Pauline Kael: Questions and Answers

Pauline Kael liked to ask questions—and answer them. As a weekly columnist, she was able to disseminate her ideas to a varied readership. Kael was given an outlet where others could access her work and love it (or not) and became arguably the most famous literary critic. Her life story is tinged with tragedy, but the lasting legacy of Pauline Kael is her writing—Oscar Wilde would be proud of her contributions to art.

Strong writers elicit reactions. Kael’s excessive use of words like, “swallowing”, “pissing”, “flatulence”, or “manure,” condemned by Renata Adler in “House Critic,” are an important part of her repertoire. Kael is not, as Adler bemoans in “House Critic”, “mistaking lack of civility for vitality,” rather she is displaying her idiosyncratic way of writing. In “Afterglow” she says, “...I loved lowbrow taste, and that was hard to get across. One of the great things about movies is that they can combine the energy of a popular art with the possibilities of a high art.” By combining the language of “high” art and adding her own “lowbrow” sensibility in creating her pieces, Kael is reflecting what she is reviewing while doing something new—challenging the United States’ “movie critic” speak, with its words that indicate condescension even before one considers their actual meaning or what they say.

Following Kael’s commentary on actors is like being there when she meets them in person. She might not have the most refined things to say about them—Renata Adler quotes one of her articles on an actress, “She’s making love to herself,”—but manages to pinpoint what they are doing by close observation while connecting them to others and the rest of the world. She writes of Barbara Streisand in “Funny Girl,” “She conceals nothing; she’s fiercely, almost frighteningly direct,” and Kael could be talking about Streisand or perhaps even herself.

While loving or attacking actors might seem to be easy way to discuss a film, Kael goes further in her reviews. Often accused of “talking about anything but the film,” she points out cultural references and phenomena that movies reflect. This is arts journalism: instead of filling the basic functions of a review (information about the piece and where to see/find it, the reaction of the critic, and whether it is worth seeing), it both acknowledges other art and while creating a work of art in itself. For instance, she writes of “Hiroshima Mon Amour, “But what makes the dialogue crucial is that the audience...feels virtuous because they want to buy peace. And the question I want to ask is: who’s selling it?” By looking at larger issues that are inevitably entrenched in film culture, Kael is not ignoring movies she reviews but seeing them more deeply than many other critics.

In a world of art and people talking about it, not all voices have value. Why did Pauline Kael’s voice matter so much? She might have asked the same question (she was very fond of questions), but she would have an answer. Always sure of herself, combining lowbrow and “high” art, and reaching beyond movies to explore concepts of society, Pauline Kael’s contributions to art itself, no matter what the consequences to those she panned or raved, are considerable.