us angry is the same as the reason great art makes us joyous, thoughtful, overwhelmed, a better person – and so much more: art is emotive. That’s the point.
The fact that bad art makes us angry is simply part of the deal. Sure, a lot of art can be underwhelming and leave us apathetic. But the rage we feel upon being let down by art is not a character flaw. We’re not overreacting (unless we decide to direct that rage at the author, or those who like what we don’t); we’re participating exactly how we should.
The day art is not allowed to play on our emotions, whether positive or negative, is a terrible day for humanity indeed.
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Photo by Jevgeni Fil on Unsplash
