Authors: Louis Menand
American Studies (19 page)
If all popular culture episodes were only commercial and manipulative, they would not matter to us. The late-sixties counterculture was not, by any means, the shabbiest episode in the postwar era, even if it now seems the most antique. It was imaginative and infectious, and it touched a nerve. A lot of those old idols deserved to be overthrown. And maybe it is a generational thing, but the music still seems tonic. But the faith in popular music, consciousness expansion, and the nonconformist lifestyle that made up the countercultural ethos is likely to strike us today as clearly misplaced. You wonder why it didn’t dawn on all those disaffected
Rolling Stone
writers and editors that Wenner was successful precisely because he wasn’t the anomaly they took him to be. He was closer to what the moment was all about than they were. But faith in anything can be a valuable sentiment; and what young people in the sixties thought their faith made it possible to do was to tell the truth. Telling the truth turned out to be much harder than they thought it
would be, and the culture they imagined was sustaining them turned out not to be “authentically” theirs, and not really sustainable, after all. But those people had not yet become cynics.
Rolling Stone
writers and editors that Wenner was successful precisely because he wasn’t the anomaly they took him to be. He was closer to what the moment was all about than they were. But faith in anything can be a valuable sentiment; and what young people in the sixties thought their faith made it possible to do was to tell the truth. Telling the truth turned out to be much harder than they thought it
would be, and the culture they imagined was sustaining them turned out not to be “authentically” theirs, and not really sustainable, after all. But those people had not yet become cynics.
The silliest charge brought against the sixties is the charge of moral relativism. Ordinary life must be built on the solid foundations of moral values, the critics who make this charge argue, and the sixties persuaded people that the foundations weren’t solid, and that any morality would do that got you through the night. The accusation isn’t just wrong about the sixties; it’s an injustice to the dignity of ordinary life, which is an irredeemably pragmatic and ungrounded affair. You couldn’t make it through even the day if you held every transaction up to scrutiny by the lights of some received moral code. But that is exactly what radicals and counterculture types in the sixties did. They weren’t moral relativists. They were moral absolutists. They scrutinized everything, and they believed they could live by the distinctions they made.
There are always people who think this way—people who see that the world is a little fuzzy and proceed to make a religion out of clarity. In the sixties their way of thinking was briefly but memorably a part of the popular culture. Gered Mankowitz, a photographer who accompanied the Rolling Stones on their American tours in the 1960s, once told a story about two groupies who dedicated themselves to the conquest of Mick Jagger. After several years of futile pursuit, they managed to get themselves invited to a house where the Stones were staying, and Mick was persuaded to take both of them to bed. Afterward, though, the girls were disappointed. “He was only so-so,” one of them complained. “He tried to come on like Mick Jagger, but he’s no Mick Jagger.”
13
The real can always be separated from the contrived: wherever that illusion persists, the spirit of the sixties still survives.
13
The real can always be separated from the contrived: wherever that illusion persists, the spirit of the sixties still survives.
P
auline Kael began reviewing movies for the
New Yorker
in 1967. She was not a “discovery.” She was forty-eight years old, and she had already written for nearly every well-known magazine in America but the
New Yorker
, including the
New Republic, Partisan Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Holiday, Vogue, Life,
and
McCall’s.
Before coming to New York, in the mid-sixties, she had made weekly radio broadcasts about movies on KPFA in San Francisco; she had been contributing regularly to journals like
Film Quarterly
and
Sight and Sound
since 1953; and a collection of her pieces,
I Lost It at the Movies,
had come out in 1965 and sold 150,000 paperback copies. Mr. Shawn was not taking a gamble on a rookie.
auline Kael began reviewing movies for the
New Yorker
in 1967. She was not a “discovery.” She was forty-eight years old, and she had already written for nearly every well-known magazine in America but the
New Yorker
, including the
New Republic, Partisan Review, the Atlantic, Mademoiselle, Holiday, Vogue, Life,
and
McCall’s.
Before coming to New York, in the mid-sixties, she had made weekly radio broadcasts about movies on KPFA in San Francisco; she had been contributing regularly to journals like
Film Quarterly
and
Sight and Sound
since 1953; and a collection of her pieces,
I Lost It at the Movies,
had come out in 1965 and sold 150,000 paperback copies. Mr. Shawn was not taking a gamble on a rookie.
In 1967, the
New Yorker
was the most successful magazine in America. It owed its prosperity to a formula that can no longer be duplicated: it was a general-interest commercial magazine for people who disliked commercialism and who rarely subscribed to general-interest magazines—a magazine, essentially, for people who
didn’t read magazines. For in the fifties and sixties, a literate and unstuffy anticommercialism was still a cherished ingredient of upper-middle-class taste, and by catering to it, the
New Yorker
was able to deliver to advertisers several hundred thousand well-educated and affluent people who could be reached through almost no other medium.
New Yorker
was the most successful magazine in America. It owed its prosperity to a formula that can no longer be duplicated: it was a general-interest commercial magazine for people who disliked commercialism and who rarely subscribed to general-interest magazines—a magazine, essentially, for people who
didn’t read magazines. For in the fifties and sixties, a literate and unstuffy anticommercialism was still a cherished ingredient of upper-middle-class taste, and by catering to it, the
New Yorker
was able to deliver to advertisers several hundred thousand well-educated and affluent people who could be reached through almost no other medium.
It did so with an editorial product rigorously manufactured to avoid any semblance of the sensational, the prurient, or the merely topical—any semblance, that is, of the things educated people could be assumed to associate with commercial media. It also avoided, less famously but with equal diligence, anything that hinted at cultural pretension. And this policy, too, was based on a genuine insight into the psychology of its audience. For
New Yorker
readers, though proud of their education and their taste, were intellectually insecure. They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them. They were intelligent people who were nevertheless extremely wary of being out-browed. The
New Yorker
was enormously attentive to this insecurity. It pruned from its pieces anything that might come across as allusive or knowing, and it promoted, in its writing and cartoons, a sensibility which took urbanity to be perfectly compatible with a certain kind of naïveté. The
New Yorker
made it possible to feel that being an antisophisticate was the mark of true sophistication, and that any culture worth having could be had without special aesthetic equipment or intellectual gymnastics.
New Yorker
readers, though proud of their education and their taste, were intellectually insecure. They did not need to be told who Proust and Freud and Stravinsky were, but they were glad, at the same time, not to be expected to know anything terribly specific about them. They were intelligent people who were nevertheless extremely wary of being out-browed. The
New Yorker
was enormously attentive to this insecurity. It pruned from its pieces anything that might come across as allusive or knowing, and it promoted, in its writing and cartoons, a sensibility which took urbanity to be perfectly compatible with a certain kind of naïveté. The
New Yorker
made it possible to feel that being an antisophisticate was the mark of true sophistication, and that any culture worth having could be had without special aesthetic equipment or intellectual gymnastics.
Pauline Kael made it possible for people to feel this way about the movies, and although that sounds like a modest accomplishment, it was not. It required disarming both phobias in the sensibility the
New Yorker
had so successfully identified: the fear of too low and the fear of too high. It meant overcoming the intelligent person’s resistance to the pulpiness, the corniness, and the general moral and aesthetic schmaltz of Hollywood movies, but without refining those things away by some type of critical alchemy. The
New Yorker’s
readers did not want an invitation to slum. But they didn’t want to be told that appreciating movies was something that called for a command of the “grammar of film,” either. They needed to believe
that it was possible to enjoy the movies without becoming either of the two things
New Yorker
readers would sooner have died than be taken for: idiots or snobs.
New Yorker
had so successfully identified: the fear of too low and the fear of too high. It meant overcoming the intelligent person’s resistance to the pulpiness, the corniness, and the general moral and aesthetic schmaltz of Hollywood movies, but without refining those things away by some type of critical alchemy. The
New Yorker’s
readers did not want an invitation to slum. But they didn’t want to be told that appreciating movies was something that called for a command of the “grammar of film,” either. They needed to believe
that it was possible to enjoy the movies without becoming either of the two things
New Yorker
readers would sooner have died than be taken for: idiots or snobs.
This was precisely the approach to movies Kael had devoted her pre-
New Yorker
career to perfecting. She heaped scorn on the moguls, and she heaped scorn on the cinéastes. She joined the magazine at the moment the movies seemed to many people suddenly to have caught up with the rest of American culture: her first piece was a seven-thousand-word defense of
Bonnie and Clyde.
She kept the attention of the magazine’s readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them. And she continued to keep it well after the movies ceased being important in most of those readers’ lives. By the time she retired, in 1991, the
New Yorker’s
traditional readership had lost its cohesion as a distinctive taste group, and the type of movies Kael had made her name by championing had nearly vanished, too. After her retirement, she stopped reviewing; she died in 2001. But she had produced a generation of epigoni, and the manner of appreciation she invented has become the standard manner of popular-culture criticism in America.
New Yorker
career to perfecting. She heaped scorn on the moguls, and she heaped scorn on the cinéastes. She joined the magazine at the moment the movies seemed to many people suddenly to have caught up with the rest of American culture: her first piece was a seven-thousand-word defense of
Bonnie and Clyde.
She kept the attention of the magazine’s readers during a time when movies seemed to mean a great deal to them. And she continued to keep it well after the movies ceased being important in most of those readers’ lives. By the time she retired, in 1991, the
New Yorker’s
traditional readership had lost its cohesion as a distinctive taste group, and the type of movies Kael had made her name by championing had nearly vanished, too. After her retirement, she stopped reviewing; she died in 2001. But she had produced a generation of epigoni, and the manner of appreciation she invented has become the standard manner of popular-culture criticism in America.
Kael was born in Petaluma, California, in 1919. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland; they ran a chicken farm. Like many people who fall in love with the movies, Kael succumbed when she was a teenager. She became enamored of two completely different kinds of movies, and the simplest way to describe her career is to say that she awoke in middle age to find them miraculously reborn together on a single screen. Her first infatuation was with the Hollywood genre movies of the 1930s: newspaper pictures like
The Front Page
(1931), comedies like
Million Dollar Legs
(1932) and
Duck Soup
(1933), and, especially, the screwballs, which began appearing in 1934—“the year,” as she put it in her long and swoony essay on Cary Grant, “when
The Thin Man
and
Twentieth Century
and
It Happened One Night
changed American movies.”
1
It was also the year Kael turned fifteen.
The Front Page
(1931), comedies like
Million Dollar Legs
(1932) and
Duck Soup
(1933), and, especially, the screwballs, which began appearing in 1934—“the year,” as she put it in her long and swoony essay on Cary Grant, “when
The Thin Man
and
Twentieth Century
and
It Happened One Night
changed American movies.”
1
It was also the year Kael turned fifteen.
Kael thought that these were great movies, but it was not “as movies” that she admired them. She did not esteem them for their realization of the possibilities of cinematic form. She esteemed them for their indifference to the idea of “the possibilities of cinematic form,” and in particular for the death blow they delivered to the high-minded sentimentality—what she described as the “calendar-art guck”—of the silent tradition. The silents, she thought, had encouraged a kind of “dream aesthetic,” which associated film with the movements of the subconscious and led to the production of a lot of misty allegories about “purity” and “morality.” When characters started speaking, the mists went away, and so did the purity and morality. “The talkies,” as she once put it, “were a great step down.”
2
2
Two things, in her view, made those thirties movies go: the writing and the acting. Her 1971 essay on
Citizen Kane
is usually remembered as an attack on Orson Welles and the cult of the director, a kind of sequel to her polemic against auteur theory, “Circles and Squares” (1963). But the point of the essay is that the reason it is wrong to talk about
Citizen Kane
as a bolt from cinema heaven is not that Welles was not really a genius; Kael thought he really was a genius. It is because
Citizen Kane
(released in 1941) was the crowning achievement of thirties movie-making, the capstone of the tradition
The Front Page
had started. It was, she thought, simply “the biggest newspaper picture of them all.”
3
What made it great was the script—by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had been involved, as a writer or producer, in many of the movies Kael loved, including
Million
Dollar Legs
and
Duck Soup
—and the acting. Charles Foster Kane was the one role in his career in which Welles was perfectly cast; for Welles was a sort of Kane himself, a theatrical
monstre sacré
, a boy wonder and a mountebank. Welles may have stolen half the writing credit from Mankiewicz, but Mankiewicz showed Welles naked to the world.
Citizen Kane
is usually remembered as an attack on Orson Welles and the cult of the director, a kind of sequel to her polemic against auteur theory, “Circles and Squares” (1963). But the point of the essay is that the reason it is wrong to talk about
Citizen Kane
as a bolt from cinema heaven is not that Welles was not really a genius; Kael thought he really was a genius. It is because
Citizen Kane
(released in 1941) was the crowning achievement of thirties movie-making, the capstone of the tradition
The Front Page
had started. It was, she thought, simply “the biggest newspaper picture of them all.”
3
What made it great was the script—by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had been involved, as a writer or producer, in many of the movies Kael loved, including
Million
Dollar Legs
and
Duck Soup
—and the acting. Charles Foster Kane was the one role in his career in which Welles was perfectly cast; for Welles was a sort of Kane himself, a theatrical
monstre sacré
, a boy wonder and a mountebank. Welles may have stolen half the writing credit from Mankiewicz, but Mankiewicz showed Welles naked to the world.
Then the parade ended. The commercial failure of
Citizen Kane
—the critics acclaimed it, but the industry, intimidated by the other real-life Kane, William Randolph Hearst, failed to stand behind it—drove Welles into the movie wilderness. And it marked,
Kael believed, the demise of the supremely smart but supremely accessible Hollywood entertainments of the 1930s. Except in odd corners of the business, such as the comedies of Preston Sturges, irreverence disappeared from the screen. The movies fell into the hands of self-righteous, fellow-traveling hacks: earnestness was prized above wit, and politically correct mediocrity was promoted over talent. “Morality” was back in the saddle. It remained there for twenty-five years.
Citizen Kane
—the critics acclaimed it, but the industry, intimidated by the other real-life Kane, William Randolph Hearst, failed to stand behind it—drove Welles into the movie wilderness. And it marked,
Kael believed, the demise of the supremely smart but supremely accessible Hollywood entertainments of the 1930s. Except in odd corners of the business, such as the comedies of Preston Sturges, irreverence disappeared from the screen. The movies fell into the hands of self-righteous, fellow-traveling hacks: earnestness was prized above wit, and politically correct mediocrity was promoted over talent. “Morality” was back in the saddle. It remained there for twenty-five years.
Kael had a second infatuation, though, and it was with a kind of movie that had nothing generic about it, a kind of movie in which the director
was
the star. This was the European realist tradition, above all the early movies of Jean Renoir—
Boudu Saved from Drowning
(1931),
Grand Illusion
(1937), and
The Rules of the Game
(1939)—but also the work of the Italian neorealists, like Roberto Rossellini’s
Open City
(1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s
Shoeshine
(1946) and
Miracle in Milan
(1951), and of Max Ophuls, particularly
The Earrings of Madame De
… (1953), a movie Kael called “perfection.”
4
The technical term for the quality many of these movies (though not Ophuls’s) share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left, at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.
was
the star. This was the European realist tradition, above all the early movies of Jean Renoir—
Boudu Saved from Drowning
(1931),
Grand Illusion
(1937), and
The Rules of the Game
(1939)—but also the work of the Italian neorealists, like Roberto Rossellini’s
Open City
(1945) and Vittorio De Sica’s
Shoeshine
(1946) and
Miracle in Milan
(1951), and of Max Ophuls, particularly
The Earrings of Madame De
… (1953), a movie Kael called “perfection.”
4
The technical term for the quality many of these movies (though not Ophuls’s) share is “open form.” The camera directs its gaze with equal empathy at every facet of the world viewed. Ordinary things are not scanted or rushed over, since the gods, if there are any, are probably in the details; but grand things are not put into quotation marks, or set up to be knocked down, either, since great emotions are as much a part of life as anything else. The door is opened onto the world “as it is,” without scrims or stage directions; and the world is left, at the end, in the same condition, unarranged, and unboxed by moral resolution.
When Kael arrived at the
New Yorker
, these were her touchstones—Gary Grant and Carole Lombard, Rossellini and Renoir. It was a canon exceptional less for what it included than for what it left out. Kael’s taste for genre pictures, for instance, was not indiscriminate. She had a distant respect for the early Westerns of John Ford, like
Stagecoach
(1939), because they handled popular iconography in a classical spirit; but she hated
High Noon
(1952),
Shane
(1953), and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
(1962) for their moralism and their mythic fakery, and she rarely passed up an occasion
to say so. She had no special enthusiasm, either, for film noir, a genre barely mentioned in her enormous final collection from all her writings,
For Keeps
(1995), or for other low-rent forms, such as horror and science fiction.
New Yorker
, these were her touchstones—Gary Grant and Carole Lombard, Rossellini and Renoir. It was a canon exceptional less for what it included than for what it left out. Kael’s taste for genre pictures, for instance, was not indiscriminate. She had a distant respect for the early Westerns of John Ford, like
Stagecoach
(1939), because they handled popular iconography in a classical spirit; but she hated
High Noon
(1952),
Shane
(1953), and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
(1962) for their moralism and their mythic fakery, and she rarely passed up an occasion
to say so. She had no special enthusiasm, either, for film noir, a genre barely mentioned in her enormous final collection from all her writings,
For Keeps
(1995), or for other low-rent forms, such as horror and science fiction.
Her line about Frank Capra is famous: “No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment the way Capra can,” she said of
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), “and if anyone else should learn to, kill him.”
5
She dismissed most of Hollywood’s postwar efforts at serious moral drama, movies like
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) and Chaplin’s
Limelight
(1952), as embarrassing imitations of European art films. She regarded
The Red Shoes
(1948) as kitsch on stilts. She considered Fellini pretentious and overrated, and Bergman a “northern Fellini.”
6
And for the high-end imports reverentially mulled over by cinéastes in the early sixties—
Hiroshima, mon amour
(1959),
Last Year at Marienbad
(1961),
Red Desert
(1964)—she had pure contempt. She called them “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties,”
7
and she considered them prime specimens of the philistinism of antiphilistinism, intellectual clichés to which repetition and obscurity had given the illusion of profundity.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(1939), “and if anyone else should learn to, kill him.”
5
She dismissed most of Hollywood’s postwar efforts at serious moral drama, movies like
The Best Years of Our Lives
(1946) and Chaplin’s
Limelight
(1952), as embarrassing imitations of European art films. She regarded
The Red Shoes
(1948) as kitsch on stilts. She considered Fellini pretentious and overrated, and Bergman a “northern Fellini.”
6
And for the high-end imports reverentially mulled over by cinéastes in the early sixties—
Hiroshima, mon amour
(1959),
Last Year at Marienbad
(1961),
Red Desert
(1964)—she had pure contempt. She called them “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties,”
7
and she considered them prime specimens of the philistinism of antiphilistinism, intellectual clichés to which repetition and obscurity had given the illusion of profundity.
There were two imports, however, which she did admire: Jean-Luc Godard’s
Breathless
(1959; released in the United States in 1960) and François Truffaut’s
Shoot the Piano Player
(1960). She was drawn to them because they were, in effect, the sum of the two types of movies that had won her heart in the thirties. They were genre pictures whose forms had been imaginatively opened up: pop plus poetry. So that when
Bonnie and Clyde
, directed by an American disciple of Godard and Truffaut, Arthur Penn, appeared in 1967, it was as though a dream Kael had been having for twenty-five years had come to life.
Bonnie and Clyde
announced, for her, a Hollywood new wave. It was a movement that lasted a decade, and produced a series of stylish entertainments people could care about without feeling trivial or pedantic. The first two
Godfather
movies (1972 and 1974) define the type: straight gangster pictures, but with the visual and moral depth of field of a Renoir.
Breathless
(1959; released in the United States in 1960) and François Truffaut’s
Shoot the Piano Player
(1960). She was drawn to them because they were, in effect, the sum of the two types of movies that had won her heart in the thirties. They were genre pictures whose forms had been imaginatively opened up: pop plus poetry. So that when
Bonnie and Clyde
, directed by an American disciple of Godard and Truffaut, Arthur Penn, appeared in 1967, it was as though a dream Kael had been having for twenty-five years had come to life.
Bonnie and Clyde
announced, for her, a Hollywood new wave. It was a movement that lasted a decade, and produced a series of stylish entertainments people could care about without feeling trivial or pedantic. The first two
Godfather
movies (1972 and 1974) define the type: straight gangster pictures, but with the visual and moral depth of field of a Renoir.
In the seventies Kael consequently became, despite her disparagement
of auteur theory, a devotee of directors. Her favorites—Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Jonathan Demme, Paul Mazursky, Steven Spielberg—were artists of the popular. They loved, without condescension, exactly what the audience loved and went to the movies to see: pursuit and capture, sex and violence, love and death. They loved the story. Spielberg won Kael over in his first feature,
The Sugarland Express
(1974), by his orchestration of one of the most mundane staples of seventies movie-making, a car chase, which she described in her review as though it had been a masked ball shot by Ophuls: “He patterns them; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. He handles enormous configurations of vehicles; sometimes they move so sweetly you think he must be wooing them. These sequences are as unforced and effortless-looking as if the cars themselves—mesmerized—had just waltzed into their idiot formations,”
8
and so on. Even the most authorial of her auteurs, Bertolucci, showed his understanding of big-screen aesthetics in his casting: Trintignant, Sanda, Brando, De Niro, Lancaster, Depardieu. People go for the faces.
of auteur theory, a devotee of directors. Her favorites—Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sam Peckinpah, Brian De Palma, Jonathan Demme, Paul Mazursky, Steven Spielberg—were artists of the popular. They loved, without condescension, exactly what the audience loved and went to the movies to see: pursuit and capture, sex and violence, love and death. They loved the story. Spielberg won Kael over in his first feature,
The Sugarland Express
(1974), by his orchestration of one of the most mundane staples of seventies movie-making, a car chase, which she described in her review as though it had been a masked ball shot by Ophuls: “He patterns them; he makes them dance and crash and bounce back. He handles enormous configurations of vehicles; sometimes they move so sweetly you think he must be wooing them. These sequences are as unforced and effortless-looking as if the cars themselves—mesmerized—had just waltzed into their idiot formations,”
8
and so on. Even the most authorial of her auteurs, Bertolucci, showed his understanding of big-screen aesthetics in his casting: Trintignant, Sanda, Brando, De Niro, Lancaster, Depardieu. People go for the faces.
The reverse side of Kael’s taste for cleverness was her distaste for cynicism. She disliked most of Stanley Kubrick’s movies because she thought they were unfeeling and aloof; she disliked most of John Cassavetes’ because she felt that they showed contempt for the audience’s desire to be entertained. She disliked
The Graduate
because it seemed to her patently manipulative while pretending to be original and sincere; and she disliked the Dirty Harry movies because they exploited the visceral appeal of blood. She despised any filmmaker who assumed that because a thing is popular it must also be cheap, or that an audience drawn to sex or violence deserves to have its nose rubbed in it. This standard is the nub of the problem in her critical judgment.
The Graduate
because it seemed to her patently manipulative while pretending to be original and sincere; and she disliked the Dirty Harry movies because they exploited the visceral appeal of blood. She despised any filmmaker who assumed that because a thing is popular it must also be cheap, or that an audience drawn to sex or violence deserves to have its nose rubbed in it. This standard is the nub of the problem in her critical judgment.
For the more compelling the movie, the trickier the distinction between cleverness and cynicism becomes. It’s not just that there is an element of cold-blooded calculation in all successful entertainment; Kael was the last person to have disputed that. It’s that the cold-bloodedness in some of the movies she championed can sometimes
seem a little more genuine than the entertainment. Barbara Harris’s pathetic anthem in the final scene of
Nashville,
the protracted slow motion of the pig’s blood sequence in De Palma’s
Carrie
, Brando sticking his chewing gum under the railing at the end of
Last Tango in Paris:
these are scenes that seem to have been created not so much to rip away the last veil of our innocence as to gratify the director’s desire to have the last laugh on humanity. Kael didn’t defend moments like these in the movies she admired. She just read them differently. She knew perfectly well that De Palma enjoyed being manipulative, but she found his movies playful and witty, rather than smarmy and cynical, just as she found
Nashville
generous and funny, rather than patronizing and dyspeptic. She sensed pathos in places where less partisan or less enraptured viewers sensed satire and even disgust. Kael wasn’t interested in satire and disgust. She was a romantic.
seem a little more genuine than the entertainment. Barbara Harris’s pathetic anthem in the final scene of
Nashville,
the protracted slow motion of the pig’s blood sequence in De Palma’s
Carrie
, Brando sticking his chewing gum under the railing at the end of
Last Tango in Paris:
these are scenes that seem to have been created not so much to rip away the last veil of our innocence as to gratify the director’s desire to have the last laugh on humanity. Kael didn’t defend moments like these in the movies she admired. She just read them differently. She knew perfectly well that De Palma enjoyed being manipulative, but she found his movies playful and witty, rather than smarmy and cynical, just as she found
Nashville
generous and funny, rather than patronizing and dyspeptic. She sensed pathos in places where less partisan or less enraptured viewers sensed satire and even disgust. Kael wasn’t interested in satire and disgust. She was a romantic.
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