Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [96]
Two of the biggest hits of the summer of 1970 were John G. Avildsen’s Joe and Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. The critical and commercial success of Joe came as a surprise: it was a crudely written and acted, modestly budgeted look at the pent-up rage and resentment of the hardworking, play-by-the-rules parents of the hippie generation—Richard Nixon’s silent majority. Joe was really an old-fashioned melodrama that got a tight grip on its audience by depicting the violence and destructiveness that the older generation was capable of inflicting on the young, and Pauline saw it for what it was—a film “slanted to feed the paranoia of youth.” At the picture’s violent climax, “members of the audience responded on cue with cries of ‘Next time we’ll have guns!’ and ‘We’ll get you first, Joe!’ ” Pauline thought that Joe’s “manipulation of the audience is so shrewdly, single-mindedly commercial that it’s rather terrifying to sit there and observe how susceptible the young audience is.”
She continued to worry that young audiences didn’t think deeply enough, didn’t read enough. They didn’t even, she claimed—though she didn’t quote any relevant statistics—go to the movies that often; they simply went to a handful of films over and over again. It also bothered her that audiences cheered the end of Five Easy Pieces, in which the social dropout Robert Eroica Dupea (Jack Nicholson) abandons his girlfriend (Karen Black) at a gas station, bums a ride off a trucker, and goes cruising down the freeway, in search of nothing and heading nowhere in particular.
After the Kent State shootings in May 1970, some 4 million American students participated in campus strikes. Pauline thought that American youth was actually in a superb position to work for positive social change, but she was surprisingly conservative on the subject of outright rebellion. In the ’60s she had chastised her nephew Bret Wallach for demonstrating against the Berkeley chancellor Edward W. Strong, assuring Bret that Strong was really a good man. She sensed that in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy in 1968, the ongoing mess of Vietnam, and the Manson Family murders, young people weren’t as interested in working for the good of something as they were in withdrawing from everything. Anger was transmuting itself not into action but into apathy. Too many young people, Pauline worried, were “not caring, and not believing anything. They go numb, like the young girl in Joe, looking vaguely for some communal Eden where those without hope can cling to each other, and they accept and prefer the loser self-image, not wanting to believe that anything good can happen to them.”
It was an observation that revealed Pauline’s allegiance—whether or not she cared to admit it—to the period in which she had grown up. For all her unconventional thinking and her strong identification with many in the younger generation of directors and actors, she held to the solidly old-fashioned view that real happiness came through hard work and testing yourself, through identifying a goal and going after it with everything you had. The numbing of the audience that she wrote about in October 1970 was alien to her temperament: She believed that youth should be encouraged to move forward. Instead, the movies were encouraging them to drop out.
There was one person, however, whom she did not encourage to move forward. For a number of years Gina had shown a marked interest in modern dance. Pauline was happy to help fund her studies but stopped short of urging her to explore a career as a dancer. It remained important