Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [191]
On May 7, 1981, Pauline appeared in a public debate with a onetime idol, Jean-Luc Godard, held at the Marin Civic Center in Mill Valley, California. The event had attracted a crowd of some two thousand people, and on the way there, Godard was quite charming to Pauline. Once they got onstage, however, his tone changed. Their debate turned out to be a long, rambling conversation in which Godard seemed perennially on the offensive against Pauline, who had taken a dim view of some of his more recent pictures. She persistently attempted to keep the conversation on a fairly linear track, while Godard just as persistently attempted to venture off on other paths. He launched the session by criticizing her for “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers.” He didn’t accept the degree of blame she placed on the conglomerates behind the studios, and felt that critics, Pauline included, needed to take more responsibility for the level of movies being released. Critics, he said, were “using their power in the same direction that the businessmen of the movies are”—meaning that advertising influenced how reviews were written. Pauline tried to defend The New Yorker’s strict separation of advertising and editorial matters, but Godard dismissed the argument.
Using Michael Cimino as an example, he attacked the press for overpraising The Deer Hunter while blatantly condemning Heaven’s Gate, a picture which, to his eye, had a number of admirable elements. “It has a lot of magnificent things that the director cannot follow through on—for very obvious reasons which we can analyze,” he protested. “But the reviewers never say that, and never try to help someone who is very arrogant, as Cimino is, to make a better picture next time.” He attacked one of Pauline’s favorites, Brian De Palma, for not adequately preparing his scripts, and compared him unfavorably with Hitchcock. He also stated that he felt criticism should be a kind of science, a comment that Pauline told him was downright perverse. The conversation ambled on, and as the evening’s presenter, Sydney Goldstein of City Arts and Lectures, recalled, “It was a chilling ride back to the city.”
The summer of 1981 saw the release of the year’s greatest commercial success, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the George Lucas–Steven Spielberg tribute to old movie serials, starring Harrison Ford. The picture had a tongue-in-cheek tone that appealed to the snobs in the audience who wanted to feel they weren’t “just” looking at an adventure movie. It appealed to an incredibly wide base, but Pauline regarded it as a perfect symbol of the rise of the marketing executives; in her review of the picture, she pointed out that marketing budgets often surpassed total production budgets, a practice that “could become commonplace.” She found Raiders didn’t allow you “time to breathe—or to enjoy yourself much, either. It’s an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer—for flash.” At last, she could see the direction in which Jaws had led. Its excesses were especially a pity, she thought, because both Lucas and Spielberg were loaded with movie-making talent. She observed that if Lucas “weren’t hooked on the crap of his childhood—if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them—there’s no imagining the result.” But it’s doubtful that Lucas paid attention to her admonishment—not in the face of the $230 million gross racked up by Raiders.
Pauline had stumbled through the year, mostly indifferent to the films she was seeing, until the summer brought Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, the story of a sounds-effects specialist (John Travolta) who one night witnesses a man driving off a bridge and into a river. The man in the car turns out to be the governor of Pennsylvania, who was preparing a campaign for the presidency; he dies, but the hero manages to rescue a