Pauline Kael's "The Movie Lover"

Pauline Kael (Photo by James Hamilton, 1985)

Ah, what’s this? A New Yorker piece by Pauline Kael called “The Movie Lover.” Erin Overbey includes it in her “Sunday Reading: Film Stories” (newyorker.com, March 28, 2021). I’ve never heard of “The Movie Lover.” I read the first sentence – “I’ve been lucky” – and instantly recognized it as the opening of the Introduction to her great 1994 collection For Keeps. I’ve read this Introduction many times; it’s one of my favorite Kael pieces. I didn’t know that it first appeared in The New Yorker as “The Movie Lover.” It’s a wonderful essay, in which Kael reflects on the genesis of her writing style – what she calls “that direct, spoken tone.” She says,

A friend of mine says that he learned from reading me that “content grows from language, not the other way around.” That’s a generous way of saying that I let it rip, that I don’t fully know what I think until I’ve said it. The reader is in on my thought processes.

Yes, she let it rip. That’s what I love about her writing. Take her superb “The God-Bless-America Symphony” (The New Yorker, December 18, 1978), a review of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter. Reading it, you sense Kael grappling with this “astonishing piece of work,” trying to sort out her responses. Finally, near the end, she lands on this perception: 

Michael shows no physical desire for Linda. They lie on a bed together, he fully clothed – should we know what they’re thinking? We don’t. And when, for one night, they’re under the covers together, without their clothes, and he rolls over on top of her, the scene is deliberately vague, passionless. He never even kisses her – would that be too personal? He was hotter for the deer.

That last line makes me smile every time I read it. I’ll bet Kael smiled, too, as she wrote it. She loved wisecracks, and that’s one of her best. And it gets at the essence of her take on The Deer Hunter – “a romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship, with the Vietnam War perceived in the Victorian terms of movies such as Lives of a Bengal Lancer – as a test of men’s courage.”