December 13, 2010 Issue

This week’s “Goings On About Town” (GOAT) is a cornucopia of verbal and visual pleasure, brimming with succulent details such as English Beat’s “punky edge,” Angie Wang’s stunning “Nellie McKay” portrait, “neo-fusion mashup” at Iridium, Warhol’s “tossed-off party pics,” Giacometti’s Montparnasse studio “overflowing with plaster dust,” a beautiful color picture of Rauschenberg’s 1955 “Short Circuit (Combine),” Joan Acocella’s “battle of the ‘Nutcracker’s,” Richard Brody’s memorable “depicts to the limits of consciousness” in his eloquent “Critics Notebook” tribute to “Shoah,” Andrea Thompson’s impeccably rhythmed “Whitewashed brick walls and green patterned wallpaper have the spare beauty of a homestead” in her superb “Tables For Two” review of Northern Spy Food Co., Bruce Diones on Cher (“her voice still has the roughness that can sandpaper the dullest lines to sharp finish”), and Laurie Rosenwald’s ingenious “On The Horizon” illustration, “Picasso’s guitars, at MOMA.”

Some of these great GOAT details triggered pleasant memories of past New Yorker pieces. For example, Joan Acocella’s mention of the possibility that the mice in Ratmansky’s “Nutcracker” will be “truly nasty-looking, with red eyes and yellow teeth” called to mind Arlene Croce’s “Baryshnikov’s ‘Nutcracker’” (The New Yorker, January 17, 1977), in which she describes the mice in Nureyev’s “Nutcracker”: “His mice were rats who tore off the heroine’s skirt.” Croce’s piece is included in her 1982 collection, Going to the Dance.

The illustration of Rauschenberg’s “Short Circuit (Combine)” took me back to Calvin Tomkins’ Robert Rauschenberg profile “Moving Out” (The New Yorker, February 29, 1964). I first read it twenty years ago in Tomkins’ 1965 collection The Bride and the Bachelor. It contains some great descriptions of Rauschenberg working, including this detail: “From time to time he paused to replenish a tall glass of vodka and orange juice.”

And Richard Brody’s powerful “Critic’s Notebook” on Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” in which he says the film “has transcended the cinema to become the primary record of the extermination of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War,” brought to mind Pauline Kael’s controversial 1985 “Shoah” review (The New Yorker, December 30, 1985), in which she dares to criticize Lanzmann’s technique, e.g., “Lanzmann’s closeups can be tyrannically close – invasions of the face.” Kael’s review is included in her 1989 collection Hooked.

Last week at newyorker.com, Brody posted a scathing critique of Kael’s “Shoah” review (see “‘Shoah’ At Twenty-Five,” December 7, 2010). In his piece, Brody comes perilously close to calling Kael’s review anti-Semitic. He says:

So when Kael charges that the movie ‘doesn’t set you thinking’ and adds ‘When you come out, you’re likely to feel dazed, and confirmed in all your worst fears,’ it’s clear that she simply doesn’t know what to think about it – and so, falls back on her own prejudices.

He also says, “Pauline Kael’s misunderstandings of “Shoah” are so grotesque as to seem willful.”

Kael faced this type of criticism back in 1985 when she wrote the review. According to Craig Seligman, in his book Sontag & Kael (2004), Alfred Kazin considered Kael’s objections to the film and found her "incapable of responding to the material.” Seligman says that Leon Wieseltier also strongly objected to Kael’s review. He quotes Wieseltier as saying that her dissenting view of the film is a “dissenting view about the film and the catastrophe.” And Seligman quotes another angry objector, the film critic J. Hoberman, as saying, “Imagine, he [Lanzmann] actually found anti-Semitism in Treblinka. If he’s not tied up again, he could probably find it in The New Yorker.”

Seligman correctly points out that “Kael was reviewing a film – she wasn’t reviewing the Holocaust.” He says that Kazan and Wieseltier “ignore the core of Kael’s argument, which is that “Shoah” fails as a film.” He says, “To deduce from her misgivings about “Shoah” that she viewed the Holocaust with insufficient gravity is malignantly unfair. (And, by the way, untrue.)” Regarding the implications of Hoberman’s statement, Seligman says, “That sentence has haunted me ever since I first read it, in 1986. Could it possibly mean what it appears to mean – that Kael’s review is anti-Semitic?” Seligman concludes that Hoberman’s charge is “an accusation of astonishing coarseness.”

I agree with Seligman. Richard Brody’s statement against Kael falls into the same category as J. Hoberman’s; to borrow Seligman’s words, it is an accusation of astonishing coarseness.

Credit: The above portrait of Nellie McKay is by Angie Wang; it appears in “Goings On About Town” in this week’s New Yorker.