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“A Worn Path,” in which an old Mississippi country woman, Phoenix Jackson, makes the trek into Natchez to get medicine for her grandson. Many of Welty’s readers wrote to her, intrigued by the idea that Phoenix’s grandson had already died, that the old woman was making the trip out of habit—the implication being that this somehow improved the story. It was an interpretation that disturbed Welty. “It’s all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say.” More and more people seemed to be having some sort of breakdown of identity in relation to what they consumed; they were learning not to trust their own reactions to what they experienced in the arts. This might have been regarded as a healthy sign, as a breaking out of complacent patterns and a reaching toward something new and different—but there were many who did not view it that way, and Pauline was one of them. She expressed her concerns on this subject in an essay called “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” which was published in December 1964—her first appearance in a large-circulation periodical, The Atlantic Monthly.

“Are Movies Going to Pieces?” was a lively examination of what she believed to be the increasing incomprehensibility of many of the new pictures being produced. The New Wave classics might have been free-form, but they had a strong, unified vision behind the experimental style; some of the more recent movies seemed to throw logic and cohesion and structure out the window in search of something more sensational or self-consciously “artistic,” and it disturbed her that viewers didn’t seem to be wise to the trend. Television, with its constant interruptions, might be partly responsible for audiences’ acceptance of gaping lapses of logic in movies, of the breakdown of a reliable storytelling method. But she sensed that there was much more to it than that, and she felt that the true cause was to be found in the chaotic pace of modern life: Audiences were so revved up emotionally that they had lost the ability to discern when a movie’s form and structure had let them down.

It was a film that not many saw which crystallized Pauline’s concerns: Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), a haunted-house thriller in which the horror is unseen. In her essay she reported what had become one of her favorite reviewing habits: scrutinizing the audience as a way of sorting out what was happening to the movie industry. She reported that at the showing of The Haunting that she had seen, the few people in attendance “were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing—the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along.” From this point, she drew a connecting line to another of her favorite targets, the art-house audience, which she felt “accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style.”

She was careful to warn her readers that, while she didn’t want to be branded as a “boob who attacks ambiguity and complexity,” she did believe that even complex subject matter should be expressed as lucidly as possible. The fracturing of narrative, the habit of taking simple ideas and stories and rendering them “complex” through superficially tricky and dazzling technical means, meant that “more and more people come out of a movie and can’t tell you what they’ve seen, or even whether they liked it.”

Having placed “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” with the widely read Atlantic Monthly, Mills was now able to sell Pauline’s essay “Old Movies Never Die” to Mademoiselle, which, despite being a women’s fashion magazine, had for years published a good deal of quality nonfiction and fiction. “Old Movies Never Die” was a fairly routine roundup of ’30s movies, and she herself thought little of it when it was eventually published in the July 1965 issue. But she was delighted with the money and exposure that publication in another