How Critics Like Kael and Leavis Exclude Too Much Art and Life

The film critic Pauline Kael once said that a friendship cannot survive too many disagreements about movies. What would she have said about friends disagreeing over ethics or religion or politics? That they should appoint a time and place for a duel? Or institute loyalty tests for every near acquaintance? It’s right and proper for a critic—or anyone—to respond passionately to the arts. But really, it’s just a movie.

From the early 1960s to the mid-’90s, Kael was the most prominent film critic in America, if not the world. From her perch at the New Yorker, she helped to set the tone for much of the New York intellectual world in which I came of age. She delivered verdicts. She rendered judgments. She didn’t waffle. She took no prisoners.

When not issuing ex-cathedra pronouncements, Kael was a good critic, adept at examining the parts that constituted—or failed to constitute—a whole, and sensitive to the peculiar intimacy of the medium of film. But most people read her for her judgments: that the first screening of Last Tango in Paris was “a landmark in movie history comparable to … the night Le Sacre du Printemps was first performed”; that Flash Gordon (1980) had “some of the knowing, pleasurable giddiness of the fast-moving Bonds,” with the added benefit of the actress Ornella Muti playing “a flaming nympho and a perfect little emblem of camp”; that Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself traded in “simplistic cynicism, like that of the barroom pundit who tells you that every man has his price”; that Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange “might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi comedy.” Whether misguided or on target, the scorching thunderbolts she hurled were delivered in an earthy American demotic that flouted the customary gentility of the New Yorker of that era.

Kael’s gleefully combative style was no shtick; she really meant it. In Lucking Out, his memoir about seventies New York, including a stint as an acolyte in Kael’s inner circle, James Wolcott recounted a conversation with a mutual acquaintance, who told him, “I think Pauline cooled on me after I told her I didn’t like [Barbra Streisand’s] Yentl. In retrospect, that was the Beginning of the End.”

My friend Al Avant, a colleague at the Brooklyn Public Library and the lead fiction reviewer for Library Journal, was also a member of that circle. He used to tell me that many of the best lines in her reviews were in fact his, and that Pauline purloined them from their many hours of conversation after seeing movies together. I doubt it, but Al did write and even speak in a Kaelite register; this was magnificent, that was shit, and surely you don’t think, Stephen, that Philip Glass is anything but a solemn fraud whose tediousness and vacuity are in inverse proportion to the amount of praise heaped on him by the New York Times?

The philistinism of the cultural pages of the Times was an article of faith for Al and his friends. If you were serious about culture, you read the New Yorker or the Village Voice or the Nation or the New Republic; you did not trifle (as Al saw it) with the hopelessly middlebrow cheerleaders at the Times, such as the film critic Vincent Canby, about whom Al had some exceedingly vicious gossip to relate. Neither Al nor most of his cronies bothered to read much of the political reporting and commentary in the Times. All of them—virtually everyone I knew in New York City—were liberals. So long as the world remained safe for democracy, they could skip the political stuff and go straight to the heart of the matter: Was Yentl the fulfilment of the classic MGM musical or just an accidental one-off?

Al’s other great friend and mentor at the New Yorker, the dance critic Arlene Croce, was the exception to the rule. When Al told me that Arlene was depressed because George Bush had lost the presidency to Bill Clinton, I could scarcely process the information; someone in New York City had voted for a Republican? There was, of course, some spillover, even in the Pauline Kael crowd. If you made a habit of reading the book reviews in the Nation, your eye would sometimes wander to the columns denouncing Bill Clinton as a contemptible middle-of-the-road sellout. The only political issue that really exercised many of my friends was AIDS, but even that topic was of less moment to Al than the decline of City Ballet under the errant leadership of Peter Martins. Maybe Al should have paid a little more attention. AIDS killed him in 1993.