Some artist reactions to their audiences’ reactions are cliché. Hell, some angry artists are just clichés to the point of being caricatures; I would say Noel Gallagher and Morrissey should start a club, but it could end in a murder or perhaps just an embarrassing slap-fight.
Their usual complaint is that they feel pigeonholed by their biggest hits like “Creep” or “Shiny Happy People.” As a songwriter with exactly zero hits to my name, my advice for those guys would be to have the dignity to shut their very expensive mouths.
This article is not about that kind of whiny “artistes”. That kind of malcontentism bores me, and it would bore you too.
That said, there are plenty of artists in all kinds of media who have legitimate beefs or at least interesting relationships with their audiences.
No ‘Correct’ Interpretations
Most of the art world feels that interpretation is up to the viewer instead of the artist. There’s an official consensus that there isn’t any one correct take on a song, novel, or film. In some ponderous cases, like the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there might not be ANY correct takes.
Even so, some audience reactions have to be infuriating for creators. I’ll quote the smarter and less violent of the Men In Black, “A person is smart. People are dumb.”
The First Rule of Fight Club: Don’t Interpret Fight Club
Movie audiences can be scary. Not scary in terms of copycat violence projection like A Clockwork Orange or The Joker. The issue that filmmakers have experienced is when they portray a character who is fundamentally reprehensible or irredeemable, and the audience loves that character and almost wants to be that character.
It’s got to be disheartening and makes film people lose faith in humanity.
Take the movie Wall Street, for example. Oliver Stone made what I think is a great movie about greed and the inherent corruption and unfairness in financial and political institutions. Well, apparently, they screwed up by showing Gordon Gekko’s lifestyle on screen, and aspirational douchebag viewers found a new hero.
Stone said that the “greed is good” speech was supposed to be a moral warning. Moviegoers remember that speech and not that Gekko ends up in jail. Michael Douglas has famously said that stockbroker fans have repeatedly come up to him and thanked him for their careers.
Equally vexing are the murderous gangsters in mafia movies, particularly The Godfather. Theatergoers identified with Michael Corleone and Don Corleone as being the relatively ethical capos in the films, even though their real power came from violence and murder.
Francis Ford Coppola tried to push the audience away from Michael in Part II, showing how far he fell morally – but fans wanted to be Michael anyway.
What’s worse than having fans ignore your financial grift and violence moral rot messages? Having them ignore both. That’s what’s happened to Martin Scorsese with Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf Of Wall Street.
Sure, only nuts like John Hinckley identified with Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. But fans couldn’t get enough of the lifestyles of Henry Hill in Goodfellas and Ace Rothstein in Casino. Scorsese has discussed that audiences stick with the riding-high parts of those movies and ignore the moral comeuppance.
He was determined to push people further to make the lessons clear with over-the-top gross and morally repugnant behavior from the leads in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Yet audiences apparently can’t see a mansion, a yacht, and Margot Robbie and not want to be a part of it, no matter how. Finance bros have literally been using clips from the movie to fire themselves up on the job.
Director David Fincher had a bad case of the same phenomenon with Fight Club. The hyper-masculinity and simple-minded anti-establishment thinking were all somewhat satirical. Fincher wanted these dudes looking for simple answers to be appealing for purposes of getting into the film, but again, audiences seem to check out morally two-thirds of the way into the film.
The alleged lone wolf anti-authoritarians turn out to be authoritarian themselves in the end – but nobody got that far.
Tyler Durden is supposed to be the villain of the movie in the end, not the hero. A critique of out-of-control masculinity ended up on dorm-room walls for young bros all over the country.
Film is perhaps the most powerful of the arts. It envelopes audiences, especially in the movie theater, where viewers are totally immersed. And the four directors I mentioned here are among the very best in the history of Hollywood, so in some of these cases they were just guilty of setting up the first 60% of their movies too well.
But audiences missing the point is not limited to movies.
The Catcher In The Why
Literature has plenty of doozies of audience wish fulfillment that spooked the author.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is pretty plainly an examination of the American Dream. Gatsby is a hollow social climber obsessed with things that aren’t real. But what’s the legacy of that novel? Gatsby parties are going over-the-top with flapper outfits even to this day, 100 years later.
Even worse was J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye about cynical and rebellious Holden Caulfield. The character is complex, and Salinger has said that he was focusing on the fragility of innocence.
Instead, he became an icon of teen rebellion and became a role model to some impressionable and misguided readers. I myself remember being somewhat affected by the book at age 21, but tried it on at 40 and had to put it down. I literally put it away and said out loud, “I hate this fucking guy.”
It famously freaked Salinger out. He retreated from public life and stopped writing, all because his personal work got taken over by Caulfield wannabees who didn’t quite get it. Salinger’s retreat is the most famous instance of an artist getting freaked out by his fans.
Total Whack Job
David Chase, in creating and writing The Sopranos, had a controversy with fan reactions. Actually, he had two reaction controversies to deal with, but I’m not really talking about the last scene going to black reaction, where fans thought their cable went out instead of it being an artistic choice.
What really perplexed Chase was that fans of the show just loved Tony. No. Matter. What. Heinous. Act. He. Committed.
My aunt, who appeared to be a fairly demure woman, was always hoping that Tony would “whack” somebody in the next episode when we discussed the show. She wasn’t alone. Sopranos fans were ride or die for Tony.
It was amazing to see how people would get amnesia about the fact that these were reprehensible murderers who fans were rooting for just because they said something funny at Satriali’s.
Mobsters in movies and TV think the rest of us are suckers – fictional Tony Soprano and Henry Hill have spelled it out exactly. Here’s Tony’s treatise on his fellow man:
“The people who follow all the rules, play it safe, they’re the suckers. They get what they’re owed and no more. You gotta take what you want.”
And Henry Hill in Goodfellas …
The audience of “suckers” idolizing these mobsters vexed Chase, and you could almost tell in the writing when fans were getting too cozy; Tony, like clockwork, would do something awful on screen – the bustout of the sporting goods store ruining his friend’s life. Or murdering Ralph. Or murdering Adriana. Or murdering Christopher. Oops, sorry for the lack of a spoiler alert.
Sometimes A Banana Is Just A Banana, But Sometimes A Flower Is Something Else
When it comes to fans spooking a visual artist, I think of Georgia O’Keeffe. She didn’t like being a public figure in the first place. And when her paintings became popular late in her life, she shied away from the attention.
What are her paintings infamous for? Her flowers look like vaginas.
She was annoyed by people’s insistence on layering sexuality over her paintings. “When people read erotic symbols into my paintings, they’re really talking about their own affairs.”
O’Keeffe also felt fan attention to be overwhelming and misplaced – she insisted that art speak for itself.
Show Business Kids Making Movies Of Themselves You Know They Don’t Give A Fuck About Anybody Else
Despite Georgia O’Keeffe’s approach to the subject, some artists have had to step in and correct the record when fans get it wrong.
Bruce Springsteen had a problem almost immediately with the release of “Born In The USA,” which landed squarely in Reagan-era America as a mindless, jingoistic, feel-good sing-along.
Springsteen has been frustrated at many generations of politicians and zealots who “totally missed the point,” which was ironic about the cold welcome to Vietnam War veterans.
So, Bruce was irritated with fans for misreading his position. Donald Fagen of Steely Dan was just plain irritated with their fans. Just irritated. Period.
Every music artist with hits gets tired of fans insisting on hits, and Fagen was no different in being put off by live-show fans heading to the bathroom during album tracks. But he also hated live show and particularly music festival energy, where fans used his concert as more of an excuse to party than to get into the music.
Steely Dan songs are famously misanthropic, so this is totally on brand. I’m personally a huge fan and have seen them live a couple of times and found myself picking up his condescension and thinking, “He’s right, we DO suck!”
Similarly, Lauryn Hill disliked fan attention being reserved only for hits and songs being misunderstood. She might be an extreme or special case because she also sometimes would no-show or walk out mid-show.
It seems like she had serious problems with fan and media attention, which affected her mental health. This would prompt her to sometimes cancel a show at the last minute, which came across to fans as being arrogant and money-hungry, when in reality she was more likely just overwhelmed.
But in the best of situations, Hill didn’t enjoy her audience as much as Fagen didn’t.
Conclusion
For any artists or wannabe rockstars, having fans misinterpret their work might seem like a great problem to have. And maybe it is.
But artists can only make art and send it into the world. Whether it becomes popular or not, or the intended message is heard, that’s not up to them.
Anybody who’s ever taken the stage multiple times has had to deal with the peccadillos and just plain weirdness of some fans. As prickly comedian Gallagher once said, “Show business is basically just babysitting drunks.”
That said, it’s part of the job. The more we reflect on the fate of these successful artists, it really does seem to be true that audiences having a mind of their own is still just a great problem to have.
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