Pauline Kael Awoke Slumbering Giant in Criticism

Audience: a New York magazine aimed at young adults, like New York Magazine

Amid the disagreements swirling around the late “New Yorker” critic Pauline Kael, one thing is not up for grabs: those who write about Kael cannot help but use her style. Since Kael hit the New York film scene in 1967, magazines have become rife with writers, self-proclaimed “Paulettes” like jazz critic Francis Davis, who reproduce her schismatic language and personal attachment. Kael was fond of superlatives; “New Times” critic Andy Klein sticks one in a Kael obituary, declaring she was “simply the most stylistically influential film critic ever.” Even Renata Alder’s essay “House Critic,” perhaps Kael’s largest censure, concludes “once the tone and the ante have been pumped up… it becomes hard - even in reviewing Ms. Kael’s work - to write in any other way.”

With so many imitators, Kael clearly awoke some slumbering thing in criticism, part Princess Aurora and part mountain troll, and it demanded response. Adler calls the thing “frenzy,” Davis, in “Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael,” would rather “energy,” and Kael spoke of her own “passion.” Certainly, Kael’s reviews do not waver on her devotion to film. 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 her particular beauty like an 19th century aesthete. Beauty for Kael is stardom, authenticity, and pleasure; it is sexual appeal and a good laugh, clear direction and pop culture.

The awoken giant shows its ugly side when her convictions persuade the reader to go to the theaters for entirely the wrong reason. Her reviews of films like “Silkwood” 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 (Jack Nicholson) doesn’t entertain us, too.” Here, Kael’s energetic writing shamefully conveys the value of judgement more than the value of the movie.

When Kael’s quest for beauty dissipates into bullying argument, Kael’s criticisms are laid bare as individual taste. Inevitably, those who can’t stand her lowbrow taste will concoct arguments against Kael, and those who love the “energy of a popular art,” as she says in Davis's interview, will join the ranks of “Paulettes.”

Adler, in “House Critic” 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,” so instead argues “all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely (Kael’s) own idea” and has no place in a movie critique. Ultimately, though, as Louis Menand of The New York Review of Books points out, Kael’s taste “kept the attention of the magazine's readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them” by generally walking the line between Sleeping Beauty and obstinate monster.