March 31, 2025 Issue

Anytime Richard Brody comments on Pauline Kael – beware! He doesn’t like her. His hostility goes back to his “Shoah at Twenty-Five” (December 7, 2010), in which he comes perilously close to calling Kael anti-Semitic because she dared to criticize Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. In this week’s issue, Brody has a “Takes” piece that revisits Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” (January 23, 1971). He appears to praise it. But don’t be fooled. His knife is out. He calls it “something of a manifesto” that “reveals why, despite Kael’s status as the foremost critic of her era, she was also sharply at odds with it.” He notes “the rise of the New Hollywood era that Kael would celebrate as a golden age,” and says, “she was hostile to many of its masterworks.” This is false. For one thing, “Notes on Heart and Mind” is not “something of a manifesto,” not even close. It’s a collection of rants she wrote out of frustration with how bad the movies were at that time. If you want to read her manifesto, read “Trash, Art and the Movies” (1969) – one of the great critical essays of the twentieth century. 

But the main reason Brody’s claim is false turns on his use of “many” (“she was hostile to many of its masterworks”). Okay, name one. Name one masterwork of the New Hollywood era, the so-called golden age of American cinema, that Kael was hostile to. I can think of at least a dozen that she celebrated: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Cabaret, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, Phantom of the Paradise, The Godfather, Part II, Shampoo, Nashville, Carrie, Taxi Driver. Kael wasn’t at odds with these revolutionary new American movies. She loved them!

The “Takes” series invites New Yorker writers to “revisit notable works from the archive.” Brody’s choice of Kael’s “Notes on Heart and Mind” is odd. It’s one of her weakest pieces. She wrote it when she was in a funk. She included it in her final collection For Keeps (1995), but she cut it drastically. With so many great Kael reviews and essays to choose from, why did Brody pick this one? I think it goes back to his hatred of her Shoah review. He’s exacting his revenge.