Pauline Kael's Classic "Underground Man"

Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver (1976)

I’m pleased to see that newyorker.com has included Pauline Kael’s “Underground Man” (The New Yorker, February 9, 1976) in its “Nights at the Movies” series. It’s one of her best. But I want to flag an error in the newyorker.com version. The punctuation after “hallway” in the following passage should be a comma, not a period:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway. It’s an Antonioni pirouette.

The correct version (from the original review) is all one sentence:

One can pass over a lingering closeup of a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the blank hallway, it’s an Antonioni pirouette. 

“Underground Man” is included in Kael’s 1980 collection When the Lights Go Down, a book Renata Adler adjudged “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless” (“The Perils of Pauline,” The New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980). To which the only possible response is “Oy!”

Kael wrote a capsule version of “Underground Man” for use in “Goings On About Town” ’s “In Brief” section, condensing the two-thousand-seventy-four-word original to a hundred and fifty-three words. It reads as follows:

Robert De Niro is in almost every frame of Martin Scorsese’s feverish, horrifyingly funny movie about a lonely New York cab-driver. De Niro’s inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the compositions. He’s Travis Bickle, an outsider who can’t find any point of entry into human society. He drives nights because he can’t sleep anyway; surrounded by the night world of the uprooted – whores, pimps, transients – he hates New York with a Biblical fury, and its filth and smut obsess him. This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground. Scorsese achieves the quality of trance in some scenes, and the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. From Paul Schrader’s script; with Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, Leonard Harris, Harry Northrup, Joe Spinell, Diahnne Abbott, and Scorsese himself. [Collected in Kael’s great 5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991]  

It’s interesting to see how Kael composed this “In Brief” note, picking words and phrases from the original piece and combining them to make new, more concentrated sentences. For example, the line “This ferociously powerful film is like a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground” is sourced in three separate sentences in the original: “ferociously” in “This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive Mean Streets”; “powerful” in “No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying”; and the rest of the sentence in “Taxi Driver is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of Notes from the Underground.” 

For me, the “In Brief” note’s most quintessentially Kaelian line is “The cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness,” a choice fragment of the original sentence: “Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness” (my emphasis). 

Forty-two years after it appeared in The New Yorker, “Underground Man” still thrives. Hail Kael!