Pauline Kael

There as always been controversy over the criticisms that have been provided by Pauline Kael during her time as a weekly movie critic for The New Yorker. As a critic, Ms. Kael used movies to show “us the work of art in some new relation to our age”, as Oscar Wilde put it. Pauline herself stated “I was often accused of writing about everything but the movie.”

It is true that Pauline experimented with the boarders between movie critic and social critic, the boarders between what type of film should or shouldn’t be reviewed (Deep Throat); there are really few barriers in critical writing that Ms. Kael did not confront. An explorer in the field of movie critics, she had no particular movie preferences and could easily stomach and enjoy even lowbrow comedy.

But looking closely at her reviews and at her interview in Afterglow, where she describes some of the reasoning behind her work, there are a lot of movies that have done quite well that she has panned (American Beauty, Star Wars) and gone against the crowd, and then there are other films which seemed like they deserved less credit but received more.

It is complicated to keep track of what Ms. Kael’s taste is because it may revolve more around the social context that the movie is platformed on than the movie itself. Top Gun was seen as homoerotic instead of the classic, and Hiroshima Mon Amour, positively heralded throughout the media, was suggested by Ms. Kael to be the educated audience’s “wish fulfillment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and their liberalism,” but Barbra Streisand’s Funny Girl was given a “Bravo!” Perhaps an understanding of her opinion will always elude us.
It is evident that a great deal of actors, directors and movie-goers will not agree with her opinion and that is okay because the success of a critic is not measured by the degree of accuracy they have to the general public’s opinion or to the actual truth. Pauline Kael did a superb job of what Oscar Wilde calls “setting a mood.”

This, he explains, is what art is about and this is what Ms. Kael was great at. She would take a film, decide if she liked it or not, figure out the social context that it represented and then as Adler says “Then there began to be quirks, mannerism, in particular in certain compulsive and joyless naughtiness.”

Pauline Kael was daring, naughty, fun, pretentious, witty, and had a unique taste in movies perhaps only perfectly compatible with Francis Davis. Her vast reserves of knowledge about movies that are forgotten today, the movies of the sixties, seventies, eighties, may grant her some insight into films that escapes the rest of us. Ms. Kael had practically become a film Guru. It showed that she loved her medium and was happy to write about it with a creativity that spawned from her genuine criticism and did what a movie critic’s job is anyways. Ms. Kael entertained her readers, not matter what.