Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [231]
One of the most powerful truths to be gleaned from examining Pauline’s life is that it was, throughout its span, a triumph of instinct over an astonishing intellect. Her highly emotional responses to art were what enabled her to make so indelible a mark as a critic. On the surface, it might seem that any critic does the same thing, but it’s doubtful that any critic ever had so little barrier between herself and her subject. She connected with film the way a great actor is supposed to connect with his text, and she took her readers to places they never could have imagined a mere movie review could transport them.
To call what she did reviewing, of course, is to trivialize it. She was not writing snappy, easily quoted opinions that would fit neatly into twelve column inches. She brought us into the experience of sitting next to her in a darkened movie theater. She generously shared her passion and knowledge and insights, made us feel that we were a part of the magic and chaos and wreckage unfolding up there on the screen. She made us feel the way we feel during a great performance in the theater—that we’re part of what’s happening onstage.
Pauline’s biggest professional disappointment was that she lived to see the infantilization of the great moviegoing audience she had always dreamed of and believed in. “Now people watch movies so they can stay kids,” said her friend Armond White in a 2009 interview. Pauline would have agreed with him. She also would have been shattered to witness the way in which the role of the film critic has been eclipsed—not only by studio marketing practices but even more by the Internet, with its system of validating the critical opinion of anyone who owns a computer.
But Pauline’s great victory was that, like a visionary novelist, she widened the scope of her art—she redefined the possibilities of how a critic could think, and how a critic’s work might benefit the art form itself. At a certain point she abandoned the idea of writing about anything but the movies. She may have been able to bring her critical gifts to bear on other subjects, and affected us similarly. What mattered most was that she gave completely and exhaustively of herself, until the day came when physically she had nothing left to give. To Ray Sawhill, her reviews weren’t pieces of criticism so much as exhilarating pieces of performance art, played out in the pages of The New Yorker.
We should be grateful that once she found her subject, she never deserted it, never grew bored with it—the trap that awaits nearly every critic. Her almost childlike optimism about the screen’s possibilities, even her unsuccessful time in Hollywood, was an attempt to draw herself closer to her subject. She lived her entire life the way so many of us do only for a brief time as college students, staying up all night in coffee shops with our ragged copies of Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov and Flannery O’Connor, reading and debating, unable, yet, to imagine that we could ever grow weary of the world of books and music and movies and ideas.
Perhaps Pauline’s life’s work, and the unflagging, joyful energy she brought to it, are best illuminated by a story that Marcia Nasatir loved to tell. It was September 1971, and the past week had seen the death of Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon’s being named Time’s Man of the Year; Nasatir’s son Seth had just been sent over to Vietnam. Nasatir called Pauline to tell her how overwhelmed she felt by it all.
Pauline listened. There was a momentary silence.
“And to think,” Pauline finally said, “there’s not even a decent movie to see.”
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began for me many years ago in Oregon, when I was a seventh-grade student and first came across Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang at the Tillamook County Library. Much of what she said about Blow-Up and Morgan! and other films