Expansive Subjectivity
(This is a brief excerpt from a piece I wrote for a 2015 anthology, Talking about Pauline Kael: Critics, Filmmakers, and Scholars Remember an Icon. My essay was called “Kael’s Influence: Expansive Subjectivity”.)
Kael wrote in two modes, which isn’t always noted when commenting on her work. Her lengthy reviews in the New Yorker filled several volumes, and are, as much as anything, her legacy. But she also wrote short blurbs for films. She had been doing this since her days running a repertory theater in Berkeley, where they appeared as program notes. At the New Yorker, she contributed to a section that featured notes on movies currently running in New York, and these contributions were something of a hybrid. She was against the idea of publishing a collection of the notes, “because they are often written hurriedly and are frequently dependent on my old, spotty memories,” adding that “many of the notes are vandalized from my own reviews”.
The latter interests me the most, because in “vandalizing” her reviews to create a short note, we can learn something about the process that informs both of her writing modes.
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Shoeshine provides a useful example. Her note, as it appears in the collection 5001 Nights at the Movies, is an almost verbatim rearrangement of the final paragraph of her initial review. She is expansive again in her ability to reach outside of movies:
It has a sweetness and a simplicity that suggest greatness of feeling, and this is so rare in films that to cite a comparison one searches beyond the medium. If Mozart had written an opera set in poverty, it might have had this kind of painful beauty.
The original review had five paragraphs. The second reflected on the reaction of James Agee to the film; the third quoted Orson Welles; in the fourth, she wondered why so few people had seen the film. The fifth included what I quoted above, and offered a concise presentation of her take on the movie.
What is missing, not only on the page but also in its contribution to what Kael had to say about the movie, is the first paragraph, the one that is so often referred to as quintessential Kael, where she begins with the lovers’ quarrel, then talks about how she felt on leaving the theater:
I came out of the theater, tears streaming, and overheard the petulant voice of a college girl complaining to her boyfriend, “Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” I walked up the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine. For if people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?
The Shoeshine of the review, and the Shoeshine of the notes, are presented in much different manners, even though the latter is taken practically word for word from the former. The notes version offers an elegantly written brief on the film. But I would argue that the complete review is the one that works the best, precisely because of the anecdotal emotions in the opening. In five paragraphs, she gets from her subjective reaction on leaving the theater, through the afore-mentioned “feeling of human emotions” that connect the film to her personal reaction, on finally to the summary of the movie as a whole. That summary is clear, and is a fine and useful addition to an anthology of notes. But the brilliance of Kael’s technique, the brilliance that was so influential, can only be found in the original.
