Usually I prefer reading fiction but, being between fiction novels now, I've gone back to the books of movie criticism I got earlier this year. I finished Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation and have continued reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies. Tarantino's book was a great companion to the movies he talked about, a charmingly personal tour of '70s cinema. I certainly didn't always agree with him. I can't share his love for Paradise Alley and I was a little surprised he considered Sylvester Stallone's inspiration for the film to be entirely The Dead End Kids. I thought it was at least partially inspired by Night and the City. But his views on Steve McQueen films and on Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse really enhanced my appreciation for them.
Kael's book, largely written in the '50s, is less interesting to me for the insights Kael has into the films she's talking about and more as a specimen of opinion pieces from the era. Of all the books I've read from the '50s, hers is the most directly expressive of conservative opinions and it gives me a clearer impression of how politics were polarised at that time than I've ever had before. This is from her chapter on New Wave British films:
The semidocumentary surface of these films is linked to an ideology which is in its way peculiar to English film critics--the ideology of commitment. If you read Sight and Sound, in which so many films are appraised for the director's degree of commitment to a social point of view (good if left wing, bad if not), you will discover that in this ideology, location shooting, particularly around working-class locations, is, in itself, almost a proof of commitment. In judging works from other countries, the English will overestimate a film like Marty, and they'll suggest that a film that is stylized or that deals with upper-class characters is somehow "evasive"--that it doesn't want to come to terms with the material. This attitude gives the critics an extraordinarily high moral tone.
Imagine what she'd have thought of Jeanne Dielmann getting voted number one on Sight and Sound's greatest films list.
The British films she talks about in the cited chapter include some I admired myself--Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, and Look Back in Anger--and Kael is not entirely negative about them. She seems to have liked Room at the Top best of all. But she makes a good point that realism or focus on working-class characters does not, by themselves, make movies great.
X Sonnet #1746
The mad and restless horses prowl the heath.
The whites of violent eyes demand a light.
Obtrusive fog descends like monster teeth.
Pervasive chill compels the blood to fight.
A giant toe could span a couple trains.
Surrounding forests dropped their leaves of cash.
Cavorting ghosts convened for growing pains.
When life arose, 'twas over barley mash.
Where falling trees arrive at leaves it's late.
The autumn weather's nice for cleaning floors.
But faeries giving birth'll make you wait.
Despite the fact you never cared for bores.
A fleet of ties eclipsed the collar sun.
Across the leggy plain the trousers run.
I started reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies last week, a collection of her reviews and essays from 1954 to 1965. It's giving me a lot of perspective. Most books I've read from that period, books that commentated on contemporary life, had a mostly progressive or liberal perspective while Kael seems to have been much more conservative. Although she praises Marlon Brando and The Wild One, Streetcar Named Desire, and On the Waterfront, she nonetheless decries a general trend of "delinquent" cinema.
The romance of human desperation is ravishing for those who wish to identify with the hero's amoral victory: everything he does is forgivable, his crimes are not crimes at all, because he is so terribly misunderstood. (And who in the audience, what creature that ever lived, felt he was loved enough?) This is the victory that we used to think of as a child's fantasy: now it is morality for nursery school and theater alike.
I wonder what she'd have thought of Joker.
More amusing, and slightly embarrassing, are her comments on how women were increasingly being portrayed, arguing a "Calendar Girl" aesthetic was infiltrating art-house cinema.
This female image is a parody of woman--lascivious face, wet open mouth, gigantic drooping breasts. She has no character, no individuality: she's blonde or brunette or redhead, as one might consume a martini, an old-fashioned, or a gin and tonic.
Now I am told that even the junior-high-school boys of America use photographs like these as pinups, and that this is their idea of the desirable female. I don't believe it. I would guess that they pretend to this ideal because they're afraid they won't be considered manly and sexy if they admit they find this image disgusting.
No, Pauline, they really thought these pinup girls were beautiful, I can guarantee it. And boys feeling disgust? I wonder if she thought bug collecting and the scatological humour of 14 year old boys were but poses. If she wanted boys to be disgusted by images of women, she should have shown them pictures of matrons serving broccoli and asparagus.
I recently reread Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", the essay that introduced the term "male gaze" along with Gaze Theory. I was struck again by what an overrated essay it is, and certainly the concept of "male gaze" is no original thought. Even Pauline Kael, writing fifteen or twenty years earlier, wouldn't have been the first to comment on women in media being depicted so as to gratify male lust. I suppose one key difference between Kael and Mulvey is that Mulvey implies the impulse to degrade women is a genetic trait carried by all men while Kael felt it was societal conditioning. Which makes Mulvey sound like the right-winger and Kael the left-winger.
I would agree that women are portrayed degradingly in a lot of media. I would say men are, too, for the satisfaction of women, though less prevalently. The suffering delinquents in the movies Kael talks about would be an example as would, I'd say, the male figures in the Twilight series. Heterosexual men and women want to see the opposite sex degraded. It gives the viewer a sense of superiority, yes, but I think very often that sense is sought for an impression of safety. When the handsome, wounded boy looks up at his beautiful saviour, she doesn't have to worry about him deceiving her into going to bed with him. That mysterious creature on the other side of daily existence suddenly becomes a known quantity, that attractive shape suddenly becomes more easily obtainable.
In addition to reading Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation lately, I've also been reading Pauline Kael. A few weeks ago, there was a rumour Tarantino's next movie, The Movie Critic, would be about Pauline Kael and that he wanted Meryl Streep to play her (which would've been perfect casting). But Tarantino denied that the movie would be about Kael, though he is on the record many times saying what a profound influence Kael was on him.
One of the things I love about Tarantino is that he clearly respects film critics. Many filmmakers, even some of the filmmakers I love, dismiss the whole profession as a gang of impotent backbiters. But in his book, Tarantino has a lot to say about critics he loved and hated, and he has reasons to back up what he says. He dedicates a whole chapter to critic Kevin Thomas who boosted a number of Tarantino's favourite exploitation films of the '70s. And Tarantino doesn't take it personally when Thomas doesn't like a movie he likes.
As a movie critic, or essayist, Tarantino is certainly insightful but, and I'm sure he'd agree, his eloquence can't match Pauline Kael's.
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre [for a critic]; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn't all corruption. The movie doesn't have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor's scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable.
-from "Trash, Art, and the Movies" by Pauline Kael, 1969
On Monday, I read her review for Ingmar Bergman's Shame. I was surprised to find she thought it a better film than Persona, a film she mostly disliked except for the monologue about the two women naked on the beach (that is a great monologue, and one of the sexiest scenes in the history cinema). She considered most of the '60s for Bergman to be diminished by a "pall of profundity". And though I disagree with her, nonetheless the sentiment in this bit really struck a chord with me:
Shame is a masterpiece, and it is so thoroughly accessible that I'm afraid some members of the audience may consider it too obvious. They have had so many years now of grappling with puzzles that they may consider all that figuring out responding to a work of art; when they devised a theory about what was going on in a film, they took their own ingenuity as proof that the film was art. And now here is Bergman, of all people, making a direct and lucid movie; they may, in self-defense, decide it's banal.
Those words Kael wrote in '68 or '69 are so apt for discourse around art in academia, and the ancillary internet whirlpools of amateur academia, to-day. Especially as critical theories have truly graduated from being merely screeds imposed on works of art to being dogma imposed on life itself.
I've read reviews by Pauline Kael here and there over the years but this is the first time I've really devoted time to her work. Partly because her work is difficult to come by. Most of her reviews that are online are behind various paywalls, particularly The New Yorker's paywall. I got a month's trial subscription to The New Yorker just to read their archives, which I swiftly regretted when I tried to cancel my subscription. I was put into an endless log-in loop--If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription. Welcome to Manage Subscription, please log-in. If you'd like to cancel your subscription, log in and click on Manage Subscription . . . I had a New Yorker subscription a few years ago and should have known not to go back to them. That time, what I thought I was signing up for was to pay a few bucks a month for the digital subscription but I was surprised to find I was immediately charged a hundred dollars for a year. But it was my fault, of course, for not paying careful enough attention to the wording on the subscription page. Still, it's funny they have these little fissures in their plumbing to suck up money at the same time the quality of their journalism has nosedived. This time, I was finally able to unsubscribe by waking up early and calling their helpline. At least, the lady on the phone said I was unsubscribed . . .
A good percentage of their archive I looked at was ridiculously useless. Many articles from the '60s are just low resolution scans that are impossible to read. I did enjoy some of the pieces by Kael I was able to read, particularly a complicated take she had on John Boorman's Excalibur. She wrote a four page review which, remarkably, was normal in those days.
There are also just big gaps in the New Yorker archive so I realised the only way to get at most of her reviews was to buy her books, so I bought two. I'm still waiting for one to be delivered next week which I'm hoping has her review of Vertigo. I know she didn't like Vertigo but I'm really curious to read her reasons. It's especially difficult to find negative reviews she wrote for movies that have become highly regarded in the decades since. I guess someone thinks they're protecting her legacy.
Another reason I'd not read much of Kael was the first time I heard of her, I think from my high school film teacher, Martin Johnson, I'd heard she didn't like Stanley Kubrick. So I thought, how much could her opinion on film really be worth? But now that I've read so much of Kael that I respect, I find myself fascinated by her dislike of Kubrick. And Tarantino's--Tarantino is also not a fan of Kubrick. Though I wonder how much of that is due to his love of Pauline Kael and Brian De Palma, whom Kael preferred over Kubrick.
Using my temporary New Yorker subscription, I read a 2003 interview with Tarantino in which he said of A Clockwork Orange,
That first twenty minutes is pretty fucking perfect. The whole non-stop parade of Alex and the druids or whatever they were called: they beat up a bum, they have a gang fight, they go to the milk bar, they rape a girl, they break into the house, and they’re driving and playing the Beethoven, and Malcolm McDowell’s fantastic narration is going on, and it’s about as poppy and visceral and perfect a piece of cinematic moviemaking as I think had ever been done up until that time. It’s like that long opening sentence of Jack Kerouac’s ‘The Subterraneans,’ all right, that great run-on sentence that goes on for almost a page and a half. I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite, because his party line was, I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence. And it’s just, like, Get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes, you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You liked the rest of the movie, but you put up with the rest of the movie. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did you’re a fucking liar.
Kubrick may indeed have been dishonest about his intentions with the film. I don't know if I'd put that down to a lack of self-awareness but to a fear of being shut down by institutions or influential individuals, a fear that Tarantino has been remarkable for lacking. I watched A Clockwork Orange again last night and it seems clear to me, not just in the first twenty minutes but in the entire film, that Kubrick is talking about a natural human love for violence and how people who deny that love are truly destructive hypocrites. Who can watch this counselor who visits Alex and not suspect he's more turned on by hurting Alex than by the prospect of helping him?
In Pauline Kael's review of A Clockwork Orange, she derides the film for making Alex the only charismatic character, and making him very charismatic. I would say this is because Alex is the only honest character. The point Kubrick is making about the dangers of social engineering isn't just in how it might malfunction but in how the instigators of such projects may not be honest about their own motives, probably even to themselves. Which would certainly pertain to social engineers to-day.
Twitter Sonnet #1685
The castle stones exude a winter's cold.
To-night, the kitchen fire's green and blue.
The seven dogs await the call of old.
But quiet spirits hide a deadly clue.
Assembled guests were numbered only three.
The sun had set an hour 'fore the game.
But summoned sure, the trio came to see
What pagan sport their wicked host would name.
A purple person put a pin to work.
Reflexive grins aggrieved the sexy nurse.
Assorted games defeat the broken Turk.
A final world expands her tiny purse.
Comparing crimes could wreck a rotten hulk.
So silence kept the evil iron bulk.
