What she said - the Art of Pauline Kael

 I didn't intend to write about the 2018 documentary What she said -- The Art of Pauline Kael.  The subject is too close to me and I don't think that I can be objective.  When I was a teenager, I avidly followed Kael's movie reviews in The New Yorker and read all of her books.  She influenced my perspective on film so powerfully that there are many movies that I  can see only through her eyes.  If I'm enjoying a film that she panned, I can hear her voice hectoring me and smearing disapproval all over a film that I might otherwise admire.  Certain pictures, most particularly things like Lawrence of Arabia and Clockwork Orange, I have always disdained because Kael savaged them so thoroughly.  It has taken me 30 years to realize that she wasn't always reliable and that many of her opinions were perverse to the point of absurdity -- I now admire Cabaret, for instance, but was trained to dislike it by Kael's scathing review.  Her opinions were so strong and expressed so vehemently that they were overwhelming and seemed, when I was young, inarguable.  Sometimes, I parroted her declarations -- that was an easy way to lose friends, particularly in the seventies when movies were a religion to many of us.

What she said isn't particularly profound and it doesn't yield much in the way of insights as to Kael's commanding personality.  There's a dearth of good footage showing Kael, and she wasn't particularly photogenic or impressive in TV interviews.  In her middle age, she came across as dowdy and efficiently opinionated -- the kind of woman you used to see at polling places, an election judge affiliated with the League of Women Voters.  (Although I know she was a progressive politically, she had the matronly appearance of a stern Republican delegate to the State Convention.)  She wasn't a "movie star" and didn't have "movie star" looks and this, of course, was always the curse of her existence -- like Andy Warhol, who knows the heights to which she might have ascended, had she been conventionally beautiful.  On TV, she seems to always have a slight grievance and her incredible sense of humor is inexplicably damped -- she speaks a bit pedantically and, in one interview, with Dick Cavett, she uses the noun "oneself" to refer to herself no less than five times in two sentences.  She doesn't speak the way she writes -- a factor that leads you to conclude that her intensely idiomatic and colloquial style, her way of seizing her readers by the buttonholes and jawboning them into submission, was a carefully contrived, and much studied, rhetorical device.  She was fundamentally contrarian and her best work enthusiastically demolishes the opinions of her competitors in the movie reviewing trade.  Her book on Citizen Kane, Raising Kane establishes the framework for the new Netflix movie Mank and was correctly perceived by Welles and his acolytes as a vicious and seditious act of lese majeste.  (Peter Bogdanovich mournfully observes how unfair the book was.)  Kael's mode was to attack sacred cows -- and Welles was a sacred cow when she wrote the book praising Mankiewicz and, if truth be known, damning Welles with mere "faint praise".  (In fact, Kael was a great admirer of Welles and her review of Chimes at Midnight is an astonishing defense of that film.)  Kael's victims were, often, severely damaged by her attacks -- for instance, David Lean claimed that he didn't make a movie for 14 years after Kael denounced him in print and, then, added an in-person assault at a party to her hostile campaign.  Like all contrarians, Kael derived her energy from the consensus opinion that she was attacking.  The more secure and powerful the consensus, the more vehement and effective her denunciation.  The odd thing was that she was, more or less, without any sort of theoretical principles -- I still recall her stinging rebuke of philosophical film critics like Siegfried Kracauer (I think it was called:  "Is there a cure for Film Criticism?")  Paradoxically, she often espoused positions in her reviews that were the opposite of her more extended polemical screeds.  For instance, she effectively damned Andrew Sarris' auteur approach to cinema, while, at the same time, using her reviews to elevate Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Coppola, and Robert Altman to the eminence of being distinguished American film auteurs.  Paul Schrader notes that Kael was shrewd in that she withheld her views until a consensus had developed and, then, attacked that consensus.  One suspects that some of her strongest opinions were founded on an obsessive desire to say the opposite of what other critics were saying -- did she famously praise Bonnie and Clyde because it was a great film or because other mainstream critics had been universally hostile to the movie?  It doesn't really matter because the force of her prose was such that she, often, seems to talk herself into positions that she has adopted as a mere contrarian strategy.  Her writing was always characterized by the most vivid hyperbole -- a good movie was the greatest of all time, epochal as far as she was concerned -- like the first performance of The Rite of Spring as she said in relation to Last Tango in Paris; movies that she didn't like were garbage, "slime" (she called Chaplin's Limelight "slimelight") not just failures but morally reprehensible.  Like most movie critics (I think Roger Ebert was the great exception), her opinions ultimately hardened to the point that she became inflexible and dogmatic.  Her highly emotional response to films became increasingly bizarre and capricious -- I remember that, at the end of her career, she might encourage her readers to see a picture that was otherwise a failure because a certain scene might have taken an emotional direction of which she approved.  (It mattered only slightly that the film failed to develop as she had hoped -- someone says in an interview that Kael always judged herself on her good intentions, a self-assessment that kept her from seeing the unnecessary cruelty that she visited upon those whom she thought were mistaken about movies that she liked or didn't like.)  In the end, those who live by the sword die by the sword as well -- she was taken down by an essay by Renata Adler that was so breathtakingly savage that you flinched as you read it.  And, unfortunately, Adler's diatribe, although profoundly unfair, was sufficiently accurate to create a recognizable parody of Kael's faults and affectations before pulverizing them to dust and ashes.  (I can still recall the shock with which I read Adler's essay and, also, the sense of recognition that much of what Adler identified as wicked and worthless in Kael's writing was, in fact, characteristic of her obsessions and rhetorical hyperbole.)  Kael didn't recover from Adler's mauling; Adler out-Kaeled Kael.  She retired shortly thereafter, leaving her admirers (and I remained one) to speculate endlessly as to what she would thought of certain films that we knew she had seen but on which she was now silent.  

There's nothing particularly new or noteworthy in this documentary.  It zips along efficiently addressing the highlights in Kael's career.  The film is illustrated by innumerable movie clips but they don't add anything much to the film and, in fact, many of the snippets are from movies that Kael detested.  Like many estimable women, she didn't begin her career until relatively late in life -- her first reviews were published when she was 35.  (She spent her youth in fruitless love affairs and raising, as a single mother, her daughter Gina.  Gina, a very attractive, if slightly hapless, women now approaching old age herself appears in the film -- she seems to have been treated, by and large, by her mother as a sort of administrative secretary.)  Kael had worked as a waitress and a seamstress and ran a couple of tiny repertory film theaters on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco.  There's some fabulous footage of her drunk at a cocktail party, holding a martini glass and welcoming her guests.  She was quintessentially a woman of the golden West -- she clearly didn't like New York City and talks, in one sequence, about her fear of going out of her apartment.  (She was very small and thought of herself as physically defenseless.)  It's interesting that she was really never paid enough money to support herself entirely by movie reviews -- even at the New Yorker, she didn't make enough on which to live.  (For this reason, she had to give lectures and sell her books, mostly collections of film reviews that she had written.)  She had many of the characteristics of a PR huckster.  (Her first book is largely comprised of short blurbs that she wrote to encourage people to see movies that she showed in her repertory theaters in San Francisco).  In fact, she famously (and unsuccessfully) worked for Warren Beatty for six months as a consultant (and, apparently, some kind of publicist) -- her sojourn in Hollywood was a failure, although the details remain mysterious:  it's a bit like Plato traveling to Syracuse to put his political ideas into practice there -- it wasn't a successful venture.  She spent much of her life worrying about money.  There's a startling sound clip of her resigning from a show on which she provided film reviews on the radio -- she bitterly laments her poverty and the fact that, if she isn't going to be paid for her services, she isn't going to provide them for free.  As a woman who valued authenticity of emotion more highly than anyone else, she was keenly aware of being manipulated by filmmakers that she didn't like -- she famously detested Hitchcock, I think, because of his manipulative effects, and seems to have had a blind spot for Michael Powell, a great director but someone she didn't much admire.  (She didn't seem to understand film noir and had little interest in many of the great crime films from the forties and fifties -- for instance, she doesn't seem to have been very impressed by Fritz Lang's American films.)  Its possible that her distaste for Hitchcock (who was, for better or worse, an auteur -- and promoted in that way) was primarily an aspect of her contrarian opinions.

The film begins and ends with Kael answering questions put to her by a small child -- probably a grandchild.  She is asked about her favorite film -- she answers Menilmontant.  She asked when she was most happy:  "Now," she says.  I didn't come to many of the films that Kael disliked until my middle-age and, in this regard, I value her disapprobation -- she kept me from seeing many movies until later in my life that I now like and, therefore, stored up pleasures for me, accordingly, that I now appreciate.