Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [185]
One person who didn’t rise to her defense was William Shawn, who characteristically tried to calm the waters. “That’s just how Renata reacts to Pauline,” he told a reporter. “One has to permit all writers a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.” Many at the magazine speculated that Shawn agreed with Adler’s assessment of Pauline’s work, but in interviews, the editor worked hard to maintain a neutral stance, saying, “There are boundaries beyond which the magazine can’t go. But you have to give Pauline the benefit of the doubt as to her intentions and needs. If at times she finds it necessary to use unconventional language, that has to be allowed.”
Many of Pauline’s friends, James Wolcott among them, felt that the Adler piece was something of an inside job, given the close relationship of both Adler and Penelope Gilliatt to one of Pauline’s chief antagonists, Vincent Canby. (Gilliatt did send Pauline a sympathetic note when Adler’s essay was published. Gilliatt wrote that such an outrage “shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone to anyone who writes.” She added, “And you certainly know how much I have always admired your humanity and zeal.”)
Pauline attempted to stay above the fray, telling Time’s reporter simply, “I’m sorry that Ms. Adler doesn’t respond to my writing. What else can I say?” Privately, however, she was deeply wounded by Adler’s harsh words. Despite her sharpness with others in print, she had always maintained a conscience about what she wrote, and she often told friends that she would have had to have been a complete boor not to feel a twinge of sadness and discomfort when she ran into someone whose films she had savaged. She had always known how painful it was for an artist to be the object of a full-scale critical attack: Now she had experienced it personally.
She went back to work, and it is impossible to know exactly what effect, if any, on her day-to-day writing Adler’s criticism had had. Certainly there seemed to be no difference in tone or substance or style, at least not immediately. The run of movies that fall wasn’t bad: She loved The Stunt Man, starring Peter O’Toole, and considered its director, Richard Rush, “a kinetic-action director to the bone; visually, he has the boldness of a comic-strip artist”; she found “a furious aliveness in this picture.” And she was completely won over by Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, which opened the 1980 New York Film Festival. Pauline compared Demme’s intuitive gifts at creating characters onscreen with Jean Renoir’s; she thought Melvin and Howard “a comedy without a speck of sitcom aggression: the characters are slightly loony the way we all are sometimes (and it seldom involves coming up with cappers or with straight lines that somebody else can cap). When the people on the screen do unexpected things, they’re not weirdos; their eccentricity is just an offshoot of the normal, and Demme suggests that maybe these people who grew up in motor homes and trailers in Nevada and California and Utah seem eccentric because they didn’t learn the ‘normal,’ accepted ways of doing things.”
The fall of 1980 saw the release of the one movie she had managed to help get onto the assembly line in Hollywood—The Elephant Man. (Some critics would have recused themselves, but Pauline saw no conflict of interest.) Pauline had liked David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and she thought that he had brought his powerful imagination to full flower in his new picture. The story of the unfortunate, deformed Englishman John Merrick was handled with remarkable grace, and without hysteria or sentiment. “The Elephant Man has the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film,” Pauline wrote, “yet there are also wrenching, pulsating sounds—the hissing steam and the pounding of the start of the industrial age.”
In late October she published a long review of Woody Allen’s latest, Stardust Memories, the most annihilating