This essay first appeared on Splice Today.
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As a first time reader of Pauline Kael, I was surprised to discover that she’s boring as fuck.
Okay, to be fair, she’s sometimes slightly less boring than that. Going Steady, her third volume from 1968 and the one which I happened to get my hands on, has its share of zingers. I smiled when she noted acidly of Mel Brooks’ script for the producers: “That’s not screenwriting; it’s gagwriting.” I’m always up for seeing Norman Mailer ridiculed, and her pummeling of his Wild 90 as a lazy egoistic exercise in flab was satisfying on that account. And there are several entertaining anecdotes sprinkled throughout. Such as this one:
Once, in Berkeley, after a lecture by LeRoi Jones, as the audience got up to leave, I asked an elderly white couple next to me how they could applaud when Jones said that all whites should be killed. And the little gray-haired woman replied, “But that was just a metaphor. He’s a wonderful speaker.
I can see James Baldwin telling that story and spinning it into an extended meditation on race and self-delusion — and not just white self-delusion either, since, after all, and to a not insignificant extent, LeRoi Jones was in fact full of shit, was not planning on killing anyone, and comes out looking at least as ridiculous as his supposedly clueless admirer. Baldwin would have noted, too, that Jones’ firebrand rhetoric was predicated, economically, on the benign disbelief of this bourgeois couple — a disbelief which, if it were to shatter, would have put someone other than the whites in danger of immediate and catastrophic violence. Perhaps Baldwin might even have discussed his own personal reaction to Jones’ speech, and talked about which parts he agreed with, which parts he disagreed with, and why.
Kael doesn’t do any of that, though. She just uses the incident to show that old, boring white people sentimentalize art and therefore don’t understand just how very subversive Bunuel is. She even quotes that bit where Bunuel talks about how his films are a passionate call to murder, etc. etc., Because nothing screams “danger” quite like quoting Bunuel from the pages of the New Yorker.
Not that I hate Bunuel — in fact, he’s one of my favorite filmmakers. I like him so much, in fact, that Kael can’t ruin him for me, even when she declares sententiously that “Bunuel’s style tells the truth of his feelings; the Spanish stance is too strong for soft emotions like pity.” Yeah, well, my soft emotion is that I want to get in a Spanish stance and defecate freely on each and every critic who uses the phrase “truth of his feelings.”
This seems to be quintessential Kael — she is the sort of critic who enthuses over strong-willed art in the language of bathos. Nor should this come as a surprise, since there’s nothing quite so wishy-washy as praising principle for its form rather than its content. In that anecdote about LeRoi Jones, Kael manages to suggest an affinity with his rhetoric without herself actually either endorsing or objecting to the extermination of her own race. In her praise of Bunuel, she notes approvingly that “he never makes people pitiable lumps,” though she also says “he can be so coldly unpleasant that we are repelled.” To which one is forced to ask, “what you mean we, bourgeois tastemaker?”
Of course, by “we,” Kael actually means “I”, or, more completely, “I who am not quite willing to own an opinion, and therefore intend to attribute it to a pseudo-mystical, validating other.” It’s an odd rhetorical device for a contrarian critic like Kael — after all, if we (ahem) aren’t reading her to find out her opinions, then why on earth are we reading her? And yet, it’s a move she makes over and over again. Here she is, for instance, in the final paragraph of the volume’s centerpiece, a 40-page essay titled “Trash, Art, and the Movies.”
If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.
The “we” here is meant to create a community, and even a teleology. It makes it look like Kael has a thesis, when all she really has is a long essay in which she says she likes trashy genre pictures and doesn’t like 2001 and The Graduate and likes bits of Hitchcock and how all of this has prepared her for liking really good movies made by people she will praise in some other essays elsewhere in the book, like (presumably) Godard.
Kael uses “we” in other words, because there is no “we”; the point for her is always self-referential; her thesis is always, “I am right.” And that solipsism is, in turn, a function, not of rampant egotism, but of the categories she uses. As “Trash, Art, and the Movies” suggests, Kael is obsessed with what is art and what isn’t art and with the evil “businessmen” who muck up everything and make it “almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new.” To read Pauline Kael, therefore, is to be confronted with a capitalism whose worst sin is making mediocre movies; with a bourgeois society the worst sin of which is enjoying those same mediocre films. Smack dab at the end of the 60s, Kael has nothing to say about Vietnam, or Lyndon Johnson, or civil rights, or any of the cataclysmic upheavals of her day. She manages to write a review of Godard’s La Chinoise in which she explicates Godard’s feelings about revolutionary youth but doesn’t tell us anything about her own position except, “yep, I think Godard is really clever!”
Even when she does take something akin to a moral stand, she is almost apologetic about it, and scurries quickly back to the safety of purely aesthetic concerns. Thus, in one of her best reviews, she demonstrates clearly that The Stalking Moon is a racist piece of garbage… and then blames its “prejudice” on the fact that “the easiest, fastest way for commercial entertainment to appeal to a mass audience is to touch soft spots.” In short, racism springs from the aesthetic failures of bourgeois sentimentalism — which is why Communists are not anti-Semitic and why D.W. Griffith’s artistic genius resulted in such egalitarian cinema.
There is no doubt that Kael loves movies, and trash, and art. She loves them so much, in fact, that she tends to forget that there are other things out there. She measures the world by art rather than the other way round, and as a result her every effort at profundity becomes banal. “What is missing,” she says herself, in an inadvertent moment of self-revelation, “is the connection — or context — in which movies are a continuing art.” The truth is, if you take a broad view, or even a narrow one, it just doesn’t matter that much whether you prefer The Graduate or The Thomas Crown Affair. The morals and beliefs and loves which led you to that preference, on the other hand, can matter quite a bit. But those are precisely what Kael refuses to discuss, which is why, at the end of this volume, I felt I had learned little about her, very little about the movies, and even less about that big swath of existence we refer to as “everything else.”
Minus the pronoun issue, is her approach all that different from your own? Just replace ‘Bergman’ and ‘Kubrick’ with ‘Clowes’ and ‘Ware’.
I think you’d find lots of people who’d say her approach is very different from mine (to my detriment of course!)
I don’t think there’s something especially vital about trash because it’s trash; trash can be nice, but there are other good things too. I”m pretty unapologetic about taking moral stands in general, I think; I don’t think the problem with racism is that it’s an aesthetic failure. I don’t usually claim art is subversive or dangerous just because it sneers at the bourgeoisie.
I dunno; it’s hard to evaluate one’s own writing obviously. I think she’s right to distrust pretension, and right to be forthright in standing up for her boredom and her irritation at that boredom. I think her aesthetics, her politics, and her moral stances all tend to be really simplistic and poorly thought through, and I think that cripples her criticism. I like to think that’s not the case for my own writing, but I could of course be fooling myself.
Well, Noah, you both seem often to indulge the same approach. You don’t like a given work, and then you work backward from your dislike to discredit said work.
I think such a dislike should put a serious critic on her guard, with an inner ‘devil’s advocate’ at work.
I mean, sorry to go so far back– but your TCJ review of ‘In the Shadow of no Towers’ opened you to endless attack; you jumped the gun there.
(Not looking for a fight! In fact I also am often exasperated by Kael; look up her review of ‘The Pope of Greenwich Village’ to see an all-time low.)
“You don’t like a given work, and then you work backward from your dislike to discredit said work.”
I don’t really see what else you’re supposed to do. It seems to me that as a critic you work to explain and analyze your own reactions and responses to a work. I guess my one demurral would be that it’s not exactly a “first this, then that” kind of thing. That is, my experience of the work is in part my reasons for liking or disliking that work; they both happen simultaneously (though both can also change in retrospect as you think things through further.)
Unless you’re saying I make up my mind before I see a work? That’s not generally the case…though of course if I’ve seen bits of it or have a relationship with the creator already I bring that with me. I don’t try to be an impartial judge; I don’t think such a thing is possible or desirable with art.
I still think that Spiegelman book is one of the worst comics I’ve ever read. I don’t regret that review.
Nor should you, really, but it was over the top; it actually gave you a very mixed reputation– I remember once apologising for an excessive critique by stating I was in a bad temper and so “did a Berlatsky”; everyone got the allusion…
Really, a critic should always be wary of himself first. This informs critics as diverse as George Orwell and Roland Barthes.
I think that Charles was simply warning you about glass houses…
Ah well; I try not to worry about my reputation overmuch. I think doing that can lead to bad places.
Charles isn’t warning me about glass houses! He’s trying to knock mine in!
Noah,
I’m not sure bathos is any worse than vulgarity in emphasizing a point. Why “the truth of his feelings” is such a sententious phrase, I have no idea, and instead I’m only left with visions of turds.
The “we” vs. “I” point is pretty good, although weakened by the second useage, and isn’t it understood that most criticism has an “I’m always right” subtext?
I’m curious about the “presumably” reference to Kael’s feelings about Godard–did you not read all the book?
As far as making explicit one’s moral stance when reviewing someone else’s art, I don’t think it’s necessary. Sometimes it may add context or another dimension, but then, so might explaining where and when one experienced the art in question, or what one had for dinner beforehand, or the crying baby in the theater. If Kael wants to write about her feelings on Vietnam in her review of someone’s movie about Vietnam, great, but if she doesn’t, I don’t agree it automatically makes her criticism less valuable or suspect.
Yes, I read the whole book. She likes Godard. The presumably is because I’m suggesting he’s her critical ideal, which seems pretty clear from the book, but she doesn’t actually say “he’s my critical ideal,” so I didn’t want to nail her down.
I’m cool with leaving you with visions of turds. And I can resolve your indecision for you; bathos is worse than vulgarity. Kael would actually agree with that, I’m pretty sure.
“the truth of his feelings” is just piffle that means nothing. Whose feelings aren’t true? What’s an untrue feeling? Why should feelings be measured by their truth or vice versa? Tell me what he thinks and why and whether you agree or disagree or don’t care; don’t muse soppily about how hard-headed he is. That’s just ridiculous.
Sure, critics claim they’re right. But Kael’s refusal to think through her positions means she’s left with little other than assertion. I find that really tedious to read. I’d much rather look at a book by someone like Shaw or Baldwin, who are willing to explicate what’s at stake for them personally and politically.
In that vein, you don’t have to discuss your own moral stance, obviously. However, if you bring up moral or political statements and praise them for their subtlety or passion without addressing their content…well, I think that’s craven and stupid, frankly. It ignores the explicit intention of the artist in favor of a wooly-headed aestheticism, and pretends to be bold and independent minded when in fact its just wishy-washy. You think you’re cool like Leroi Jones? All right, then stand behind what he said — and presumably off yourself if you’re white. If you can’t do that, then disagree with him. And if you can’t be bothered to do either of those things, then why shouldn’t I just laugh at you?
Noah:
“[…]she’s boring as fuck.”
Do you write that to convince engaged readers they should just ignore you?
What’s even more damning is that you jettisoned a valid criticism for the sake of a shock opening.
The fact is, Kael isn’t “boring as fuck”.
She’s endlessly entertaining.
That’s what’s insidious about her– she sacrifices critical rigor to entertainment value, and she has influenced two generations of film critics to follow her example.
I tnink you should re-think your targting, Noah.
“The fact is, Kael isn’t “boring as fuck”.
She’s endlessly entertaining.”
You realize this isn’t a fact, right? It’s an opinion.
I find her really tedious. If others don’t, that’s cool, but it was my very strong reaction after reading that book.
>>That’s what’s insidious about her– she sacrifices critical rigor to entertainment value, and she has influenced two generations of film critics to follow her example.>>>>
Or, rather than completely for entertainment value, for a pet theory that the details only barely fit. Witness the hatchet job on Orson Welles, and its barest relationship to the facts of the matter.
I’m sure it’s more for the theory than the entertainment value.
I wouldn’t mind half-baked theories if they were interesting or illuminating. But the warmed-over, half-assed, meaningless anti-bourgeois bullshit without any actual political or moral commitment — I can’t hack it.
You should try reading some of the OTHER people who were writing movie reviews in the ’50s. Random things in local newspapers are SCARY.
Scary how? Just empty headed, or rabid and confused?
Sometimes all of the above. Often hostile and usually repressive. Also frequently prim.
I was trying to remember how common the “we” thing is. I know I’ve seen this use, that assumption of a community. I think it wasn’t uncommon for writers in that era to speak to a hypothetical group like that.
I wonder to what extent Kael would have considered herself part of the bourgeoisie. I feel sure she intended to speak to a mainstream audience — she was of an era where the upper middle class didn’t automatically reject “elite” art. What you’re reading as anti-bourgeois might actually be “improvement” within a bourgeois framework, criticism from within.
I think of her as a middlebrow writer with a mix of elite and trashy aesthetic tastes, but who valued art in a way that we now associate almost exclusively with elites. But I’ve often wondered too, how cultivated that was, especially when reading her on Godard. I find her take on the New Wave unsatisfying, even though I tend to agree with her affection for it. I wonder whether she really isn’t thinking about it any more critically or deeply — or whether she thought that the more assertive stance would just backfire with her audience.
Been following your blog, thought you might be interested in this article (I hope the link works), where Kael alongside Canby, Kauffman and others are gored. Film criticism has historically been weak and she’s among the worst of the lot.
Annnnd of course it didn’t:
http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/carncult/darktext.htm
Caro, I’m pretty sure the “we” thing is a stylistic tic of hers. I saw another more contemporary essay about her after I’d finished mine which mentioned it as well. It’s insistent and weird.
Kael tends to position herself fighting on behalf of the masses against stultifying high art. I think she’d be strongly against the idea of “improvement.” It’s the age old story…Class X doesn’t want to admit it’s bourgeois. But it is.
BCole; thanks! I’ll try to read that today….
Whoops; just skimming it, but he seems to be on the same page as me re Kael:
“In fact, what seems left out of her meticulous anatomy of gestures, glances, and looks, her aesthetic of frissions, shocks, and visions, is simply all the rest of life. Kael’s attention to the isolated movements, shots, or postures that define a performance necessarily isolates it from the social, political, and personal contexts that surround and sustain it.”
I don’t know, I think ‘we’ is appropriate for the cinema in many ways– the best way to see a film is in a full theater. There’s a communal aspect to the experience.
Actually, the Kael tic that drives me nuts is her frequent “the movie wants to be about…”
No, it doesn’t, Pauline. Sheesh.
“Kael tends to position herself fighting on behalf of the masses against stultifying high art.”
That’s true, but you’re making it sound like she thinks all high art is stultifying, which I don’t think she’d agree with.
The context of bourgeois improvement was everywhere in the ’50s-’60s, so making her this postmodern “low-brow” just seems anachronistic to me. She believed that entertainment and pleasure were important aspects of art, and that overlooking them was enough for failure, but I just think that mapping a kind of binary class politics (masses v. elites) onto her is too blunt for the mid-century context.
Kael felt her mission was to get people to go to the movies, and to make sure that going to the movies was worth their time, so that’s both a very collective project and one where “worthwhile work” is by definition not stultifying. (She responds to the “we” question here.)
Also, one of her signature things was frustration about artists condescending to the audience. She liked that about Godard — he treated the audience as though they could get it, and would get it and would value it. You don’t defend that if you’re actually anti-art. Truffaut, maybe, although it’d be a stretch even there, but not Godard.
What I personally dislike most about her writing is that mission to “get people to go to the movies” — it makes her first and foremost a reviewer, so you almost never get anything sustained from her, and it always feels shallow and subjective. But that’s as much an objection to reviews, as to Kael’s take on them. By all accounts, her readers got to the point over time that they knew her perspective well enough that it wasn’t that subjective to them. They’d heard her say these things before and knew what she meant. I’ve never been able to replicate that experience though.
A site like Senses of Cinema, which I consider to be very good film criticism, doesn’t have that same relationship with an audience or with the movie business. I like it a lot better than Kael, but it’s undoubtedly less influential. Although I’m not sure anybody could do what Kael did now — the “we” is well and truly broken up.
I thought ‘we’ was a New Yorker magazine thing. Maybe I’m misremembering.
I liked Kael when I read her, but I’m not sure whether her glory wasn’t so much based on comparison to the deeply bad dreck of the local paper.
Caro, her account of the “we” is what I got. She uses it to mean the audience…though in that essay it’s more like many audiences, and ends up kind of being moviegoers everywhere. I think she’s a little cagey in saying that she carefully separated out the “I”. To me, anyway, she definitely using the mass “we” not just as descriptive but as teleological and normative. There’s a wisdom of crowds of which she is a part and other (snootier) reviewers are not.
She’s definitely not opposed to art…I don’t think I say she is in this piece? I do think she’d bristle at the idea that she’s improving people…but you’re much more knowledgeable about the 50s cultural context than I am.
BCole, thanks for that link. It’s a really fun essay.
I just wanted to add a very belated response to this – don’t know if you’ll read this, Noah, but I largely agree with your negative take on Kael. I think her enormous influence on subsequent generations of critics has been little short of disastrous. And, if anything, Kael became even worse – more strident, more illogical, more blindly emotional – in subsequent volumes. In GOING STEADY, she’s in her prime. Wait till you read some of her later stuff.
No critic I’ve ever encountered so frequently overuses the “royal we,” and no one was so intent on glorifying and sanctifying her own arbritrary whims, caprices, and flights of fancy. She’d expend thousands of words exalting pieces of mindless fluff just because they HAPPENED to catch her on a good day. We all have trash we enjoy, but we don’t all rationalize it or try to make our personal list of guilty pleasures into something of more artistic significance than genuine masterpieces. Kael seemed to think being a critic and being a giddy fangirl were one and the same enterprise.
I also had a look at your argument with “Mr. Sausage” and other puerile ranters on that discussion thread and you must have the patience of Job to wade through that. I think there’s really no point in engaging in debate incoherent ranters who obviously can’t, or don’t want to, follow the most basic elements of a logical argument.
Thanks! I hadn’t really connected the dots on the fannishness, but that makes sense.
I think figuring out why you take pleasure in things is worthwhile; I don’t necessarily fault Kael for that. It’s the narrow scope in which she thinks about that though that irritates me; the way her only referent seems to be film and occasionally a kind of untheorized anti-capitalism.
That discussion thread was maybe not an ideal move. It seemed worth a try though. That other guy (not Mr. Sausage) was civil at least….
Caro:
“The context of bourgeois improvement was everywhere in the ’50s-’60s”
No, not un-nuanced. This was the age, after all whaen Camp rampaged across the cultural spectrum.
Beyond that, economically, the middle-class householder of 1959 was as economically terrified as his grandson of 2011.
I don’t think I said — or meant — that it wasn’t nuanced. Isn’t everything nuanced?
But I also think the 1950s is too early for “camp” in any meaningful sense. Sontag’s essay isn’t until ’64. But even she contextualizes it pretty directly in this notion of “improvement.” I would probably read camp as anti-middlebrow, but drawing on the same conditions of possibility that middlebrow does: the absence of “an authentic aristocracy to sponsor special tastes,” which opens up the opportunity to assert a self-conscious (and therefore artificial) apparatus for taste.
(That’s from Sontag’s essay.)
I think it’s not impossible to see the earliest emergence of camp in this sense as a direct response to widespread “bourgeois improvement” and the weakened impact and influence of “aristocratic” taste…
I’m not speaking of economic improvement at all, though. Bourgeois culture in the ’50s and early ’60s was nearly obsessed with “high culture” — they brought Michaelangelo’s David to the 1964-5 World’s Fair, and housewives and children queued up to see it and ooh and ah at (or be scandalized by) the “culture.” It was important to see it. It wasn’t important to get it.
If Lawrence Welk is low camp, so is that.
Your point is taken about high camp — that’s always oppositional. But the difference between low camp and middlebrow aspiration pretty much just depends on where you’re sitting to watch.
Noah — I don’t know that I noticed your comment to me from above.
I wish I had a better word than “improvement.” That’s ’50s lingo but it has the wrong connotations today. It was just that middle-class people then sincerely valued things like having polished manners, not being “base,” being exposed to “high” culture. It was a form of aspiration to upper class culture — but it was tempered by middle class values, so it wasn’t really “aspirational.” It was just about being as genteel and cultured as possible.
I think Kael’s career was, by in large, made possible by the dominance of that attitude in the culture at that time. She was part of that, although tempered by her New York-ness and her belief in Cap-A-Art and the value of good creative work: she advocated for good culture that was accessible and available, that wasn’t snobby or pretentious, but that was still legitimately good culture. What she couldn’t countenance about the American middle-class was their puritanism, their racism, their provincialism. She recognized that the middle-class tended to reject art that challenged their bourgeois perspectives.
But at the same time, she wrote in an era when middle-class culture paid attention to Art in a way it doesn’t now, and that made it possible for her to produce these mainstream reviews for a really wide audience that weren’t entirely beholden to mass taste or the industry.
I don’t think she would have considered herself middle-class… but I also think she really wasn’t part of a true “elite.” She wasn’t really part of that class of “self-appointed aristocrats of taste” that Sontag’s talking about, because she was far too sincere, not campy enough. I think, after she “went mass” when she started working for McCall’s, she really was sort of the prototype of the bourgeois bohemian…
Just wanted to say, that’s an interesting perspective on Kael. Also, I caught sight of this as I was reading the Sontag article: Camp?
Caro– it wasn’t Michelangelo’s David at the World’s Fair, it was his Pieta.
I know,’cause I was there!