Pauline Kael’s choice to become a writer over a lawyer was one big mistake. Although Kael is obviously very intelligent graduating from the University of California, Berkley and well acclaimed through her long career at the New Yorker, Kael’s reviews embody a subjective approach filled with strong emotional reactions and extremely polarized opinions. As a critic, Kael’s stubbornness, straightforwardness, bold claims, outdated expectations and exaggerations all confirm that she clearly takes her job too seriously.
Kael always prided herself on her independent standpoints. These, however, are the very things that have caused a lot of resistance and hostility towards her work. Her pieces undoubtedly capture attention from the first sentence, but her long rants were known for rarely saying anything constructive. In a review of “The Witches of Eastwick”, Kael claimed that “nothing is carried through; about half the scenes don’t make much sense and the final ones might as well have a sign posted: ‘We’re desperate for a finish’”. In this example, she is excessively brash and straightforward, while also inflating the producer’s alleged intentions. Maybe Kael should have spent less time evaluating and more time enjoying the film. It seems to me that Kael is a critic merely to criticize, offering very little genuine analysis.
Kael’s overemphasized claims also carry over into unnecessary questioning within her reviews. Her numerous questions prove degrading and insulting to not only all efforts of the film, but also to the readers that might have enjoyed what Kael doubted. For example, in reference to an actor’s performance, she cynically asked “Why didn’t anyone explain to him that he needn’t wear himself out with acting?” and another actor, “How can you have any feeling for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?” Kael self-assuredly asks these questions hoping to intrigue her readers, but it actually comes across as Kael having an un-stimulating conversation with herself. She tries so hard to be witty and overly sarcastic for entertaining purposes, but it seizes to impress.
She even goes as far as to make high assumptions about her audience with her recurrent use of “you”. An example of this is when she is talking about “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and she remarks, “I don’t know how many movies you have gone to lately that were made to sell soap, but American movies are like advertisements”. She does this in a generalizing and manipulative way that really means, “If you don’t think like I do, you are clearly not as intelligent as me”. Evidently, Kael personifies the grandmother figure that knows best. However, she would have made a better case in court.
Additionally, Kael fails to astonish with her un-riveting endings. It is obvious that she is trying too hard in many of her assessments. She tries to sound intelligent and credible when she ends her “Hiroshima Mon Amour” review by musing, “And the question I want to ask is: Who’s selling it?” My question is “Who cares?”
Kael’s retirement came at a good time. Her stubborn nature and her inability to adapt to change were definitely a few determinants. She remarked in Davis’s “Afterglow” that “I am a mechanical idiot…I wrote by hand…but I think it was an excuse so I wouldn’t have to learn to operate machinery”. As Kael had little desire to keep up with modern day innovations, it is evident that she has no desire to keep up with modern day movies. Nonetheless, as times change, movies change, and her bitterness and pessimism noticeably increased over the years given her hostility toward current-day Hollywood. She expresses “I suddenly couldn’t say anything about some of the movies. They were just so terrible”. It seems like it finally got to the point where she inadvertently went to the movies with outdated expectations instead of seeing the film for its own uniqueness.
Kael is clearly not up to contemporary day challenges and her black-and-white thinking was inevitably going to dead-end her writing sooner or later in this new generation of film. An authentic critic should be less stubborn and self-centered, and more objective and open-minded—all of which Kael had no intention of embracing.
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