Pauline Kael: All Critic, No Heart

Audience: Current Readers of The New Yorker

Pauline Kael: All Critic, No Heart

There is no doubt that Pauline Kael, famed film critic of the fifties and sixties, loved movies. In fact, she loved them so much that, according to protégé Francis Davis in “Afterglow,” she “[asked] more of them than they could routinely deliver.” In that manner, her love for movies comes across more as affectionate abuse, like squeezing a beloved puppy until it cannot breathe. Love folded in hate; crass taste disguised as a personable tone; a critical eye covering up a lack of sympathy– Pauline Kael was a series of contradictions.

In “Afterglow,” Francis Davis’s interview with Pauline Kael, Kael says, “I loved lowbrow taste, and that was hard to get across.” However, in her reviews her vocabulary and taste in vulgarity convey her lowbrow taste more than adequately. In Renata Alder’s “House Critic” she mercilessly points out many of Kael’s “ad personam physical images” such as “a new brand of pop manure” and “flatulent seriousness.” Alder also calls attention to Kael’s affinity for four basic film components typically associated with adolescent males: “frissons of horror,” “physical violence,” “sex scenes,” and “fantasies of invasion.” Kael’s taste isn’t lowbrow; it’s nothing more than that of a cocky teenage boy with an extensive knowledge of film.

Kael’s appetite for the harshness in life is apparent in her praise of “My Left Foot” and “Klute.” For both films she makes note of the “toughness” of the characters and the directors’ straightforward take on the respective stories of a cerebral palsy victim and a call girl. It is understandable to want a film to give its subject justice unburdened by sentimentality; however Kael’s lack of sensitivity extends to almost anti-social proportions.

In her review of “Funny Girl” Kael says that movies stars are “more intense and dazzling than people we ordinarily encounter in life, and far more charming than the extraordinary people we encounter” because “we don’t have to undergo the frenzy or the risks of being involved with them.” Is she being witty or inadvertently revealing herself? Like Davis writes in “Afterglow,” it’s well known that Pauline Kael did not have her daughter with one of her three husbands, but rather as an arrangement with gay poet James Broughton. It seems that Kael went to great lengths to avoid “involvement” with people.

Kael’s un-involvement with people extended to movies. She never saw a film more than once, or rather, would not allow herself to do so—she admitted in “Afterglow” that she wanted to see Robert Altman’s Nashville another time. Kael had the potential to be a film lover, but was too disciplined in her profession, and instead became a mere film expert.

In her review of “Hiroshima Mon Amour” Kael claims that actress Emmanuelle Riva “was exposing one of the worst faults of intelligent modern women: she was talking all her emotions out.” In turn, it seems that the opposite was true of Kael—her biggest fault was not feeling enough.