The Parentheses of Pauline

One of the hallmarks of Pauline Kael’s incomparable style was her extensive and creative use of parenthesis. She stuffed all kinds of comments - sniffs, snorts, hoots, harrumphs, cackles, raspberries, tidbits, wisecracks, barbs, etc. – inside brackets. Example of a wisecrack (from her review of Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, The New Yorker, December 27, 1969; included in her great National Book Award-winning 1973 Deeper Into Movies):

Ashamed of her sexuality (like all liberals, in this schematic view), she is given such lines as – to Redford – “I use you the way you use me.” (Most women in the audience will probably think, Lucky you.)

Example of a tidbit (from her review of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The New Yorker, June 28, 1982; collected in her 1984 Taking It All In):

Henry Thomas (who was the older of Sissy Spacek’s two small sons in Raggedy Man) has a beautiful brainy head with a thick crop of hair; his touching serio-comic solemnity draws us into the mood of the picture.

Example of a barb (from her terrific essay “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978; collected in her 1980 When The Lights Go Down):

She is truly a terrible actress, of the nostril school. (Did she study under Natalie Wood?)

There’s scarcely a paragraph in the hundreds of reviews she wrote that doesn’t contain at least one parenthesis. Sometimes she’d pack two or three in a single sentence. Example (from her brilliant 1969 Harper’s Magazine essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” included in her 1970 collection Going Steady):

It took off from a political double entendre that everybody had been thinking of (“Why, if Joe McCarthy had been working for the Communists, he couldn’t be doing them more good!”) and carried it to startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in a way that was trashy yet liberating.

Kael’s paragraphs are like strings of firecrackers going off – sparks of perception flying in every direction – many of which are caught in parentheses. There are at least three kinds of Kael parenthesis. The first kind is sort of a “memory pocket,” which Kael filled with movie associations drawn from her vast knowledge of the cinema. Example (from her review of Saturday Night Fever, The New Yorker, December 26, 1977; included in When The Lights Go Down):

(She’s reminiscent of the girl Margaret Sullivan played in The Shop Around the Corner.)

A second type is what I would call her “poison pen” parenthesis, in which she plants a sharp-tongued comment. Example (from her review of Midnight Express, The New Yorker, November 27, 1978; collected in When The Lights Go Down):

(I didn’t hope for Billy and his friends to escape – just for the movie to be over.)

And a third variety of Kael’s parenthesis is a very general category that I simply call “descriptive.” It’s my favorite kind, in which Kael tucks an extra bit of memorable detail into her descriptions of scenes, characters, actors, etc. Example (from her review of Stardust Memories, The New Yorker, October 27, 1980; collected in Taking It All In):

She seems to be used just for her physiognomy – for her bony chest and wide mouth (its corners run right into her cheekbones).

It’s hard to say how Kael’s penchant for parenthesis developed. It may be a spin-off from her admiration for thirties comedies’ fast-talking, wisecracking heroines – e.g., Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard. I say this because I see a parallel between the quick, subversive way a verbal wisecrack is delivered and the quick, subversive way Kael inserts her parenthetical comments into her writing). Or it could be an aspect of her tendency to say something and then immediately qualify it with a “but ... ,” “though ... ,” “still ... ,” thereby adding shade after shade of nuance.

Kael’s parentheses don’t stick out or clog the flow of her writing. They’re part of what makes the texture of her prose so incredibly rich. They're a means of conveying the action of her thought.

From the hundreds (maybe thousands) of parentheses that Kael wrote, here are six I’ve chosen mainly because they strike me as being so … Kaelesque:

(The bit of opera performed in China Is Near is the damnedest thing since “Salammbô” in Citizen Kane.) – “China Is Near,” The New Yorker, January 13, 1968

(And when, at last, he communicates with a visitor from above, there is a fleeting suggestion of Jean Renoir’s lopsided grin in the extraterrestrial’s young-old face.) – “The Greening of the Solar System,” The New Yorker, November 28, 1977

(You’ll also notice that she gets the worst – the most gnomic – lines, such as “At the center of a sick psyche there is a sick spirit.” Huh?) – “Fear of Movies,” The New Yorker, September 25, 1978

(His theory that men impart their substance and qualities into women along with their semen is a typical macho Mailerism; he sees it as a one-way process, of course. Has no woman slipped a little something onto his privates?) – “Marilyn,” The New York Times Book Review, July 22, 1973

(He wants to be buried in an unmarked grave. Of course. That’s why he’s made a four-hour movie about himself and his pilgrimage.) – “The Calvary Gig,” The New Yorker, February 13, 1978

(For true dryness, you’d have to sit through The Legend of the Lone Ranger to hear another great comedian, Jason Robards, as President Ulysses S. Grant, rasp out at the end, “Who is that masked man?”) – “Arthur,” The New Yorker, July 27, 1981

Credit: The above 1985 photograph of Pauline Kael is by James Hamilton. It appears on the back of her 1985 collection State of the Art.