Contrarianism, Rage and Acceptance
The older I get, the less I care about my opinions as well as those of others. When you’re young and hungry and full of ambition and fire, as I was at some point in the distant past, opinions seem terribly important, particularly your own.
Young people have a tendency to see themselves as the sum of their opinions, and are consequently prepared to fight for them on that noblest field of battle: the internet.
When I worked for The A.V Club I was annoyed that many of the commenters clearly did not read the article they were commenting on and consequently did not engage with the ideas being expressed in the reviews.
That thankfully was not true of the comment sections at The Dissolve or Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, which are so good, so engaged and so respectful that they’ve ruined me for all other comment sections.
Despite my ostensible indifference towards the opinions of myself and others, sometimes I’ll see opinions expressed online that I find so egregious and so appallingly wrong that they feel like ugly personal attacks on me.
When that happens, and it happens more often than I’d like, I realize that I am nowhere near as Zen as I delude myself into thinking I am. On the contrary, I am just as poisonously attached to my stupid opinions as everybody else on the internet.
When I see someone express the maddeningly widespread opinion that despite its reputation as arguably the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane is actually kind of boring, it legitimately angries up the blood.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs, “How DARE you say that, you fucking philistine! Orson Welles should come back from the dead and stab you in the eyeball for your insolence!”
On a similar note, I saw that someone slandered Steven Spielberg’ s oeuvre as boring and I was ready to physically assault the man for his cultural heresy.
Needless to say, Citizen Kane, a popular choice for greatest film of all time, and Steven Spielberg, the most successful filmmaker in American history, do not need me to defend them. Yet I nevertheless feel an intense urge to do so all the same.
To cite a more recent example, I posted a blog post about how my wife and my seven year old son have a deep emotional connection to the movie Encanto that I understood completely when I sat down to watch it with them for the first time.
I wrote about what an overpowering emotional experience it was and what an impact it has had on the people I love the most. So of course someone commented that while they liked Encanto just fine it was completely un-engaging and none of the songs were memorable or catchy.
The rational part of my brain realized that this was just someone expressing their opinion, and not something I should take personally or get upset over. But it enraged me all the same.
Like people criticizing Citizen Kane and Steven Spielberg for being boring and overrated, this opinion seemed so self-evidently, transparently wrong that it angrily demanded an indignant and enraged response.
“We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is literally one of the catchiest and most successful singles of the past fifty years. I have not been able to get ANY of the songs from Encanto out of my head.
Yet, on a fundamental level, this contrarian opinion fundamentally does not matter. Who cares if this fellow was underwhelmed by a movie my family loved? To paraphrase the Dude, that’s like, his opinion, man.
Incidentally, if someone says that they had an incredibly profound response to a movie, album, book or play, that it shook them to their very core, don’t respond that you thought it was “meh” and nothing special. That’s condescending and invalidating.
If someone REALLY loves something and it’s not problematic or distasteful LET THEM love it. Honor that connection. You don’t need to express your opinion whenever the opportunity presents itself. It is totally fine to keep it to yourself for the sake of not upsetting, angering or disappointing someone else.
I need to stop getting reflexively angry when I see an opinion expressed that I find unforgivably wrong because what is the internet if not a giant clearinghouse for unforgivably wrong opinions?
By letting the contrarian opinions of strangers get under my skin and piss me off I am giving them way too much power when they ultimately deserve none.
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