Doing it Wrong

             There are critics, and then there is the singular Pauline Kael. Kael wrote about movies for the New Yorker from 1968 to 1991 in a style that defies categorization, mixing consumer advocacy, autobiography, and social criticism (oftentimes in the same paragraph). She revolutionized arts journalism by doing everything wrong: she wrote in a conversational tone, peppered her pieces with liberal doses of the first- and second-person, and considered objectivity to be the domain of “sapheads.” Sometimes, she devoted almost no space in her column to the movie itself, preferring to follow her own meandering train of thought wherever it took her.

            Her unique approach gained her a legion of fans, a National Book Award, and a spate of imitators known as “Paulettes.’ When it worked, it was utterly brilliant. For instance, take this excerpt from her 1976 review of the movie Sparkle: “the ‘bad girl’ is the cheapest, easiest way for the movies to deal with the woman with guts.” This is a valuable insight about the way movies reflect gender norms, and it is interesting and original enough that Kael can be forgiven for putting the movie itself aside for about four hundred words.

            But Kael also had her detractors, mainly other critics who took issue with her highly personal, subjective style. Most of them have a point—Kael’s writing is not without its flaws. In her essay, “House Critic,” Renata Adler sets out to criticize the critic, and she does make some unpleasantly vicious (but accurate) points about Kael’s work.

            Most importantly, Adler shows that Kael can downright mean. Though her wittiness sweetens her cruelty, Kael said some indefensibly vicious things over the course of her career. Was it really necessary for her to call Paul Schrader a “whore” who “doesn’t know how to turn a trick” when reviewing a movie that Schrader likely put his whole being into? This is perhaps the most pernicious part of Pauline’s legacy: that she made it cool for critics to be nasty.

            Her other failings are more forgivable. Yes, it is true that Kael has a habit of stringing together a series of buzzwords to create sentences that seem impressive but mean nothing once unpacked, such as “Hans Christian Anderson’s tear-stained The Little Mermaid is peerlessly mythic.” And yes, she also has a habit of doing things like alluding to the Faustian aspects of The Little Mermaid, then dropping the subject completely without explaining herself—a literary sleight-of-hand that gives the impression of deep thinking without the accompanying substance.

              And yet, there is always Kael’s insight at the end of her column, where she might casually postulate that The Little Mermaid is successful despite being a “stale pastry” because parents have “been imprinted with Disney-style kitsch,” forcing the reader to ponder the way art can placate across generations. To borrow one of her techniques (using the second person to bring the reader inside the critic’s mind), you overlook her detours and failings because she ends up in such an interesting place.