Remembering Pauline Kael, Fondly or Not, Is Still a Tribute

Pauline Kael is gone, inspiring appreciations as quirky and rhapsodic as her own reviews. Those who knew her personally have remembered her that way?in loving, tender sendoffs. Those who knew her only through her writing might have messier reactions.

I'm one of those people. Like pretty much any working critic born during the last 50 years, I spent the early part of my career trying to emulate her, either stylistically or temperamentally. Seven years ago, I wrote an essay about her book For Keeps. It was so nakedly worshipful that when I re-read it, it makes me feel kind of embarrassed. After a while, I started to figure out that the best way to honor Kael was to read more criticism and history, watch more movies and stop using her as a measuring stick all the time.

It's not easy, for one good reason: Kael was, and may remain, the most influential film critic ever published in this country?maybe the most influential critic, period. Peter Biskind's definitive pop history of late 60s and 70s film, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, rightly accords Kael the same prominence as the era's directors, producers and stars. She championed Bonnie and Clyde, M*A*S*H, Nashville, Last Tango in Paris and other key works, introducing them to some readers, legitimizing their artistry to others. She used her New Yorker job as a bully pulpit, persuading (sometimes goading) other critics into acknowledging her point of view even if they thought it was hooey. (Now there's a Kael word.) Much of modern criticism owes a debt to Kael's?not in the specifics (taste in films, directors, actors), but in its general assumptions about what films should be (visceral, kinetic, emotional, populist). Most contemporary reviews begin by assuming that everything in the film springs straight from the director's imagination, rather than evolving from messy and imperfect collaboration; Kael had plenty to do with that. France birthed the auteur theory, and Andrew Sarris imported it to the States, but Kael mainstreamed it for viewers and for quite a few filmmakers. Mean Streets and Nashville exemplified the best parts of that tradition; Heaven's Gate, the beginning of the end for big-budget 70s auteurism, epitomized the worst. On the whole, her worship of the director was a fine and valuable thing, if only because it convinced millions of casual filmgoers that popular entertainment could be art and that criticism should pulse with life.

It should also be blunt and truthful?and since Kael was no fan of glass-half-full assessments, glossing over her flaws would dishonor her memory. To wit: She involved herself in the creation of some of the same films she later praised or buried. She critiqued scripts, suggested actors, even partied with key directors and the celebs in their orbit. From M*A*S*H onward, she was Robert Altman's best-credentialed fan. Warren Beatty, whose career as a producer was cemented by the success of Bonnie and Clyde, helped bring her out to Hollywood in early 1979 for an ill-fated foray into film production, and she and Beatty disagreed on the merits of Heaven Can Wait (her review had called it self-flattering)and Reds (she advised him not to do it). Beatty went his own way and Kael, eaten alive by Hollywood, returned to The New Yorker and dissected him in print, not just as an actor or filmmaker, but as a psychoanalytic case study. "Whatever he started out to make the picture for," she wrote of Reds, "he has replaced it with stale gags and bits of business that he thinks will work with an audience." Her next sentence might as well have been, "And if you see him, tell him I want my records back."

She expertly described how movies made her feel, but rarely explained how lighting, camera angles, editing and music combined to produce those feelings. She preferred visceral movies (she called them "pictures") that either hewed to a classical mode or reinvented it without fracturing it. In the early 60s, when mainstream American directors began describing themselves as authors and flirting with postmodern concepts, she reminded readers that movies still owed more to theater and novels than to opera, pop music or painting?and presumably always would. McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a dreamy period drama with a linear spine, inspired one of her finest reviews; 2001 made her roll her eyes. A part of Kael remained suspicious of noteworthy directors whose sense of life?and of cinema's possibilities?did not reflect her own. She often deflated Stanley Kubrick, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais, conceding their ambition and technical skill while poking fun at their desire to say meaningful things about modern life and timeless themes. In her 1962 essay "The Come-Dressed-As-The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties," she accuses Antonioni of ogling star Jeanne Moreau's backside with his camera and passing it off as existential angst in La Notte, and writes off Fellini's La Dolce Vita as "sort of a 'Ben-Hur' for the more, but not very much more, sophisticated." (That's another unfortunate Kael tradition: insulting the reader.)

Throughout her career, Kael's voice communicated her feelings so forcefully, so seductively, that it invited readers to mistake Kael's emotions (and their own) for ideas. Some of her arguments had more holes than a piñata after a kindergarten party. In the same year, 1971, she condemned A Clockwork Orange as pretentious, irresponsible, nasty and sexist, blasting its voyeuristic sexual assaults; yet she twisted herself into knots to justify Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, an arted-up revenge fantasy in which a woman got raped and liked it. (While decrying the film's "stupidity and moral corruption," she insisted "the rape is one of the few truly erotic sequences on film.")

Though friends have described her as sweet, sensitive and rather retiring, on the page Kael cultivated a bad-girl brashness. Her anthologies had naughty titles like Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down. At her loopiest, she could seem like an Ayn Rand heroine, eager to submit to the energy of (mostly male) filmmakers. It's no coincidence that many of her favorite directors from the 60s and 70s, while undeniably gifted and significant, aimed to subjugate the viewer and render him awestruck with horror, revulsion or pity: Peckinpah, Arthur Penn, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg. Although she praised Renoir, Altman and the pre-Apocalpyse Now Francis Coppola for their democratic, noncoercive wide shots and long takes, she was more likely to respond to directors who told people where to look. I'm not saying those sorts of directors aren't great, because many of them are. I'm saying that films by Made-You-Look directors seemed to ring Kael's bells harder than works by directors who were more interested in characterization, behavior and performance: John Cassavetes, Elia Kazan, Woody Allen; Fellini and Bergman after the mid-70s. (Yet she wrote more perceptively about acting than any film critic before or since?an aspect of her talent that will probably remain underrated. Of Bill Murray's performance in Ghostbusters, she wrote, "He's always an onlooker; he won't even commit to being in the movie.") She lost interest in documentaries after cinema verite became commonplace, and when she did write about them (see her pieces on Shoah and Roger & Me), she spent a lot of her energy complaining that they were too manipulative?an odd gripe from a writer who popularized the most coercive pronoun in journalism, the royal "you."

Kael's subjugating directors had something else in common with one another, something that meshed perfectly with Kael's worldview: they made films that were as excited about movies as they were about life?maybe more. In De Palma and Spielberg's work, especially, the subjugation of the heroes by the director's vision gets copped to in metaphor: Spielberg's early masterpiece Close Encounters haunts and inspires its characters and its audience via the same primal effects?by plunging you into darkness, then blinding you with light. (There's that royal "you" again.) De Palma's Blow Out, a thriller about the difference between seeing and knowing, assumes the audience is as film-savvy as its audio engineer hero?then proves, with still-astonishing confidence, that no matter how much think you know about cinema's manipulative power, De Palma can still get you. (And again; resistance is useless!)

Kael worked on readers the same way?grabbing their heads and telling them where to look. But she didn't make the key mistake of so many of her acolytes: assuming that if it came from an artist, it must be great art. (Without denigrating Spielberg's genius, she honestly catalogued the flaws of Empire of the Sun and Always; I bet she would have done the same for A.I.) She linked entertainment with art, beauty with life. She responded to rebel swagger and youthful bravado. No wonder her reviews are to young critics what Hunter Thompson's gonzo reportage is to young reporters. When you hear her words on the page, you can't get them out of your head. The act of quoting her is respectful even when the critic defines himself in opposition to Kael; quoting her writing admits its impact. She is the mother of all pop criticism, and she is quoted accordingly?the way people quote their mothers in private conversations with siblings. Whether the memory of her influence arouses tenderness or impatience, the act of remembrance is still a tribute. We remember her voice to discover our own.