The Elements of Pauline Kael: Influence, Taste, and Judgement

Amid the debate about the late “New Yorker” critic Pauline Kael, one thing is not up for grabs: those who write about Kael inevitably use her grammar. Francis Davis, author of “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” counts himself within the ranks of “Paulettes” in today’s magazines. Even the censures, Renata Adler’s essay “House Critic” looming large among them, recognize Kael’s pervasive literary influence. Adler writes in her conclusion that “it becomes hard -- even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work -- to write in any other way,” and exposes her own essay to be rife with Kael’s techniques. Andy Klein, a critic for the New Times and a clear devotee to her superlatives, declares in his obituary of Kael that she was “simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.”

With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism that demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on their convictions or her devotion to her subject. She delighted in Jean-Luc Godard’s “stunning” use of pop and Barbara Streisand’s “incandescent” comedy, and panned “Hiroshima Mon Amour”s “passive… imposture” and “Top Gun”s “depersonalized… commercial”; she pursued beauty like Oscar Wilde at his most conspicuous. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.

The awoken giant sometimes drifts back to sleep in her longer pieces, “Busybody” for example loses all excitement by the third rambling paragraph, and it is here that the controversy surrounding Kael emerges. When visceral excitement can’t carry her, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Those who can’t stand lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against her, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”

In the end, one cannot judge taste on any stronger grounds than those upon which the opinions rely. Rational debate comes to a standstill. Adler, for example, wants to skewer Kael on her penchant for bodily functions, both in movies and in her writing, but she cannot say “Pauline shouldn't like guts” and instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and is outside of “the legitimate borders of polemic.”

Whatever your position on Kael’s taste, it is unfortunate when her energies persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Reviews like “Busybody” or “Funny Girl” are essentially argumentative, a challenge to disagree. Kael’s second person, as in “You feel that you understand,” could be construed as including the audience, except that, as Adler indicates, “‘You’ is most often Ms. Kael’s ‘I.’” She co-opts the reader’s power to make his or her own decisions: “The Witches of Eastwick” review states “And damned if he doesn’t entertain us, too.” The implication is that you are damned if you disagree. Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.