by Brian Kellow
Pauline didn’t get behind James Bridges’s evocative Urban Cowboy, about aimless Texas oil-rig workers who compete to ride a mechanical bull, but she was entranced by Debra Winger, whom she described as having “a quality of flushed transparency. When she necks on the dance floor—and she’s a great smoocher, with puffy lips like a fever blister—her clothes seem to be under her damp skin. (She’s naked all through the movie, though she never takes her clothes off.)” Winger had the kind of sensual, electric presence that Pauline had once loved in the young Jane Fonda.
She again came out powerfully on behalf of Brian De Palma for his latest, Dressed to Kill, a compendium of Hitchcockian themes and takeoffs. There were a few genuinely frightening scenes in Dressed to Kill, but her response to the movie seemed excessive: She found it De Palma’s most sustained piece of work, in which he had “perfected a near-surreal poetic voyeurism—the stylized expression of a blissfully dirty mind.” But despite her exuberant description of some of the movie’s lengthier set pieces, many readers found her review unpersuasive if not simply wrong-headed.
Why did Pauline prefer De Palma’s work to Hitchcock’s, when the younger director was essentially reworking over many themes developed by the master? Perhaps it was the understanding of female psychology that De Palma showed. (Hitchcock’s movies are full of scenes with women that make one’s skin crawl—a prime example being the sequence in his 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which James Stewart sedates Doris Day before telling her that their son has been kidnapped.) Her friend David Edelstein thought that she also favored the lushness of DePalma’s visual palette—his emphasis on pure sensuality.
When the Lights Go Down was still selling nicely by midsummer. One prominent publication, however—The New York Review of Books—had not weighed in on the book until mid-August, when it ran a lengthy review by Renata Adler. The sniping notices that Pauline had received over the years—particularly for Reeling—were of a type that nearly every writer had to deal with in the course of a career. But the piece in The New York Review of Books was another matter altogether: It was the most devastating critical attack on Pauline’s career ever published. The cover line, “The Sad Tale of Pauline Kael,” was an indication of what was to come; the review itself was titled “The Perils of Pauline,” a formula that had already been exhausted in any number of newspaper and magazine pieces about her. More than just a review of When the Lights Go Down, Adler’s essay was a broadside against Pauline’s lofty reputation, an aggressive attempt to discredit her—with the nation’s literary community occupying a ringside seat.
Certainly an attack on America’s most celebrated movie critic was a “box-office” concept, and Renata Adler was an inspired choice to write it. She was a well-known contributor to the publication, a sometime film critic with impressive credentials (The New York Times and, most recently, The New Yorker). and an acclaimed fiction writer. The passionate, emotional, argumentative Pauline confronted with the dispassionate, chiseled-prose Adler—two more temperamentally opposed writers would have been difficult to imagine.
Pauline had been annoyed by many of Adler’s recent reviews for The New Yorker; in particular, she was incensed by Adler’s dismissal of Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, which Pauline considered one of the best films of a bad year. And with her tony educational background (Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, a law degree from Yale) and frequently reported-on social connections, Adler was the sort of darling of the East Coast intellectual establishment that Pauline had for so long viewed with contempt.
An advance copy of The New York Review of Books issue that featured “The Perils of Pauline” was sent to Pauline with a note from the publication’s editor, Robert Silvers, in the event that Pauline wanted to reply.
Adler’s essay began with a lengthy two columns in which she outlined her thoughts on what made a good critic in the arts, and why the best ones inevitably found themselves played out after a certain period and moved on to write about other topics. For another two and a half columns she expressed her qualified admiration for Pauline’s work from the 1950s up through her first few years at The New Yorker, stating that she had “continued to believe that movie criticism was probably in quite good hands with Pauline Kael.”
The bomb was dropped midway through the fifth column, when Adler stated that When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” She went on to detail her complaints—that Pauline’s work had taken on “an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.”
In 1976, when Reeling was published, John Simon had, while expressing his admiration for Pauline as a stylist, objected to her coarseness of spirit and taste, in terms of both language and her championing of certain movies he considered lowbrow: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler echoed this theme in her review, complaining that Pauline had “lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic. Mistaking lack of civility for vitality, she now substitutes for argument a protracted, obsessional invective—what amounts to a staff cinema critics’ branch of est.” Adler—not coincidentally, perhaps, an ardent admirer of William Shawn’s editing style—lamented Pauline’s use of images of “sexual conduct, deviance, impotence, masturbation; also of indigestion, elimination, excrement. I do not mean to imply that these images are frequent, or that one has to look for them. They are relentless, inexorable.” Among the words and phrases that bothered her: “just a belch from the Nixon era”; “you can’t cut through the crap in her”; “plastic turds”; and “tumescent filmmaking.”
Adler also attacked Pauline for her repeated use of “the mock rhetorical question,” such as “Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer?” “Where was the director?” and “How can you have any feelings for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?” These questions, she felt, were “rarely saying anything; they are simply doing something. Bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying.”
There was more: Adler took issue with Pauline’s use of “you” to indicate what the audience was feeling, when she would have more civilly, in Adler’s view, said “I.” Like Robert Brustein, Andrew Sarris, and even Pauline’s friend Greil Marcus, she found fault with the surfeit of hyperbole, and she objected, seemingly on moral grounds, to comments such as the one Pauline wrote about Paul Schrader, in Hardcore—not knowing how to turn a trick—which Adler felt represented “a new breakthrough in vulgarity and unfairness.” She also theorized that Pauline had taken advantage of The New Yorker’s famously genteel editing process, in which writers are “free to write what, and at what length, they choose.” While disagreements with writers of feature articles could be dealt with simply by postponing the running of the piece, movie reviews demanded constant currency; Pauline’s work had to be run, week in and week out, essentially forcing The New Yorker either to fire her or “to accommodate her work. The conditions of unique courtesy, literacy, and civility, of course, were what Ms. Kael was most inclined by temperament to test. Her excesses got worse.” Reading Pauline in book form was a very different experience from reading her from week to week, Adler wrote, because “It is difficult, with these reviews, to account for, or even look at, what is right there on the page.”
“The Perils of Pauline” quickly became an incendiary topic of conversation in New York literary circles. It was hard to remember when any established writer had launched such a damning dismissal of one of her own kind. Time and New York ran full-scale feature articles on the scandal. In The Village Voice, Andrew Sarris gave his seal of approval to Adler’s broadside, but the publication also ran a scathing article by Pauline’s friend James Wolcott, who mercilessly limned A
dler as “Princess Renata,” a writer who “when not dusting off her diplomas . . . writes about journalistic chores—book reviewing, movie reviewing, investigative reporting—with the pained, annoyed tone of a royal bride stranded in one of the empire’s scruffier provinces.” Letters to the editor poured into The New York Review of Books. “Renata Adler should see a psychiatrist,” her young critic friend at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Michael Sragow, wrote to Pauline. “Hope you’re bearing this latest injustice with your usual fortitude and good humor, which is what you’ve been displaying in your reviews.” Several other friends came to Pauline’s rescue in print, including Gary Arnold, who denounced Adler to New York as “one of the dunces of the profession.”
One person who didn’t rise to her defense was William Shawn, who characteristically tried to calm the waters. “That’s just how Renata reacts to Pauline,” he told a reporter. “One has to permit all writers a certain amount of idiosyncrasy.” Many at the magazine speculated that Shawn agreed with Adler’s assessment of Pauline’s work, but in interviews, the editor worked hard to maintain a neutral stance, saying, “There are boundaries beyond which the magazine can’t go. But you have to give Pauline the benefit of the doubt as to her intentions and needs. If at times she finds it necessary to use unconventional language, that has to be allowed.”
Many of Pauline’s friends, James Wolcott among them, felt that the Adler piece was something of an inside job, given the close relationship of both Adler and Penelope Gilliatt to one of Pauline’s chief antagonists, Vincent Canby. (Gilliatt did send Pauline a sympathetic note when Adler’s essay was published. Gilliatt wrote that such an outrage “shouldn’t happen to anyone, let alone to anyone who writes.” She added, “And you certainly know how much I have always admired your humanity and zeal.”)
Pauline attempted to stay above the fray, telling Time’s reporter simply, “I’m sorry that Ms. Adler doesn’t respond to my writing. What else can I say?” Privately, however, she was deeply wounded by Adler’s harsh words. Despite her sharpness with others in print, she had always maintained a conscience about what she wrote, and she often told friends that she would have had to have been a complete boor not to feel a twinge of sadness and discomfort when she ran into someone whose films she had savaged. She had always known how painful it was for an artist to be the object of a full-scale critical attack: Now she had experienced it personally.
She went back to work, and it is impossible to know exactly what effect, if any, on her day-to-day writing Adler’s criticism had had. Certainly there seemed to be no difference in tone or substance or style, at least not immediately. The run of movies that fall wasn’t bad: She loved The Stunt Man, starring Peter O’Toole, and considered its director, Richard Rush, “a kinetic-action director to the bone; visually, he has the boldness of a comic-strip artist”; she found “a furious aliveness in this picture.” And she was completely won over by Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard, which opened the 1980 New York Film Festival. Pauline compared Demme’s intuitive gifts at creating characters onscreen with Jean Renoir’s; she thought Melvin and Howard “a comedy without a speck of sitcom aggression: the characters are slightly loony the way we all are sometimes (and it seldom involves coming up with cappers or with straight lines that somebody else can cap). When the people on the screen do unexpected things, they’re not weirdos; their eccentricity is just an offshoot of the normal, and Demme suggests that maybe these people who grew up in motor homes and trailers in Nevada and California and Utah seem eccentric because they didn’t learn the ‘normal,’ accepted ways of doing things.”
The fall of 1980 saw the release of the one movie she had managed to help get onto the assembly line in Hollywood—The Elephant Man. (Some critics would have recused themselves, but Pauline saw no conflict of interest.) Pauline had liked David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and she thought that he had brought his powerful imagination to full flower in his new picture. The story of the unfortunate, deformed Englishman John Merrick was handled with remarkable grace, and without hysteria or sentiment. “The Elephant Man has the power and some of the dream logic of a silent film,” Pauline wrote, “yet there are also wrenching, pulsating sounds—the hissing steam and the pounding of the start of the industrial age.”
In late October she published a long review of Woody Allen’s latest, Stardust Memories, the most annihilating piece of criticism she had done for some time. Pauline thought the director had been in decline for a while. She had admired the sweetness of feeling that came through in his 1977 hit Annie Hall, but she was bothered by the picture’s New York chauvinism and sneering attitude toward Los Angeles, and Allen’s self-deprecating treatment of his Jewishness worked on her nerves. In her notes for the movie (she didn’t review it), she wrote of Allen’s character, the uptight Jewish comedian Alvy Singer, “He only shows you what you see anyway.” She thought Annie Hall was a promising idea that wasn’t delved into deeply enough and never quite found its real subject because it veered off into a tale of two cities—New York versus L.A. She had also had major reservations about Allen’s 1979 picture Manhattan, which Andrew Sarris hailed as the first great film of the seventies; Pauline was disturbed that Allen chose to focus on the narcissism and career issues of three mixed-up people as being representative of what was wrong with all of New York, and she hooted at the idea that all of this neurosis was shown in contrast to the purity of the teenage girl played by Mariel Hemingway. “What man in his forties,” she wrote, with chilling prescience, “could pass off a predilection for teen-agers as a quest for true values?”
In Stardust Memories, Allen played Sandy Bates, a famous comedy director who wants to be taken seriously and find himself as an artist, but no one will let him. Pauline was annoyed by the movie’s sour narcissism; she thought that Allen was trying to become the Jewish Fellini. “Throughout Stardust Memories,” she wrote, “Sandy is superior to all those who talk about his work; if they like his comedies, it’s for freakish reasons, and he shows them up as poseurs and phonies, and if they don’t like his serious work, it’s because they’re too stupid to understand it. He anticipates almost anything that you might say about Stardust Memories and ridicules you for it.” There was no question in Pauline’s mind that Sandy was a mouthpiece for Allen’s true feelings about himself; she cited a comment he had made to Newsweek: “When you do comedy, you’re not sitting at the grown-ups’ table, you’re sitting at the children’s table.” In her reviews of Stardust Memories, she painted him as another kind of traitor, too: For years Allen’s unmade-bed looks and wired, smart Jewish humor had made him “a new national hero.” Now he seemed to be rejecting all that as well. Pauline considered it “a horrible betrayal when he demonstrates that despite his fame he still hates the way he looks and that he wanted to be one of them—the stuffy macho Wasps—all along.” She closed with a stinging slap: “If Woody Allen finds success very upsetting and wishes the public would go away, this picture should help him stop worrying.”
There was a time when Pauline had been invited to Allen’s New Year’s Eve parties, events filled with many bright lights among New York’s intelligentsia. On one invitation, Allen wrote that even if she didn’t like most of the people there, she’d have him to talk to for laughs. He was apologizing in advance for the guests at his party. Pauline had seen right through him, and she used it in her review of Stardust Memories. After that, her friendship with Allen froze solid.
She was also disappointed in Martin Scorsese’s new picture, Raging Bull, in which Robert De Niro played the middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta. Like Allen, Scorsese seemed to have gotten carried away with his own seriousness. She thought Raging Bull wasn’t content to be a human drama about the glory days and inevitable decline of a famous prizefighter; it aimed to be “a biography of the genre of prizefight films.” And it wasn’t even content to be that: “It’s also about movies and about violence, it’s about gritty visual rhythm, it’s about Brando, it’s about the two Godfather pictures—it’s a
bout Scorsese and De Niro’s trying to top what they’ve done and what everybody else has done.” It was meant to be the apotheosis of all the great, tough pictures of the seventies about Italian-American urban life, but it had a muffled impact, in Pauline’s view, because “You can feel the director sweating for greatness, but there’s nothing under the scenes.” She also found De Niro’s much-acclaimed performance didn’t have the impact that was intended. “What De Niro does in this picture isn’t acting, exactly,” she wrote. “Though it may at some level be awesome, it definitely isn’t pleasurable. De Niro seems to have emptied himself out to become the part he’s playing and then not got enough material to refill himself with.”
Pauline was annoyed the following year when the eight Academy Award nominations for The Elephant Man did not include one for Freddie Francis’s cinematography. She was also upset that the Academy ignored her new favorite, Debra Winger, for Urban Cowboy. At the New York Film Critics Circle voting that year, she had gotten behind Melvin and Howard, her friend Irvin Kershner’s sequel to Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and—inexplicably—Dressed to Kill for Best Picture; O’Toole, Alan King (for Sidney Lumet’s comedy Just Tell Me What You Want), and Kurt Russell (for Used Cars) for Best Actor; Debra Winger, Mary Steenburgen, Dyan Cannon (for Honeysuckle Rose), and Shelley Duvall (as Olive Oyl in Robert Altman’s film of the famous comic strip Popeye), for Best Actress. She was chagrined when Ordinary People took the prize for Best Picture, but happy that Melvin and Howard earned citations for Best Director (Jonathan Demme) and Best Screenplay (Bo Goldman).