“Do you realise
how offensive
you’re being?”
That Tone and that Question
were provoked courteous
Disagreement with a Consensus
which Kael was Trying
to Create and Enforce.
After Pauline Kael gave
a bad review of The Enforcer,
Clint Eastwood asked
A Psychiatrist
to do an analysis of her
from her reviews of his past work,
which he had memorised verbatim.
It concluded that Kael was actually physically attracted to Clint
and because she couldn't have him,
she hated him.
Therefore, it was some sort
of Vengeance.
PREFACE
In the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, Pauline Kael was not only the most powerful movie critic in America. She had become the most powerful reviewer in any medium. And her influence extended, not just to criticism of all kinds, but to journalism, to academic writing, to the appointment of faculty members at university film departments throughout the country.
Writing every week for six months of the year in The New Yorker, and publishing regular collections of her pieces, she generated admiration (for some years deserved), and then – gradually, surprisingly – fear. She had colleagues and filmmakers she liked, and others she didn’t. Her likes and dislikes became dogmatic, remorseless. She had her cliques and imitators, including a more or less servile cult, known as the Paulettes. They chattered, laughed, sneered, whispered, loudly gossiped during previews and screenings. Then they went back to their various publications and tried to outdo one another in agreeing with Kael.
Meanwhile, almost without anyone taking notice, Pauline Kael’s interest in movies was declining, even as her writing style became more and more excessive. She began less to write than to rule.
The titles of her books, in their redundant, unfunny naughtiness, should have given it away. I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper Into Movies. The joyless, fake ordinariness of it all, the aging, essentially humourless woman reveling in unimaginative talking dirty --- we didn’t notice, prize committees of various kinds did not notice, the underlying quality of what we were endorsing, year after year. But her influence was great, her exercises of power remarkably effective. What we might characterize as unconscious Pauline Kaelism was contagious, and now, still, pervades the culture, wherever second-rate prose can be found. A Life in the Dark, a biography of Pauline Kael by Brian Kellow has just been published. Library of America has published an anthology of her writing. Both books are worthy and have been widely and seriously reviewed.
In 1980, Renata Adler, at the time a New Yorker writer --- author of two novels, and five books of essays and reporting, including, as it happens, A Year in The Dark, an anthology of her own pieces as former chief film critic of The New York Times --- reviewed Kael’s When the Lights Go Down for The New York Review of Books.
That review stirred an enormous fuss, consternation, taking sides. The review itself was reviewed and discussed, as though it were News, in newspapers and magazines. It has somehow remained an occasional subject of controversy to this day.
There were rumors: a committee had collaborated to write it; Mr. Shawn, editor of The New Yorker had secretly commissioned it; Adler was pursuing a vendetta generated by some incident or series of incidents years before.
None of this, as it happened, was True.
Kellow, in his biography, writes that Adler, at a meeting of the New York Film Critics, “stormed out,” saying she “had to see her analyst immediately.”
Adler had no analyst; she had not “stormed out.” When she did, in fact, quietly walk out, several other critics, including Stefan Kanfer of Time (later, author of distinguished books), walked out with her. As they left, Kael said, “Do you realise how offensive you’re being?”
That tone and that question were provoked by the departing critics’ (including Vincent Canby’s) courteous disagreement with a consensus which Kael was trying to create and enforce.
Adler was relatively young, chief film critic of The New York Times - a position widely thought to be so self-evidently desirable that advertisements for a department store began “Some people think Renata Adler’s job is like being paid to eat bonbons.”)
Adler had no reason to be hostile to Kael, and was not. In fact, until she was asked to review Kael’s collection, Adler had thought fairly highly of Kael’s work.
Renata Adler’s “Pauline Kael piece” has been mentioned so often through the years, in articles about Kael, including interviews and virtually all obituaries, that people who had never read the piece had the strongest possible views of what they thought it said. Reviews of the two recent books refer to it.
What follows is the piece itself —
When Clint Eastwood approached
Don Siegel to offer him the directing job
for Dirty Harry (1971),
Eastwood gave Siegel
four drafts of the script,
one of which was written
by Terrence Malick.
Malick's script changed The Killer
from being a mindless psychopath
who killed because he likes it
to being a vigilante who
killed wealthy criminals
who'd escaped Justice.
Siegel didn't like Malick's script, but
Eastwood did. Malick's ideas
formed the basis for
Magnum Force.
The plot of this movie was inspired by
The Death Squads of Brazil that
were in the news at the time.
John Milius pitched Clint Eastwood
a scenario of Harry Callahan
similarly encountering a corrupt
Police Force of Vigilantes
assassinating those they
could not convict.
Eastwood liked the idea,
particularly since he wanted to
address the controversy caused
by the original movie,
Dirty Harry.
Some Viewers and
Critics believed
that it supposedly
endorsed Fascism
and Vigilantism.
Eastwood wanted to make it clear
that Harry was not A Vigilante.
