Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [193]
Pauline didn’t foresee that her remarks would upset her readers, and perhaps if they had been written by a gay man, they might not have. But coming from a heterosexual woman, they were perceived by many as hostile; by 1981, the lines in the war for sexual equality had been drawn much more boldly than they had been before. In identifying Bisset’s character with what she thought of as the masochistic side of gay cruising, she misstepped by failing to explain herself adequately: She was speaking specifically of the gay men she knew for whom sex and genuine intimacy were two different things. For Pauline, casual sex onscreen didn’t need to be accompanied by an explanation or apology, or loads of sober, melancholy rationale—this was exactly what had disturbed her about Looking for Mr. Goodbar. But her comment about Bisset’s affairs was perilously close to the one she had made about the Rod Steiger character in The Sergeant, and it appeared to some of her offended readers that her thinking on gay issues hadn’t advanced since 1968. Many of her gay readers might once have unquestioningly been seduced by her language and the force of her personality; now many of them demanded accountability.
The gay press was quick to register its outrage, with a full-scale attack launched by Stuart Byron in The Village Voice. “However much male gay life has followed promiscuous patterns not available to straights until the advent of the postpill paradise, the gay fantasy has always been exactly the same as the straight fantasy: love and happiness with one person forever.” The Voice, of course, had long had it in for her: it was the home base of Andrew Sarris, and the paper’s critics deplored the fact that Pauline didn’t toe the line on feminism and gay rights—and certain staff members even felt that she had never fully embraced her own Jewishness. “The reason the Voice hated her was that she wasn’t politically correct,” said David Edelstein. “It’s as simple as that. They didn’t consider her tastes particularly feminist. De Palma they found unbearable. They were cultural commissars there.”
Many of her friends leaped to her defense. James Wolcott was stunned by the backlash from her Rich and Famous review. “Pauline was so advanced on gay things in her sensibility, in the people she had around her,” he said. “The Stuart Byron thing bothered her because she knew it wasn’t true, and when something like that was said other people would pick up on it. She would say, ‘Haven’t they seen what a lousy movie it is?’ ‘You’re going to make this movie the basis of your stand about gay portrayals and sensibility—this thing?’ It was a sore point.”
Pauline believed in giving readers a precise description of the emotions a film generated in her, even if the words she used to describe them were tough, even coarse. Years earlier, when she had used the phrase “fag phantom of the opera” to describe Rod Steiger’s role in No Way to Treat a Lady, she had chosen the term both for rhythm and to convey the cheap, low-camp nature of the character. Likewise, shortly after her Rich and Famous review appeared, she wrote about Pixote, Hector Babenco’s superb film about the horrible lives of child criminals in Brazil. Describing a character played by Jorge Juliao, she wrote that he was “a soft creature, flamingly nelly—an imitation of a young girl without parody.” Her use of the word “nelly” may have rankled William Shawn—but again, it was the word she thought best conveyed her feeling for the character. “Effeminate” would have been too tame, too predictable. A key to her profound connection with readers had always been her rich use of the vernacular; she wrote in the current jargon, and she thought her readers should be able to take it. “If I make these jokes,” she told her friend Daryl Chin, “it’s because I have so many gay friends and I assume they all understand.”
While some movie fans were offended by her review of Rich and Famous on behalf of George