What are the critics for
On Pauline Kael and the cojones
My regular readers will know that the death of art and book criticism in Canada is one of topics that I obsessively keep coming back to. Will the Canadian novel, opera and classical survive without the lively critical chatter? Movies certainly will, but what will they be if only fandom exists, and not any kind of independent critical evaluation? Do readers care, do artists care? (Media owners and execs in Canada have shown that they don’t, so we know that answer.)
That film criticism too is in rough shape, I’ve only begun to realize a few years back. Fandom, star-struckness and compromise-for-access has always dogged the profession, but the internet and social media have further exacerbated the issues. Watching the Rob Garver doc about Pauline Kael was like visiting another planet: a place where at least some critics had huge popular appeal and played a crucial role in the growth of the art form.
The Kael era cannot be repeated, of course, because the political economy of movie consumption is different now but also because the critics are made of a different mettle. (Gather round children…) One feeds off the other, in this interplay between the environment and the character. Though you would think that in the social media, culture wars environment controversial and rude critics would thrive, opposite has been the case. I’ll leave it to you movie people who read my newsletter to tell me why the freelance-supplied reviews are now, to use a Kaelism, written in a tone of “term paper pomposity” and with their (sorry, talk to Kael) “balls cut off”?
Kael herself wasn’t sure if it’s possible to earn a living as an independent movie critic for much of her life. “There had been so much pressure from the movie companies that I wasn’t allowed into screenings,” she says in one of the TV interviews in the doc. “I’d pretty much been forced out of every job either by editors, to be cooperative with advertisers… [or because of] reader pressure. I really thought maybe there’s just no way to do it.”
She was offered a contract at McCall’s but the predominantly female readership hated her sarcasm for the pure movies like The Sound of Music. In The New Republic, she’d find her sentences had been rewritten without her knowledge. Her first review for the New Yorker was the now legendary take on Bonnie and Clyde, which was rejected at TNR because it went against the tide. Several of the people in the documentary, writers and filmmakers equally, talk about that salvaging of B&C against the major trashing everywhere else as a key moment in what would be known as the American New Wave. “It had started the American New Wave. I think it was the movie, Bonnie and Clyde, but it was also her review, which was a sensation on its own”, says one of the critics. She had championed young Scorsese, Coppola, and always Robert Altman, especially Nashville and Mrs Miller and McCabe. Famously, she panned Blade Runner, 2001: A Space Odyssey, various auteur Italian movies like La Notte and La Dolce Vita, and – something that required not a small amount of courage – Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour Shoah. For that, she was called a “self-hating Jew”.
Even when her legend was established, the New Yorker still did not pay her a living wage, but divided the movie critic’s position into two six-month-a-year gigs, which she alternated with another writer. Early in her career, for a long time, she held an unpaid reviewer position at a radio station where she filled a popular time slot. (It’s like the start-up time where you work for no or little money is a must in art criticism, whenever new media technologies introduce themselves.) Once finally at the New Yorker, she had an intense love-hate relationship with William Shawn who was, as she would have put it and probably did, a gentleman critic. She took pleasure in writing words that would upset his sensibilities. “Does a latrine have to appear this frequently in your reviews”, is one of the more benign notes from him to her.
Camille Paglia in the doc: “There’s a certain kind of colloquial voice that Pauline Kael had. It’s back to Dorothy Parker, a kind of snappish sound.” Criticism for Kael was a popular genre. And people read her like crazy.
She went after other movie critics with relish (see under Andrew Sarris) and novelists too (Normal Mailer whinges about her in an interview in the doc). I wish I could re-jenga the time and see how she would react to Richard Brody. Renata Adler, in turn, brutally panned her. It was like art criticism was a matter of life and death, or something.
Quentin Tarantino, a life long fan, is also in the Garver doc and the latest news is that his next film will be about Kael.
“The world is really divided,” Kael says in another TV interview, “between the people who get deep pleasure from doing a good job and the ones who are just trying to get through the day. And there are a great many critics who are just trying to get through the day, who know they’re second rate and who are scared of their editors and scared of their readers, and scared of the movie companies. And with some justification, but they are never good enough to conquer their fears. The point would be to try to strengthen your own writing style and develop more courage because then you’re in a better position.” And “Without critics, you have nothing but advertisers. So, it’s the job of the critic, in terms of a social function, to try to alert people and interest them in anything that’s really new or innovative, that spells the future of an art form. Without a few critics doing that, the advertisers will keep everything stagnant. Because if they can sell anything, if there are no dissenting voices, movies will not advance in any way.”
I thought a lot about this and am trying to come up with a list of people who are performing this kind of social function as critics, and are allowed to and encouraged by their media companies. As something of a counter example, this 2018 piece by Sarah Miller in Popula came to mind, her recollection on why she decided to keep her gig and force herself to praise the English Patient back in the 1990s when Anthony Minghella’s epic cleaned up the award ceremonies and swept the critics and the audiences off their feet. It’s depressing and optimistic (better late than never) at the same time.
“It will be hard to be engaged with the world as much as Pauline was,” says Greil Marcus in the film, “in terms of her energy, in terms of her intellectual curiosity, her capacity for outrage and love.” And the best of the critics I read today (they tend to be found in the Spectator, the Times (London), the Critic and UnHerd) have that vitality and irreverence. Has the left lost the capacity for irreverence and humour in art criticism, why am I reading criticism in predominantly right-of-centre publications? (I have to fess up to Spiked too, which had one of the best reassessments of JK Rowling, by Julie Burchill, anywhere, ever, and the best pan of Grace Lavery’s ghastly book, anywhere, ever.) But that topic deserves its own conversation.
Anyone with a library card can watch What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael on Kanopy for free.