Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [183]
Why did Pauline prefer De Palma’s work to Hitchcock’s, when the younger director was essentially reworking over many themes developed by the master? Perhaps it was the understanding of female psychology that De Palma showed. (Hitchcock’s movies are full of scenes with women that make one’s skin crawl—a prime example being the sequence in his 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which James Stewart sedates Doris Day before telling her that their son has been kidnapped.) Her friend David Edelstein thought that she also favored the lushness of DePalma’s visual palette—his emphasis on pure sensuality.
When the Lights Go Down was still selling nicely by midsummer. One prominent publication, however—The New York Review of Books—had not weighed in on the book until mid-August, when it ran a lengthy review by Renata Adler. The sniping notices that Pauline had received over the years—particularly for Reeling—were of a type that nearly every writer had to deal with in the course of a career. But the piece in The New York Review of Books was another matter altogether: It was the most devastating critical attack on Pauline’s career ever published. The cover line, “The Sad Tale of Pauline Kael,” was an indication of what was to come; the review itself was titled “The Perils of Pauline,” a formula that had already been exhausted in any number of newspaper and magazine pieces about her. More than just a review of When the Lights Go Down, Adler’s essay was a broadside against Pauline’s lofty reputation, an aggressive attempt to discredit her—with the nation’s literary community occupying a ringside seat.
Certainly an attack on America’s most celebrated movie critic was a “box-office” concept, and Renata Adler was an inspired choice to write it. She was a well-known contributor to the publication, a sometime film critic with impressive credentials (The New York Times and, most recently, The New Yorker). and an acclaimed fiction writer. The passionate, emotional, argumentative Pauline confronted with the dispassionate, chiseled-prose Adler—two more temperamentally opposed writers would have been difficult to imagine.
Pauline had been annoyed by many of Adler’s recent reviews for The New Yorker; in particular, she was incensed by Adler’s dismissal of Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, which Pauline considered one of the best films of a bad year. And with her tony educational background (Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, a law degree from Yale) and frequently reported-on social connections, Adler was the sort of darling of the East Coast intellectual establishment that Pauline had for so long viewed with contempt.
An advance copy of The New York Review of Books issue that featured “The Perils of Pauline” was sent to Pauline with a note from the publication’s editor, Robert Silvers, in the event that Pauline wanted to reply.
Adler’s essay began with a lengthy two columns in which she outlined her thoughts on what made a good critic in the arts, and why the best ones inevitably found themselves played out after a certain period and moved on to write about other topics. For another two and a half columns she expressed her qualified admiration for Pauline’s work from the 1950s up through her first few years at The New Yorker, stating that she had “continued to believe that movie criticism was probably in quite good hands with Pauline Kael.”
The bomb was dropped midway through the fifth column, when Adler stated that When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” She went on to detail her complaints—that Pauline’s work had taken on “an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the