Rereadings: Pauline Kael's "Reeling"

This is the fifth in a series in which I’ll revisit some of my favorite books by New Yorker writers and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s selection is Pauline Kael’s splendid Reeling (1976).

Reeling is a collection of over seventy movie reviews that Kael wrote for The New Yorker, 1972-1975. It includes some of her best work: “Tango” (on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris); “Everyday Inferno” (on Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets); “Movieland – The Bum’s Paradise” (on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye); “Love and Coca-Cola” (on Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us); “Fathers and Sons” (on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II); “Beverly Hills as a Big Bed” (on Hal Ashby’s Shampoo); and “Coming: Nashville” (on Robert Altman’s Nashville). 

Notice that three of those pieces are on Robert Altman. Kael loved Altman’s work. If you want to know what her governing aesthetic is, read her reviews of Altman. She praised him for his “glancing touch,” his “relaxed awareness,” his “organic style of moviemaking that tells a story without the clanking of plot.” “He’s not a pusher.” “He finds his story through the actors” and “through accidents of weather and discoveries along the way.”

There are some undervalued gems in this collection, too. I love her review of Steven Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express. She writes, “Photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, the cars shimmer in the hot sunlight; in the dark, the red lights of the police cars are like eerie night-blooming flowers.”

Her dismissal of Terrance Malick’s Badlands is unforgettable: “Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it.” She concludes: 

And there’s a basic flaw in Malick’s method: he has perceived the movie – he’s done our work instead of his. In place of people and action, with metaphor arising out of the story, he gives us a surface that is all conscious metaphor. Badlands is so preconceived that there’s nothing left to respond to.

Reeling also contains two book reviews – both excellent. One is on Arlene Croce’s The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book; the other is on Norman Mailer’s Marilyn. The Marilyn review contains several classic Kael zingers. Example: “Marilyn is a feat all right: matchstick by matchstick, he’s built a whole damned armada inside a bottle. (Surely he’s getting ready to do Norman? Why leave it to someone who may care less?).”

If you are new to Kael’s work and you are wondering where to start, I recommend Reeling. It covers a golden period of American movies, and shows Kael when she was really rolling, trying to get at what she responds to and why. As she says in her Foreword, “I may not have rendered justice to the best, but I’ve done my damnedest.”  

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!