Pauline Kael

Pauline Kael, Critic and Criticized
By Kelly Arnes

Kael began her career with the New Yorker in 1968, after moving to New York from California. She had weird quirks about her, such as never seeing the same movie twice, which made her stand out among all the other movie lovers. She brought passion and love to her reviews, and she wasn’t scared to piss someone off. She said what she thought and defended movies that others hated and critiqued movies that others loved. Her ability to say what she meant brought her many followers, and just as many adversaries
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She was a strong willed and vivacious writer. She didn’t have a problem speaking her mind, whether it was on paper or in her conversations with people. In her interview with Francis Davis, she was talking to him about Howard Hawks and mentioned that others thought all of his movies were “wonderful by definition” but she said that some of his movies were “very bad.” She was able to write what she wanted, and wasn’t scared to write something different than what other reviewers were writing.

She also had no qualms about upsetting or disagreeing with her boss, William Shawn. She was quoted in her interview with Davis saying Shawn often objected to things, such as writing too harshly about an actor or director. She goes on to say that it makes sense to try to protect the feelings of other people, and so she often conceded and changed things based on Shawn’s recommendation. Kael also gave in on things she wanted to write about, such as the pornographic film, Deep Throat, which Shawn considered outside of the magazine’s reader base. She had a different feeling about it, and these unique views on film were what amazed her readers and annoyed her competitors.

Kael was credited with increasing the readership of the New Yorker, as mentioned in her interview “[Shawn] also recognized that I significantly lowered the average age of the magazine’s readers. It was something the advertising department was very well aware of, too.” But, she was also criticized, Renata Adler wrote “She tended to write rather too long for what she had to say each week, and there was something overwrought in her tone.” Adler continued in her book Canaries in the Mineshaft to critique the many faults that Kael had and tried to undermine the reputation that Kael had built for herself.

Adler wrote in her essay House Critic, “What [critics] provide is a necessary consumer service…” and further stated that a review was a set of adjectives that express a “yes vote or a no vote.” Her view provides a simplistic view of a critic; ultimately, that is what they do, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Oscar Wilde wrote in The Critic as Artist, “It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it…. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.” And that one woman was Pauline Kael.