American Studies (20 page)
Authors: Louis Menand
Between 1967 and 1978, the American film industry turned out
Bonnie and Clyde,
written by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty;
Shampoo
, produced by Beatty and written by Robert Towne; Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown
, written by Towne; Coppola’s first two
Godfather
movies and
The Conversation
; George Lucas’s
American Graffiti
, produced by Coppola; Altman’s
M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, and
Nashville;
Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
and
Straw Dogs
; Scorsese’s
Mean Streets
, which he wrote, and
Taxi Driver,
written by Paul Schrader; Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, which he wrote; Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall,
which he wrote with Marshall Brickman; Mazursky’s
An Unmarried Woman,
written by him;
Midnight Cowboy; The Graduate; Five Easy Pieces; The Outlaw Josie Wales; Easy Rider; The Last Picture Show
; and
The Deer Hunter.
Kael did not admire all these movies; she panned a few. But she responded intensely to most of them (she divided her
New Yorker
column during those years with Penelope Gilliatt), and she shared the sense many of her readers had that these were movies that somehow cut to the bone of the
American experience. She was old enough to appreciate the serendipity of the phenomenon, and she assumed the role of its grand interpreter. She was the Hollywood Dr. Johnson.
Bonnie and Clyde,
written by David Newman and Robert Benton and produced by Warren Beatty;
Shampoo
, produced by Beatty and written by Robert Towne; Roman Polanski’s
Chinatown
, written by Towne; Coppola’s first two
Godfather
movies and
The Conversation
; George Lucas’s
American Graffiti
, produced by Coppola; Altman’s
M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller
, and
Nashville;
Peckinpah’s
The Wild Bunch
and
Straw Dogs
; Scorsese’s
Mean Streets
, which he wrote, and
Taxi Driver,
written by Paul Schrader; Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, which he wrote; Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall,
which he wrote with Marshall Brickman; Mazursky’s
An Unmarried Woman,
written by him;
Midnight Cowboy; The Graduate; Five Easy Pieces; The Outlaw Josie Wales; Easy Rider; The Last Picture Show
; and
The Deer Hunter.
Kael did not admire all these movies; she panned a few. But she responded intensely to most of them (she divided her
New Yorker
column during those years with Penelope Gilliatt), and she shared the sense many of her readers had that these were movies that somehow cut to the bone of the
American experience. She was old enough to appreciate the serendipity of the phenomenon, and she assumed the role of its grand interpreter. She was the Hollywood Dr. Johnson.
Then, in 1978, she actually went there. She was invited by Beatty, who wanted her help with a movie he was producing. That project fell through, and she became a story consultant at Paramount instead. After six months she was back at the magazine. She denied it in interviews, but the view of Hollywood from the inside seems to have turned her stomach; and in 1980, she published a jeremiad called “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers,” which blamed everything on the money.
9
9
Well, it usually
is
the money. That happens to be the flag that commercial culture salutes. But whether it was because material conditions really had changed, as her essay claimed, or because Hollywood’s imaginative juices had somehow dried up, or simply because the major screen breakthroughs had all been accomplished, by the end of the 1970S the connection between enjoying a movie and feeling a shock of recognition, a connection that had come to seem almost automatic in the decade before, was severed. It might have been adolescent to have walked out of
Shampoo
or
Five Easy Pieces
or
Mean Streets
feeling that you must change your life, but not even adolescents walked out of
Beverly Hills Cop
or
The Empire Strikes Back
or
Batman
feeling that way. They were happy to feel they had gotten the price of the ticket.
is
the money. That happens to be the flag that commercial culture salutes. But whether it was because material conditions really had changed, as her essay claimed, or because Hollywood’s imaginative juices had somehow dried up, or simply because the major screen breakthroughs had all been accomplished, by the end of the 1970S the connection between enjoying a movie and feeling a shock of recognition, a connection that had come to seem almost automatic in the decade before, was severed. It might have been adolescent to have walked out of
Shampoo
or
Five Easy Pieces
or
Mean Streets
feeling that you must change your life, but not even adolescents walked out of
Beverly Hills Cop
or
The Empire Strikes Back
or
Batman
feeling that way. They were happy to feel they had gotten the price of the ticket.
Kael responded to this decline in the cultural authority of the movies in a peculiar way. She began to overpraise. Hyperbolic abandon had always been the virtual signature of her style. The stakes could never be too high. She equated
Nashville
and the second
Godfather
with Melville and Whitman; she equated the opening night of
Last Tango in Paris
with the opening night of
Le Sacre du Printemps.
“There are parts of
Jaws
,” she wrote in 1976, “that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach.”
10
And when she didn’t like a movie, she wasn’t just irritated or bored; she was the victim of an intellectual mugging. She condemned
The French Connection
as “total commercial opportunism passing itself off as an Existential view.”
11
(Well, yes, but how was the picture?) She condemned the earnest
Lenny
as”the ultimate
in modern show-biz sentimentality.”
12
Words like “corrupt,” “dishonest,” “decadent,” and, for a while, “fascist” were part of her regular critical vocabulary.
Dirty Harry
she pronounced”a deeply immoral movie.”
13
Nashville
and the second
Godfather
with Melville and Whitman; she equated the opening night of
Last Tango in Paris
with the opening night of
Le Sacre du Printemps.
“There are parts of
Jaws
,” she wrote in 1976, “that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn’t intellectualized himself out of reach.”
10
And when she didn’t like a movie, she wasn’t just irritated or bored; she was the victim of an intellectual mugging. She condemned
The French Connection
as “total commercial opportunism passing itself off as an Existential view.”
11
(Well, yes, but how was the picture?) She condemned the earnest
Lenny
as”the ultimate
in modern show-biz sentimentality.”
12
Words like “corrupt,” “dishonest,” “decadent,” and, for a while, “fascist” were part of her regular critical vocabulary.
Dirty Harry
she pronounced”a deeply immoral movie.”
13
“Shallowly immoral” would probably have done it. But you cannot compare the movies you love with
Moby Dick
and then let the ones you hate off with a shrug. You have to keep writing as though souls are being saved and lost down at the cineplex every night. In the years when many of her readers found it exciting to treat movies as tests of character, Kael’s rhetoric was just excessive enough. You argued about the movie with your friends, and then you picked up the
New Yorker
and argued about it with Kael. But when the same people eventually found themselves content to describe the movies they enjoyed as “a lot of fun” and the movies they didn’t enjoy as “pretty stupid,” Kael’s rhetoric began to seem a little curious.
Moby Dick
and then let the ones you hate off with a shrug. You have to keep writing as though souls are being saved and lost down at the cineplex every night. In the years when many of her readers found it exciting to treat movies as tests of character, Kael’s rhetoric was just excessive enough. You argued about the movie with your friends, and then you picked up the
New Yorker
and argued about it with Kael. But when the same people eventually found themselves content to describe the movies they enjoyed as “a lot of fun” and the movies they didn’t enjoy as “pretty stupid,” Kael’s rhetoric began to seem a little curious.
So did her judgment. It became possible to read one of her rapturous reviews—of, for instance, Philip Kaufman’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) (“It may be the best movie of its kind ever made”)
14
or Robert Zemeckis’s
Used Cars
(1980), which inspired comparisons with
Bringing Up Baby, Shampoo, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and Melville’s
The Confidence Man
—and then find the actual movie, when you went to see it, almost unrecognizable. What had made her pulse race so fast? The less portentous the buzz around a movie she wanted to like, the more hyperkinetic her exertions seemed to become. Unpopular or unexceptional efforts by old favorites began to receive shameless raves—as in: “I think De Palma has sprung to the place Altman achieved with films such as
McCabe
&
Mrs. Miller
and
Nashville
and that Coppola reached with the two
Godfather
movies—that is, to a place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is the artist’s vision.”
15
She was reviewing
Blow Out
(1981). And when the whole movie couldn’t honorably be rhapsodized, a single scene or even a single line would be given a prominently placed homage, a sort of verbal trailer. This is the lead paragraph of Kael’s review of
Tequila Sunrise
(1988), a slightly underpowered romance/thriller that happens to have been written and directed by Robert Towne:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1978) (“It may be the best movie of its kind ever made”)
14
or Robert Zemeckis’s
Used Cars
(1980), which inspired comparisons with
Bringing Up Baby, Shampoo, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
and Melville’s
The Confidence Man
—and then find the actual movie, when you went to see it, almost unrecognizable. What had made her pulse race so fast? The less portentous the buzz around a movie she wanted to like, the more hyperkinetic her exertions seemed to become. Unpopular or unexceptional efforts by old favorites began to receive shameless raves—as in: “I think De Palma has sprung to the place Altman achieved with films such as
McCabe
&
Mrs. Miller
and
Nashville
and that Coppola reached with the two
Godfather
movies—that is, to a place where genre is transcended and what we’re moved by is the artist’s vision.”
15
She was reviewing
Blow Out
(1981). And when the whole movie couldn’t honorably be rhapsodized, a single scene or even a single line would be given a prominently placed homage, a sort of verbal trailer. This is the lead paragraph of Kael’s review of
Tequila Sunrise
(1988), a slightly underpowered romance/thriller that happens to have been written and directed by Robert Towne:
Michelle Pfeiffer tells Mel Gibson how sorry she is that she hurt his feelings. He replies, “C’mon, it didn’t hurt that bad,” pauses, and adds, “Just lookin’ at you hurts more.” If a moviegoer didn’t already know that
Tequila Sunrise
was the work of a master romantic tantalizer, Gibson’s line should cinch it. That’s the kind of ritualized confession of love that gave a picture like
To Have and Have Not
its place in moviegoers’ affections. What makes the line go ping is that Mel Gibson’s blue eyes are wide with yearning as he says it, and Michelle Pfeiffer is so crystalline in her beauty that he seems to be speaking the simple truth … . It’s a line that Gary Cooper might have spoken to Marlene Dietrich … .
16
Tequila Sunrise
was the work of a master romantic tantalizer, Gibson’s line should cinch it. That’s the kind of ritualized confession of love that gave a picture like
To Have and Have Not
its place in moviegoers’ affections. What makes the line go ping is that Mel Gibson’s blue eyes are wide with yearning as he says it, and Michelle Pfeiffer is so crystalline in her beauty that he seems to be speaking the simple truth … . It’s a line that Gary Cooper might have spoken to Marlene Dietrich … .
16
Stop! I give up! I’ll see the movie!
What had evaporated was the consensus that it all mattered. The result was a dissociation between the experience and the commentary. Kael’s disquisitions on the psychology of the American movie audience, which characterized her early criticism, gave way to page after page of word-painting. She would paraphrase almost the whole story line, and every clever bit in the movie seemed to end up in the review. After you had read her review of
Zelig,
the movie itself felt like something you had already seen, and not quite as ingenious as you remembered it. She was a pioneer, in effect, of the condition movies suffer from today, when by the time a big-budget production hits the screen, it has been so overexposed in magazines and on television that there is almost no point in bothering to go see it. Which is fine, of course, with magazine publishers and television producers. The coverage competes with the product.
Zelig,
the movie itself felt like something you had already seen, and not quite as ingenious as you remembered it. She was a pioneer, in effect, of the condition movies suffer from today, when by the time a big-budget production hits the screen, it has been so overexposed in magazines and on television that there is almost no point in bothering to go see it. Which is fine, of course, with magazine publishers and television producers. The coverage competes with the product.
Kael’s manner of overpraising and overdamning has itself been so overpraised and overdamned that rereading her reviews is a little like rereading Hemingway after listening to too many parodies: why can’t she stop trying to sound so much like Pauline Kael? The trademark Kaelisms now trip you up on every page: the second-person address; the slangy heighteners, “zizzy,” “zingy,” “goosey,” “plummy,” and so on, and put-downs, like “frowzy,” “whorey,” “logey” (her word for Claude Lanzmann’s
Shoah
); the high-low oxymorons, like “pop classic” (for the remake of
King Kong
) or “trash archetype” (for
Carrie
);
and her most exasperating locution, the conditional universal superlative, which she used promiscuously and frequently bathetically: “The scene is perhaps the wittiest and most deeply romantic confirmation of a marriage ever filmed”
17
(
The Right Stuff);
“He may be the most natural and least self-conscious film actor who ever lived”
18
(Jeff Bridges).
Shoah
); the high-low oxymorons, like “pop classic” (for the remake of
King Kong
) or “trash archetype” (for
Carrie
);
and her most exasperating locution, the conditional universal superlative, which she used promiscuously and frequently bathetically: “The scene is perhaps the wittiest and most deeply romantic confirmation of a marriage ever filmed”
17
(
The Right Stuff);
“He may be the most natural and least self-conscious film actor who ever lived”
18
(Jeff Bridges).
Her writing is all in the same key, and strictly
molto con brio.
There is no modulation of tone or (which would be even more welcome) of thought. She just keeps slugging away. She is almost always extraordinarily sharp, but she is almost never funny. And (as she conceded in the introduction to
For Keeps
) she is clearly working her way through her feelings about the movie as she writes, and this produces garrulousness and compositional dishevelment. Writing in the
New Yorker
gave her a huge space advantage over other reviewers; she did not always profit by it. Her reviews are highly readable, but they are not especially rereadable. James Agee, in his brief service as movie critic of the
Nation
, reviewed many nondescript and now long-forgotten pictures; but as soon as you finish reading one of his pieces, you want to read it again, just to see how he did it. Kael does not provoke the same impulse.
molto con brio.
There is no modulation of tone or (which would be even more welcome) of thought. She just keeps slugging away. She is almost always extraordinarily sharp, but she is almost never funny. And (as she conceded in the introduction to
For Keeps
) she is clearly working her way through her feelings about the movie as she writes, and this produces garrulousness and compositional dishevelment. Writing in the
New Yorker
gave her a huge space advantage over other reviewers; she did not always profit by it. Her reviews are highly readable, but they are not especially rereadable. James Agee, in his brief service as movie critic of the
Nation
, reviewed many nondescript and now long-forgotten pictures; but as soon as you finish reading one of his pieces, you want to read it again, just to see how he did it. Kael does not provoke the same impulse.
Still, fine writing is not the name of the game. W. H. Auden once praised Agee’s column by saying that he never went to the movies, but that he looked forward to reading what Mr. Agee had to say about them every week. Many people have said the same thing about Stanley Kauffmann, the longtime reviewer for the
New
Republic
who is, in critical terms, pretty much the UnKael. Kael was not a reviewer for people who didn’t go to movies. She was the ideal person to read when you had just seen a movie and couldn’t make up your mind what you thought about it. At her best, she argued it through on the page for you. You know what you think about
Bonnie and Clyde
by now, though, and so her insights have lost their freshness. On the other hand, she is a large part of the reason you think what you do.
New
Republic
who is, in critical terms, pretty much the UnKael. Kael was not a reviewer for people who didn’t go to movies. She was the ideal person to read when you had just seen a movie and couldn’t make up your mind what you thought about it. At her best, she argued it through on the page for you. You know what you think about
Bonnie and Clyde
by now, though, and so her insights have lost their freshness. On the other hand, she is a large part of the reason you think what you do.
And her influence is everywhere. Kael was, by all accounts, a journalistic queen bee. If she did not orchestrate opinion (something she was accused of many times), she certainly took pleasure
in orchestrating the orchestrators. She maintained, even before her
New Yorker
days, a circle of admirers whose careers she cultivated and whose degree of orthodoxy she monitored closely; and she became an object of personal infatuation for many younger writers who never met her. She has a number of protégés and ex-protégés among active movie reviewers: Terrence Rafferty, who succeeded her at the
New Yorker;
David Denby, who succeeded Rafferty; Michael Sragow; Roger Ebert; John Powers; Peter Rainer. But her impact extended far beyond movie reviewing. The television critics James Wolcott (who now writes about more than television) and Tom Shales, the art critics Jed Perl and Sanford Schwartz, the music critic Greil Marcus, and the sportswriter Allen Barra are all her fans, and there is a long list of other writers, in many genres, whose work would be almost unimaginable without her example. There are also two celebrity epigoni: Camille Paglia, whose style is a virtual pastiche of Kael’s but who (such is the anxiety of influence) has almost never mentioned her name in print; and the Hollywood wunderkind Quentin Tarantino, who mentions her name at almost every opportunity. And properly so; for Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
is a dish for which Kael spent forty years writing the recipe.
in orchestrating the orchestrators. She maintained, even before her
New Yorker
days, a circle of admirers whose careers she cultivated and whose degree of orthodoxy she monitored closely; and she became an object of personal infatuation for many younger writers who never met her. She has a number of protégés and ex-protégés among active movie reviewers: Terrence Rafferty, who succeeded her at the
New Yorker;
David Denby, who succeeded Rafferty; Michael Sragow; Roger Ebert; John Powers; Peter Rainer. But her impact extended far beyond movie reviewing. The television critics James Wolcott (who now writes about more than television) and Tom Shales, the art critics Jed Perl and Sanford Schwartz, the music critic Greil Marcus, and the sportswriter Allen Barra are all her fans, and there is a long list of other writers, in many genres, whose work would be almost unimaginable without her example. There are also two celebrity epigoni: Camille Paglia, whose style is a virtual pastiche of Kael’s but who (such is the anxiety of influence) has almost never mentioned her name in print; and the Hollywood wunderkind Quentin Tarantino, who mentions her name at almost every opportunity. And properly so; for Tarantino’s
Pulp Fiction
is a dish for which Kael spent forty years writing the recipe.
Kael’s followers are sometimes referred to, a little dismissively, as “the Paulettes.” The standard complaints about them are that they imitate Kael’s enthusiasm for the cheap-thrill element of popular culture, and that they are prisoners of her journalistic mannerisms. This is unfair to their talents, but there is no question that Kael’s style proved highly infectious; and there is no question, either, that her appetite for sensationalism, for blood and sex, helped to shape educated movie taste. Cataloguing stylistic tics, though, is not the most accurate way to measure Kael’s influence. For her importance has, in the end, very little to do with her style of writing or even her taste in movies. It is much greater than that.
The problem Kael undertook to address when she began writing for the
New Yorker
was the problem of making popular entertainment
respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the high-low problem—the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow technique bends his or her attention to an object that is too low, when the professor writes about
Superman
comics. In fact, this rarely is a problem: if anything profits from (say) a semiotic analysis, it’s the comics. The professor may go on to compare
Superman
comics favorably with Tolstoy, but that is simply a failure of judgment. It has nothing to do with the difference in brows. You can make a fool of yourself over anything.
New Yorker
was the problem of making popular entertainment
respectable to people whose education told them that popular entertainment is not art. This is usually thought of as the high-low problem—the problem that arises when a critic equipped with a highbrow technique bends his or her attention to an object that is too low, when the professor writes about
Superman
comics. In fact, this rarely is a problem: if anything profits from (say) a semiotic analysis, it’s the comics. The professor may go on to compare
Superman
comics favorably with Tolstoy, but that is simply a failure of judgment. It has nothing to do with the difference in brows. You can make a fool of yourself over anything.
The real high-low problem doesn’t arise when the object is too low. It arises when the object isn’t low enough.
Meet the Beatles
doesn’t pose a high-low problem;
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
does. Tom Clancy and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” don’t; John Le Carré and
Masterpiece Theater
do. A product like
Sgt. Pepper’s
isn’t low enough to be discussed as a mere cultural artifact; but it’s not high enough to be discussed as though it were
Four Quartets,
either. It’s exactly what it pretends to be: it’s entertainment, but for educated people. And this is what makes it so hard for educated people to talk about without sounding pretentious—as though they had to justify their pleasure by some gesture toward the “deeper” significance of the product.
Meet the Beatles
doesn’t pose a high-low problem;
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
does. Tom Clancy and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” don’t; John Le Carré and
Masterpiece Theater
do. A product like
Sgt. Pepper’s
isn’t low enough to be discussed as a mere cultural artifact; but it’s not high enough to be discussed as though it were
Four Quartets,
either. It’s exactly what it pretends to be: it’s entertainment, but for educated people. And this is what makes it so hard for educated people to talk about without sounding pretentious—as though they had to justify their pleasure by some gesture toward the “deeper” significance of the product.
One of Hollywood’s best-kept industrial secrets is that the movies are entertainment for educated people, too. This was a finding that surprised the studios when, in the 1940s, they first undertook to analyze their audience: frequency of movie attendance increases with income and education. Even today, when people complain that they don’t make movies for grownups anymore, the percentage of people who say they are “frequent moviegoers” is more than half again as great among people who have gone to college (31 percent) as it is among people who have only finished high school (19 percent). The belief that education makes people snobbish about moviegoing is the opposite of the case: 20 percent of people who have been to college say they “never” go to movies, but the figure is 39 percent among adults who have only finished high school and 57 percent among adults with even less education than
that. Kael didn’t persuade
New Yorker
readers to go to the movies; they were already going. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was teaching them how to think critically about it.
that. Kael didn’t persuade
New Yorker
readers to go to the movies; they were already going. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was teaching them how to think critically about it.
One way to think critically about it, the way consistent with modern thinking about the arts generally, is to identify the formal properties of the medium and to judge movies by how fully and intelligently they use them. So that the assertion “
Stagecoach
is a great movie” might be defended against the person who wants to know if that means it is as great as
King Lear
by replying that
Stagecoach
is great “in cinematic terms.” This is to defend your judgment with an abstraction; for when you say things like “in cinematic terms,” you are on your way toward developing a theory of film. Kael had devoted her entire pre–
New Yorker
career to demolishing this way of thinking. By 1967, her anti-aesthetic had been completely worked out. She hated theories. She didn’t oppose only auteur theory; she opposed all theoretical preconceptions. “Isn’t it clear that trying to find out what cinema ‘really’ is, is derived from a mad Platonic and metaphorical view of the universe,” she wrote, in an unreprinted essay, in 1966, “—as if ideal, pure cinema were some pre-existent entity that we had to find? Cinema is not to be found; but movies are continuously being made.”
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And, more famously, in “Is There a Cure for Movie Criticism?” (1962), an attack on the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer: “Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it … . We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?”
20
Stagecoach
is a great movie” might be defended against the person who wants to know if that means it is as great as
King Lear
by replying that
Stagecoach
is great “in cinematic terms.” This is to defend your judgment with an abstraction; for when you say things like “in cinematic terms,” you are on your way toward developing a theory of film. Kael had devoted her entire pre–
New Yorker
career to demolishing this way of thinking. By 1967, her anti-aesthetic had been completely worked out. She hated theories. She didn’t oppose only auteur theory; she opposed all theoretical preconceptions. “Isn’t it clear that trying to find out what cinema ‘really’ is, is derived from a mad Platonic and metaphorical view of the universe,” she wrote, in an unreprinted essay, in 1966, “—as if ideal, pure cinema were some pre-existent entity that we had to find? Cinema is not to be found; but movies are continuously being made.”
19
And, more famously, in “Is There a Cure for Movie Criticism?” (1962), an attack on the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer: “Art is the greatest game, the supreme entertainment, because you discover the game as you play it … . We want to see, to feel, to understand, to respond in a new way. Why should pedants be allowed to spoil the game?”
20
Kael was the most brilliantly ad hoc critic of her time, and she made it possible to care about movies without feeling pompous or giddy by showing that what comes first in everyone’s experience of a movie isn’t the form or the idea but the sensation, and that this is just as true for moviegoers who have been taught to intellectualize their responses to art as it is for everyone else. The idea that a movie critic needs to work from sensations was not new with her, of course. Agee’s persona in the
Nation
had been that of the ordinary intelligent guy who just happens to love going to movies (and who also just happens to write like James Agee). Robert Warshow, who
wrote about movies for
Commentary
and
Partisan Review
in the 1940s and ’50s, warned that the critic who trucks a load of sociology and aesthetics into the movie theater will end up missing the show. “A man watches a movie,” as he once famously, and perhaps a shade sententiously, put it, “and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.”
21
Nation
had been that of the ordinary intelligent guy who just happens to love going to movies (and who also just happens to write like James Agee). Robert Warshow, who
wrote about movies for
Commentary
and
Partisan Review
in the 1940s and ’50s, warned that the critic who trucks a load of sociology and aesthetics into the movie theater will end up missing the show. “A man watches a movie,” as he once famously, and perhaps a shade sententiously, put it, “and the critic must acknowledge that he is that man.”
21
When Warshow wrote about
Scarface
and Agee wrote about
National Velvet,
they didn’t have much trouble being that man. But that is because the high-low problem doesn’t kick in with
Scarface
and
National Velvet
. It kicks in with a movie like
Monsieur Verdoux,
Chaplin’s black comedy about a serial killer, which very few people have patience for anymore, but which Agee and Warshow both went solemnly bananas over. Agee and Warshow thought that Chaplin had Something Important To Say in
Monsieur Verdoux,
and they therefore bent over backward in their appreciation of the movie in order to give him credit for his good intentions.
Scarface
and Agee wrote about
National Velvet,
they didn’t have much trouble being that man. But that is because the high-low problem doesn’t kick in with
Scarface
and
National Velvet
. It kicks in with a movie like
Monsieur Verdoux,
Chaplin’s black comedy about a serial killer, which very few people have patience for anymore, but which Agee and Warshow both went solemnly bananas over. Agee and Warshow thought that Chaplin had Something Important To Say in
Monsieur Verdoux,
and they therefore bent over backward in their appreciation of the movie in order to give him credit for his good intentions.
Kael never gave anyone credit for good intentions. “Art,” as she put it back in 1956, “perhaps unfortunately, is not the sphere of good intentions.”
22
She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it does have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover—which is why nothing irritated Kael more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform. “If a lady says, ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’” she explained to the readers of
Holiday
in 1966, “that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.”
23
She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001:
A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair
were either lying or were guilty of sex-in-the-head. There were a lot of people like that around before 1967. “What
did
she lose at the movies?” asked a puzzled Dwight Macdonald when he reviewed
I Lost It at the Movies,
in 1965.
24
Case in point.
22
She wasn’t interested in abstractions like “social significance” or “the body of work.” She had to be turned on all over again each time. Her favorite analogy for the movie experience got seriously overworked, and was lampooned as a result, but it does have the virtue of simplicity: a movie, for her, was either good sex or bad sex. For the quality of sex doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the glamour of the partner. The best-looking guy in the room may be the lousiest lover—which is why nothing irritated Kael more than a well-dressed movie that didn’t perform. “If a lady says, ‘That man don’t pleasure me,’” she explained to the readers of
Holiday
in 1966, “that’s it. There are some areas in which we can still decide for ourselves.”
23
She thought that people who claimed to enjoy 2001:
A Space Odyssey more than The Thomas Crown Affair
were either lying or were guilty of sex-in-the-head. There were a lot of people like that around before 1967. “What
did
she lose at the movies?” asked a puzzled Dwight Macdonald when he reviewed
I Lost It at the Movies,
in 1965.
24
Case in point.
Kael’s contention that “serious” movies should meet the same
standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. For it rests on an empirically sustainable proposition, which is that although people sometimes have a hard time deciding whether or not something is “art,” they are rarely fooled into thinking they are being entertained when they are not. It was Kael’s therapeutic advice to the overcultivated that if they just concentrated on responding to the stimulus, the aesthetics would take care of themselves. What good is form if the content leaves you cold?
standard as pulp—that they should be entertaining—turned out to be an extremely useful and widely adopted critical principle. For it rests on an empirically sustainable proposition, which is that although people sometimes have a hard time deciding whether or not something is “art,” they are rarely fooled into thinking they are being entertained when they are not. It was Kael’s therapeutic advice to the overcultivated that if they just concentrated on responding to the stimulus, the aesthetics would take care of themselves. What good is form if the content leaves you cold?
The kind of approach Kael promoted is antiessentialist. It is a reaction against the idea, associated with modernist literature, painting, and architecture, that the various arts have their own essential qualities—that poetry is
essentially
a matter of the organization of language, that painting is
essentially
a matter of figure and ground, that architecture is
essentially
a matter of space and light. The undoing of these assumptions is often taken to have been the work of high critical theory, of semioticians, Derrideans, and postmodernists. And that undoing is associated with highbrow, avant-garde art and literature—it is thought of as a distinctly elitist cultural movement. In fact, the cultural work was done long before “postmodernist” became a theoretical concept in the academy, and it was done by people whose audience was entirely mainstream. If we need to give it a brow, this reaction against modernist formalism and essentialism was a middlebrow phenomenon. Its champion practitioners were Warhol (in painting), Mailer (in fiction), and Tom Wolfe (in journalism)—all perfectly accessible figures who played to a large, nonintellectual audience. Its “theoreticians” were people like Susan Sontag, who was a freelance writer, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who were architects, and Kael, who never finished college. For the notion that serious art must be appreciated formally before anything else was actually not so much a feature of modernist art itself—it’s not something most of the major modernists would have claimed about what they were doing—as it was the result of the way modern art and literature were taught to people like the people who read the
New Yorker
in the 1950s and early 1960s. Formalism was a middlebrow oppression. It didn’t frighten
poets; it frightened moviegoers. It made them think there was something they ought to know about called the “grammar of film.”
essentially
a matter of the organization of language, that painting is
essentially
a matter of figure and ground, that architecture is
essentially
a matter of space and light. The undoing of these assumptions is often taken to have been the work of high critical theory, of semioticians, Derrideans, and postmodernists. And that undoing is associated with highbrow, avant-garde art and literature—it is thought of as a distinctly elitist cultural movement. In fact, the cultural work was done long before “postmodernist” became a theoretical concept in the academy, and it was done by people whose audience was entirely mainstream. If we need to give it a brow, this reaction against modernist formalism and essentialism was a middlebrow phenomenon. Its champion practitioners were Warhol (in painting), Mailer (in fiction), and Tom Wolfe (in journalism)—all perfectly accessible figures who played to a large, nonintellectual audience. Its “theoreticians” were people like Susan Sontag, who was a freelance writer, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who were architects, and Kael, who never finished college. For the notion that serious art must be appreciated formally before anything else was actually not so much a feature of modernist art itself—it’s not something most of the major modernists would have claimed about what they were doing—as it was the result of the way modern art and literature were taught to people like the people who read the
New Yorker
in the 1950s and early 1960s. Formalism was a middlebrow oppression. It didn’t frighten
poets; it frightened moviegoers. It made them think there was something they ought to know about called the “grammar of film.”
This liberation of art from a priori principles was one of the great achievements of American culture in the 1960s. It has since been attacked for encouraging the dangerously relativist notions that “It’s art if I say it’s art” and “Anything goes.” People said those things in the sixties, and I suppose people say them now, but those are not the necessary conclusions of the lesson Kael helped to teach. A dislike of formalism does not entail a dislike of form. And openness to mass culture does not entail identification with the mass audience; it doesn’t require an attitude of
épater les intellectuels,
or a belief that if it’s “of the people,” it must be counterhegemonic. The critical attitude Kael represented only means approaching a work of art without bias about what “a work of art” is supposed to be. It is predicated on the notion that modern culture is fluid and promiscuous, and therefore that nothing is gained by foreclosing the experience of it—particularly if you are a critic. Pauline Kael understood these things, and she consciously built her practice as a reviewer around them. And that is why she is a supremely important figure even for writers who, although they grew up reading everything she wrote, strove, in their own work, never to sound like Pauline Kael.
épater les intellectuels,
or a belief that if it’s “of the people,” it must be counterhegemonic. The critical attitude Kael represented only means approaching a work of art without bias about what “a work of art” is supposed to be. It is predicated on the notion that modern culture is fluid and promiscuous, and therefore that nothing is gained by foreclosing the experience of it—particularly if you are a critic. Pauline Kael understood these things, and she consciously built her practice as a reviewer around them. And that is why she is a supremely important figure even for writers who, although they grew up reading everything she wrote, strove, in their own work, never to sound like Pauline Kael.
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