Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [58]
While she was waiting for the McCall’s assignments to begin, she accepted a number of lecture engagements. One of them was an invitation to speak at a conference of educators held at Dartmouth College in October 1965. The speech that resulted may not have been what the conference’s officials had in mind, but it was a perfect distillation of Pauline’s feelings about the worst traps of academia. “It’s Only a Movie” was a persuasive argument against film studies courses in American universities. In it, Pauline referred to her early, rebellious student attitudes. Sitting down to try to prepare a film course, she said, served only to remind her “how my thumbnails got worn down from scraping the paint off my pencils as the teacher droned on about great literature. I remembered music appreciation with the record being played over and over, the needle arm going back and forth, and I remembered the slide machine in art history and the deadly rhythm of the instructor’s paper. Teaching a course in film studies,” she said, “goes against the grain of everything I feel about movies, and against the grain of just about everything I believe about how we learn in the arts.”
What academic instructors seemed incapable of recognizing about genuine movie-lovers, she argued, was that film represented “a world more exciting than the deadening world of trying-to-be-helpful teachers and chewed-over texts.” Film, like jazz and popular music, had an advantage over other traditional art forms because it had not received a cultural stamp of approval in advance; it was “something we wanted, not something fed to us.” She went on:
Surely only social deviates would say to a child, “What’s the matter with you, why don’t you want to go to the movies?” Kids don’t have to get all dressed up or go with an adult the way they do to a Leonard Bernstein concert, shiny and flushed with the privilege of being there. No cultural glow suffuses the Saturday afternoon movie audience; they are still free to react as they feel like reacting, with derision or excitement or disappointment or whatever.... Going to a movie doesn’t wind up with the horrors of reprimands for your restlessness, with nervous reactions, tears, and family disappointments that you weren’t up to it. It’s only a movie. What beautiful words. At the movies, you’re left gloriously alone. You can say it stinks and nobody’s shocked.
She also penned an intriguing essay for The Atlantic Monthly: “Marlon Brando: An American Hero.” The title may have suggested a straightforward, starry-eyed appreciation, but what evolved was something rather different: an attempt to explain why Brando, only sixteen years after the beginning of his screen career, seemed to be parodying himself. Pauline placed the blame on the unspoken conspiracy of both journalists and the movie industry to ridicule him. She also lit into the corrupt studios, which, in her view, usually reacted to a star’s rising power and fame by launching “large-scale campaigns designed to cut him down to an easier-to-deal-with size or to supplant him with younger, cheaper talent.” Still, Brando’s talent could not be disguised. “His greatness is in a range that is too disturbing to be encompassed by regular movies,” she wrote. She found him “still