Kael-aesthetics

PAULINE KAEL has always been my father's favorite movie reviewer. To me she is titan critic of them all, often bigger than the movies she writes about, and I have the feeling that she would appreciate the distinction. It comes out of the fact that movies were elevated to an art form as part of the Pop impulse of the sixties, and under the domination of Pop, people started taking the movie messages more seriously than they ever had before, which makes the job of the critic all the more critical. Movie makers got more pretentious, and superlatives were applied unreservedly to works that would have been laughed at as art ten years ago, as the new media hype began to rob the public of their critical bearings. For Kael, this means that where a movie's mistakes were venial sins in the past, today they are more likely to be mortal. So she keeps hands on holster ready to warn the public of any foul play.

Kael knows how dangerous movies are. How a slick upbeat surface can bowl over and infatuate your senses, how a movie's immediacy can hit you with its message without giving you the data needed to consider the issues it raises; how flashy technology can play upon your emotional vulnerability and creep into your bloodstream. A commercially calculated cynicism can warp, even wreck your beliefs.

1969-1973 was a legendary period for movies: The Conformist, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Five Easy Pieces, Murmur of the Heart, The Wild Bunch, The Godfather, The Sorrow and the Pity. The list supports the idea that America is no longer divided into two publics, the demanding and the undiscerning. Thanks in part to movies, the line between high and popular art has faded into a blur.

On the other hand, 1969-1973 was also a period packed with dishonesty movies, and the dishonesty was heaviest in those geared to youth: Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, Getting Straight, or Strawberry Statement, all exploitation "message" movies cashing in on a youth movie fad. They indulge in gratuitous technique, fancy pans, flash forwards and fast cutting; they splurge on a nouveau artistry that distorts our perspectives by filching half the evidence.

To Kael this is another form of Madison Avenud militancy, which flatters youth with a new cosmetic image, and is more irresponsible than the old formulas of Doris Dayland banality. For the message movies tune their politics to an ad man's pitch. They mainline the message "America is all crap" and project an American self-hatred not only on the present but on the past (Tell Them Willie Boy is Here). They pat you on the back for paranoia with pictures of a world pitted against you. And by leaving you with the feeling that the only thing left to do is get stoned and die, they rationalize the failure to do anything about the ugliness they project.

THAT KAEL is attacking generally is a Big Movie Industrial Complex. Movies are ties to big money and she points her heaviest guns at the new conglomerate-appointed studio moguls (hipper Louis B. Mayers or Darryl F. Zanucks) who sport long hair while dishing out the "terroist utopian thinking" that threatens to stalemate the numbness of the day. For Kael this bureaucratized Pop, this self-serving negativism, is a mass form of deprivation. Brutal movies don't attack present brutality, they practically glamorize it. The mess of movies that package bankrupt values in million dollar budgets, glossy surfaces and you-can't-miss sloganeering rings jingoistic, insidiously so, to Kael.

I get the feeling that the fuming Pauline Kael is touched at bottom by nostalgia--she still doesn't sound jaded. I picture a middle to late-middle-aged lady with a rather racy past behind her--first a movie pioneer, then a movie regular, now settling into her movie watching position as if keeping faith with a bad habit she deserves. She is caught right up in the screen, wrapped up in it, when suddenly it stumbles. Something smells crooked, a bit dirty. She hasn't asked for much, but when she gets less dressed up as more she sets her instincts loose in revolt. The Big Shots have not only spoiled her fun, they have insulted her.

When she sits down to write about film, she sticks by her initial responses as the ones she can trust the most. She lets her heat build, but hits ground before it peaks: "So there's my two bits, take it...or leave it." It's a no bullshit no pretensions tone. She is like a muckraker fighting for the rights of movie lovers, a one-time member of "the gang" who pounces on the hint of an excuse to blast the Big Wheels and demagogues and hooligans of movie-making. The voice belongs to someone who is simply fed up with slickness and sellouts, someone who wants to make sure that we know enough to ask for more from movies before it is too late.

KAEL IS ALL for the underdog. At times she seems to hunger for that ole simple straight talkin' soul, that sensibility set aside for off hours and cherished on visits to rural small towns--the one she hopes movies won't estrange us from more than urban living already has. I think that this nostalgia sometimes gets in her way, confused her sense signals. When she calls the gangling, gifted loser Pookie Adams (of A Sterile Cuckoo) "a resonant American archetype," I get the feeling that she has gone overboard on her identification. Or perhaps it is just that hitting so hard at Hollywood for so long has made her desperate for something to like. So she lingers over this plain wallflower movie not because it's any flower but because it isn't a plastic one.

Her problem is a basic one. If all you see are bad or fraudulent movies there comes a point when you feel like you've got to make up for so many tough punches--being a non-stop shrew can talk you out of likinig yourself. So you come out for an underdog that doesn't deserve your support. Or if you see only one brand of stereotype any other looks unconventional, and therefore good. Kael is so convinced that the worst sell-out in movies is thinking big that she is apt to be lenient on the small scale, thought or no thought.

Kael is sometimes prone to theatrics when she files off the handle, but I think that she has to be. When the media hype pushes the reviewer into the role of fashion setter-everything he likes becomes a new peak - he has to come out extra loud to fight against its pressures.

Since Kael is so loyal a defender of youth vis-a-vis "the riot movie fad" it seems treacherous to fault her on the subject. Nevertheless, while she treats upper-class enervation as a given, when Antonioni's activist youths (Zabriskie Point) are zombies it means he is alienated. The assumption blights her reasoning. Especially since she insists the America is a better place to live than Antonioni makes it out to be - which puts her on the side of straight liberal anti-radical youth.

THE POINT is that you have to be careful when you read Kael. Careful because she's so good. Her influence is tremendous: she got my mother to go to Loving and then to mindlessly applaud it because she had come equipped with Kael's permission to read herself into its middle-class sweat.

So you may not always agree with her. But if you might not be able to forgive what she says, you can't forget it. Her voice is too eloquent, too powerful. Once that voice gets inside your head, it sticks there.