Author profile: Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael should have been a standup comic. She wrote film criticism instead; lucky for us. Not so lucky for the films, filmmakers and performers she zeroed in on:

On Return of the Jedi: “Even the scene that should be the emotional peak of the whole mythic trilogy -- the moment when the young protagonist, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) removes the black visor and the helmet that have concealed Darth Vader’s face -- has no thrill. There isn’t a gasp to be heard in the entire theatre. Luke looks into the eyes of his nightmare father, and he might be ordering a veggieburger.”

Kael was born in California in 1919. She was a philosophy major at the University of California, Berkeley, and parlayed that lucrative diploma into a patchwork career as a movie theatre manager. She flirted with radio and filmmaking early on, but it was her written descriptions of the films playing at her theatre that first caught attention. A notorious early stint at McCall’s, during which she famously trashed The Sound of Music, led her to The New Yorker, where she spent 23 years. She retired in 1991 and died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease on Sep. 3, 2001.

The act of deconstruction is a vicious thrill to every critic, and Kael’s writing style often convinced her readers that there was more bitter vitriol in her than celebratory adulations. She was a physically small woman (under five feet tall), which was a marked contrast to the authoritative boom of her writing. Automatic audience goodwill was a fallacy to her; what mattered most was the intoxicating, intensely vivid personal experiences that, she believed, only the movies had the power to convey. More than anything else, she valued films that were honest and direct in their intentions; she was as quick to celebrate pop filmmaking that went unashamedly for the gold as she was to denounce excessive self-consciousness and pretension.

She was, of course, controversial, not to mention undeniably influential. Peter Biskind’s gossipy Easy Riders, Raging Bulls depicts Kael as a starstruck member of the New York literati elite who was subject to hyperbole when it came to the work of filmmakers she was familiar with on a personal level, like Robert Altman, Brian DePalma and Martin Scorsese (claims Kael subsequently dismissed as specious), but it’s generally agreed that her insistent support of films like Bonnie & Clyde, MASH, Mean Streets and The Godfather helped play a crucial role in the film movement of the 1960s and 70s. She also was one of the first film critics to cross over to a job in the film business, as an “executive consultant” for Paramount, a job which lasted all of five months and inspired her most incisive, and prescient, piece on the state of the art, “Why Are Movies So Bad? Or, The Numbers” (June 23, 1980):

“There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. At first, the heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications -- the opportunity to associate with world-famous celebrities. Some other conglomerate heads may be drawn in for the girls, but for them, too, a new social life beckons, and as they become socially involved, people with great names approach them as equals, and it gets them crazy. Famous stars and producers and writers and directors tell them about offers they’ve had from other studios and about what ideas that they have for pictures, and the conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they control aren’t in on those wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with their studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be summoning directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and telling the company executives what projects should be developed.”

Film criticism can sometimes be a lucrative gateway; Stephen Schiff, Rod Lurie, Stephen Hunter and Elvis Mitchell have followed in her footsteps, but few have Kael’s ferocious gift for it. You get the sense that her best work is done when she’s picking apart something that she can’t help but to love. What is most striking about Kael is her voice: passionate, tough and uncompromising. Alongside critics like Andrew Sarris, she brought artistic legitimacy to the form and captured, in her body of work, the electric excitement of creative revolution, and the crushing sadness of its increasingly-commercialized decline. In her introduction for For Keeps, a 1996 anthology of her work, she wrote:

“I’m frequently asked why I don’t write my memoirs. I think I have.”

Bibliography:
I Lost It at the Movies (1965)
Going Steady (1970)
Deeper Into Movies (1973) (winner of the National Book Award)
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1976)
Reeling (1977)
When the Lights Go Down (1980)
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982) (collected capsule reviews)
Taking It All In (1984)
State of the Art (1985)
Hooked (1989)
Movie Love (1991)
For Keeps (1996) (collected reviews & essays)

Featured in:
The Citizen Kane Book (1972) (essay “Raising Kane”)

Subject of:
Conversations with Pauline Kael by Will Brantley (1996)
Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me by Craig Seligman
Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael by Francis Davis (2002)
- read excerpts at Salon

Further resources:
Ken Tucker surveys Kael’s career at Salon
Choice Kael quotes from BrainyQuotes
NPR’s collection of audio tributes to Kael from All Things Considered, David Thomson and Elvis Mitchell