Do We Really Hate Anne Hathaway?
““Everyone sort of hates Anne Hathaway,” Mr. Stern said, speculating that it was because she comes off as “so affected and actressy.” Mr. Franco did not strain to defend his 2011 Academy Awards co-host. “I’m not an expert on — I guess they’re called ‘Hathahaters’ — but I think that’s what maybe triggers it,” he replied cagily.
So why does the perky and supremely talented actress inspire such froth? Ms. Hathaway could simply be a victim of what the British call “tall poppy syndrome” — the bloom that pokes above the others is the first to get cut. With her too-perfect mouth, flawless skin, doe eyes and svelte figure, Ms. Hathaway is certainly one of Hollywood’s most visible blossoms of late, particularly after scooping up a best supporting actress Oscar and Golden Globe for her turn as Fantine in “Les Misérables.”
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No one, it should be noted, accuses her of doing anything wrong. Rather, Ms. Hathaway seems to have become a mirror for our own inadequacies.
“It’s not really Anne Hathaway I ‘hate,’ ” said Sarah Nicole Prickett, a writer for Vice and The New Inquiry, a culture and commentary site. “It’s all the lesser, real-life Anne Hathaways I have known — princessy, theater-schooled girls who have no game and no sex appeal and eat raisins for dessert.”
Indeed, for some nonfans, Ms. Hathaway seems to embody the archetypal high school drama geek who cannot turn off the eager, girlish persona, even away from the stage. “We love authenticity, that’s why we have a billion reality shows,” said Neal Gabler, an author of several best-selling books on Hollywood culture and history. “And here comes Anne Hathaway. Everything she does seems managed, calculated or rehearsed. Her inauthenticity — or the feeling of her inauthenticity — is now viral.”
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“Why Do Women Hate Anne Hathaway (But Love Jennifer Lawrence)?” Ann Friedman asked on New York magazine’s fashion and women’s issues blog, The Cut. “We simply don’t find successful ‘perfect’ women all that likable,” she wrote, adding that women prefer sassy best-friend types like Jennifer Lawrence, with her Oscar-night podium stumbles and self-effacing jokes about Spanx and cheese steaks.
One might think that Ms. Hathaway would have an adoring fan base in the gay community — what with her outspoken support of gay rights, her star turns in “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Devil Wears Prada,” her fashion sophistication, a gay brother and her reported plans to play Judy Garland in a biopic. But gay people, too, have failed to embrace her, according to Derek Hartley, a talk-show host on SiriusXM’s gay issues channel, OutQ. “Anne Hathaway practically demands that we love her,” Mr. Hartley wrote. “I’ve seen less aggressive bids for our attention on Grindr.”
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P. M. Forni, a founder of the Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins University, which focuses on manners and social behavior, agrees that piling on can be fun, in a perverse sort of way. “The sensation of belonging to a group of like-minded people activates the pleasure centers of the brain,” Dr. Forni said. “So at a certain point, something like what has happened to Ms. Hathaway acquired momentum, and people were willing and eager to be part of that momentum.”
“The psychological dynamics at work are, at least in part, the ones at work in cyberbullying,” he added.
Jack Goncalo, an associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell University, who studies group dynamics, goes further and argues that the Hathahaters might not actually harbor negative feelings about Ms. Hathaway, but are merely following a mob mentality. Psychologists call this “informational social influence.” “ ‘If the majority has done my thinking for me, I can move on to something else,’ ” Dr. Goncalo said. “People don’t want to think.”
In that sense, Hathahating echoes the emergent online sport of “hate reading” — following a blog regularly for the express purpose of ridiculing it, or “hate watching,” the bad-television-show analog, as chronicled by Katie J. M. Baker, in Jezebel.
“It’s like we’re in middle school,” Ms. Baker said. “The easiest way to bond is to talk smack about someone else, whether you’re online or at a party.””
