Critique of Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael was the first to transcend the role of critic and became famous in her own right. She attracted a dedicated fan base that followed her unique and sharply written opinions on film, and influenced a generation of critics during her time at The New Yorker from 1968 to 1991. Because of this mini cult of personality that arose around Pauline, and the corrupting power that came with it, her writing became overly aggressive and downright mean. Often she used her reviews as a soapbox for things that were going on in American culture at the time rather than what was actually going on in the film.

One of the problems with Pauline’s writing is that she will frequently employ a badgering tone that implies that if you disagree with her you are an idiot. Not only does she attack the film for being worthless; she will mock its audience. In her review of Hiroshima Mon Amour she rhetorically asks, “Was it possibly an elaborate, masochistic fantasy for intellectuals?”, and later she sarcastically generalizes that the audience for the film, “feels virtuous because they want to buy peace.”

She also can be unnecessarily mean and degrading to people in or who worked on the films she is reviewing. In her review of Top Gun Kael devotes the entire opening paragraph to making fun of Tom Cruise’s height. A brief mention of the humorous image of Kelly McGillis adjusting to the short Cruise would have been sufficient, but she devotes nine lines to humiliating him. Her language in describing sexuality is crude for the sake of shocking the reader, like in her review of Silkwood, where she writes that Kurt Russell, “demonstrates the very latest in gentle, good-animal lovemaking.” A sex scene in any film is a risk for the actor and requires a lot of bravery; it doesn’t deserve smirking comments like this.

Kael was often accused of writing about everything but the movie. In her long review of Hiroshima Mon Amour she only spends a third of the review writing about the actual film. The rest is about her perception of art-house snobbery.

Renata Adler, who also worked at The New Yorker, is one of Kael’s biggest critics. She believes that Kael’s work, “embodies something appalling and widespread in the culture”, and that her, “quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse.”