Pauline Kael, Film Criticism’s Good Mommy
Perhaps around the time that New Yorker critic David Denby published “My Life as a Paulette,” in which he described how the late film critic first mentored him and then wrote him off as “not really a writer,” I lost my taste for Pauline Kael. Not because of her dismissal of Denby — if I’ve learned anything, it’s that film critics backbite each other worse than mosquitos in a swamp — but because the piece brought home how she spawned the monotone dominating contemporary film criticism. It wasn’t her fault necessarily, though some reports suggest she encouraged great flattery from her adherents. But the plainspoken chattiness that was her trademark has congealed into a sometimes ugly glibness when attempted by the many critics who’ve either taken cues from her or, perhaps, reacted against her. Once upon a time a review would be about whether or not the reviewer recommended the film — a simple, even simplistic, goal but a nonetheless honorable one. These days, a review still may serve that purpose, but too often it engages in a variation of the following dialogue: Q. Would you fuck it?” A. Ah, but you just did, my friend. Fair or not, I named Kael as the godmother of all that glibness.
Then the other night, I watched Altman’s Three Women and fell knee-deep under its spell: the illusive, elusive dichotomies that Lynch should be so lucky as to achieve; the mirrors found in pools and windows and fishtanks and dumb lugs; the spot-on performances from Sissy Spacek and Shelly Duval. At the film’s end I still lacked much insight into its characters or plot or even intentions. Yet I was utterly hooked — deeply uncharacteristic for a girl who tends to dismiss such opaqueness as mere smoke and mirrors. It was a moment when I longed for a teacher or a good review to illuminate me or even frame the context of the conversation, and I realized that more than anyone I longed for Kael and her smart-cookie two cents.
For the first time in a dog’s age I cracked open one of her review collections: I Lost It at the Movies. And, though I never found her essay on Three Women (I did suss out that he’d improvised the film from a dream), in my search I fell knee-deep under her spell as well. In a way, Altman and Kael’s tone is of a piece: marked by a high-minded chattiness that never borders on pretension even when it misses the mark. What distinguishes Kael’s writing, even after all these years and even in this era of critical oversaturation, is that she’s writing for someone who’s already seen the movie.
She never lost what they call in yogic circles “beginner’s mind,” always demonstrating a generosity more typical of viewers who’ve paid for a sitter and consumed a heady cocktail of popcorn and smashing trailers before the feature. It’s why her now-infamous second person voice doesn’t grate nearly as much as when others slather it on: she really was talking to us. Her reviews were written as if we were all cradling cups of tea around a kitchen table after having seen the movie togther, savoring the pleasure of the experience with a satisfying post-mortem. That’s why, even when she didn’t like a film in question, her prose never devolved into vitriol.
Her musings on the ’60s and ’70s classics are best remembered; how (like Sontag, like Warhol) she relished jop and pazz and dispensed briskly with such dichotomies as high and low culture that other critics still drew upon with a straight face. But even when reviewing a mostly mediocre batch, like the films in Movie Love, her collection of 1989-1991 reviews, she drew upon her significant body of knowledge to excavate positives — a lingering shot, a director’s development, a new actor’s performance. And when she did find fault, she did so cheerily, with no loser-in-a-black-cape fury fueling her assessments.
It’s been said that Kael didn’t much cotton to female Paulettes in her life, but none of that Adrienne Rich “exceptional woman” pathology colored her prose. She admired actresses as well as actors, and pointed out without rancor where sexism sank plots by not fleshing out female characters. She was funny, but only in service of more precisely nailing her point rather than gilding her reputation. She was smart but in a matter-of-fact, unshowy way that suggested she’d be a smart observer of any human milieu. Her calm, confiding tone inspired both confidence — and confidences — in each of us, and she used her good name to cultivate filmmakers and critics and an American audience whom she recognized as worth cultivating.
Only Kael tapped into the basic psychology of film-viewing; that there, in that temperature-regulated womb of a movie theater complete with a light flickering at the end of the tunnel, we each, alone but together, shoulder to shoulder, are silently reborn again and again. She remained both open-hearted and open-eyed to the end, a too-rare combination these days in any field. She may have been the progentitor of contemporary film criticism but more than that (I smell test tubes in that word, anyway), she was, and remains, its good mommy.
Maureen Dowdy Ain’t No Broady, and Other Notes From the Feminist Ghetto
I’ve been knee-deep in malodorous manuscripts these last few weeks — for one of my few remaining money jobs, you dig. In the meanhow, speaking of malodorous, I will chime in my (last) two cents on the Dowd Question and, no doubt, surprise no one in the process. For: I never liked Miss Mo and her delusions of screwball-dame grandeur, and now her botoxed puss is giving me the heebie-jeebies as she spews her reductionist, classist, Cathy-cartoon, decidedly un-Great Kate, Catholic schoolgirl-uniform tripe all over the media’s three rings. She is old-school only in negative, dichotomous ways, and I anticipate her self-implosion breathlessly, from the bowels of the back of the classroom. She gives straight-girl feminists a bad name.
On another, deeply related note: I am sick of women distancing themselves from the very term “feminism.” None of us like every action or ideology that lives under its umbrella, but it’s disrespectful and downright ignorant to dismiss the label out of hand after everything the movement has given every one of us.
Last and least lofty: My lesbian boyfriend Yancey was kind enough to purchase for me Season 2 of The L Word. Despite our extended, archived grievances, Jostle and I have learned that the much-maligned season lends itself quite nicely to boozy, woozy heckling. Plus, the girls themselves (Kate and Leisha, in particular) mock the weak storylines and musical choices mercilessly on the commentary track of the “Love Boat” epi. Clearly we missed another boat in momentarily taking the show seriously. Say it loud, say it proud: f-f-f-f-fucking.
As The Passenger
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how powerfully the European filmmakers mastered quiescence. I was pretty sure my assertion was correct, but it’d been at least a few months since I’d watched a European classic on a big screen.
Ah, but I was right. I just saw Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975) on Sony’s very big screen, then walked outside to find midtown NYC, and myself, transformed. Restored, even.
It took a moment or two to surrender to Antonioni’s pacing, but once I did there was nowhere else I would have preferred to have been for two hours of a late Thursday afternoon. A thirtiesh Jack Nicholson — still coltish, and only depraved enough to star in a movie directed by an Italian (AKA not yet depraved enough hunt Hollywood’s prepubescent daughters) — stars as a TV international journalist weary of his job, his wife–his life, really. So when a stranger dies in the African hotel room next to his, he swaps their passport pictures and takes off with the dead man’s identity, leaving the corpse behind to be pronounced as his own. Only–as he spins through Europe and Africa with tiger-eyed Maria Schneider, the legacies of both men prove too powerful to entirely evade.
That’s the storyline, and it’s the sort that would come equipped with an action-jackson edit and overbearing soundtrack had it been shot today by a Hollywood studio. Instead it drifts along with nothing to fill your ears for minutes at a time but the crunch of gravel; the hiss of dust billowing up to defy an empty sky; the lonely, swelling murmur of passersby’s conversations. Views from the trunk of a car linger even when a slammed door is all that’s left to look at; the camera trails after each car whooshing by a couple lunching in a roadside cafe. It’s all an indolent nod to the distractions of modernity, and all to train you for the clicking heels of destiny approaching, as the film whittles down to pure silence and a room with a (fatalistic) view.
This is a movie whose dialogue is spare enough that you take heed of the few words actually exchanged. Especially Nicholson’s proclamation that “There are coincidences everywhere.” As he utters it, in fact, the woman in front of me craned toward her male companion in a way that gave me a start of recognition. It was a woman, I suddenly realized, whom I’d once known quite well.
When the lights came up, they were both gone. I darted out to catch them in the corridor of the screening room’s lobby, but was greeted only by two men chattering into cells, their silhouettes cast into perspective by a glittering, steel Manhattan sky. For a second, I thought I’d mistaken real life for another scene in the movie but then knew it’d been no mistake. It was all of a piece; she had dipped in and out of plain view the way Nicholson’s character had on screen. The movie, made 30 years ago, had reached into my life and made someone visible who’d disappeared from my life years before.
But not me. I was still wonderfully invisible.
Downstairs on 55th street I slipped into the noisy quiet of the New York City throng, clicking east in my silver-toed boots and popping chocolate-covered apricots from a brown paper bag in my pocket. Listening close. For three blocks still I was just an extra passenger.