Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

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. 

Postscript: Gene Hackman 1930 - 2025

Gene Hackman, in The French Connection

I see in the Times that Gene Hackman has died. He was 95. He’s one of my favorite actors. He appeared in at least three cinematic classics – Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The French Connection (1971), and Unforgiven (1992). I first saw him in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, in which he played Clyde’s older brother Buck. It was only a supporting role, but Hackman was superb. Reviewing the movie, Pauline Kael said his performance was “beautifully controlled,” “the best in the movie.” Then four years later, he played the lowlife police detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in William Friedkin’s The French Connection, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor. But perhaps his greatest role was as the sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s magnificent Unforgiven for which he won another Academy Award – this time for Best Supporting Actor. What I loved about Hackman’s acting is its naturalness. He seemed not just to play his roles, but to live them.   

August 19, 2024 Issue

Wow! It was just like old times. I opened this week’s issue (an “archival issue”), and who should I find? None other than Pauline Kael – my all-time favorite New Yorker writer. What a treat! The selected piece is her great “Bravo!,” a review of William Wyler’s Funny Girl. It originally appeared in the September 28, 1968 New Yorker, and was later included in two Kael collections – Going Steady (1969) and For Keeps (1994). It’s a key piece in Kael’s oeuvre. It’s one of her earliest expressions of her critical credo. She wrote,

There hasn’t been a funny girl on the screen for so long now that moviegoers have probably also got used to doing without one of the minor, once staple pleasures of moviegoing: the wisecracking heroines, the clever funny girls—Jean Arthur, of course, and Claudette Colbert, and Carole Lombard, and Ginger Rogers, and Rosalind Russell, and Myrna Loy, and all the others who could be counted on to be sassy and sane. They performed a basic comic function—they weren’t taken in by sham; they had the restorative good sense of impudence—and in the pre-bunny period they made American women distinctive and marvellous.... The comedy is the comedy of cutting through the bull, of saying what’s really on your mind.  

I don’t think Kael aspired to be a “funny girl.” But she loved making wisecracks, and she could always be counted on for being “sassy and sane” and “cutting through the bull.” In a way, I think she saw herself in the tradition of Jean Arthur, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, and the other wisecracking actresses she mentions. They definitely influenced her impudent approach to criticism. 

“Bravo!” contains several quintessential Kael lines. This one, for example: “Most Broadway musicals are dead before they reach the movies—the routines are so worked out they’re stiff, and the jokes are embalmed in old applause.” And this: “And the tears belong to her face; they seem to complete it, as Garbo’s suffering in 'Camille' seemed to complete her beauty.”

“Bravo!” is one of Kael’s best pieces. I applaud The New Yorker for republishing it. Hail Kael!

Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #3 "Barry Levinson's 'Diner': Kael vs. Wolcott"

This is the eighth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “Barry Levinson’s Diner: Kael vs. Wolcott” (January 18, 2014):

It’s interesting to compare James Wolcott’s “French Fries and Sympathy” (in his recent collection Critical Mass) with Pauline Kael’s “Comedians” (in her classic 1984 collection Taking It All In). Both are reviews of Barry Levinson’s charming, offbeat 1982 autobiographical movie Diner. They provide an excellent opportunity to contrast Kael’s and Wolcott’s critical approaches. Also, I want to see how the student stacks up against the master. Wolcott was a Kael disciple, a Paulette. They saw Diner together. Wolcott writes about it in his memoir Lucking Out (“ ‘What’s that they’re pouring on the French fries?’ she asked as the camera panned the diner counter. ‘Gravy.’ ‘They put gravy on French fries?’ ‘Oh, yeah, beef gravy. Though chicken gravy is an option’ ”). Wolcott was just a fledgling; Kael was at the height of her powers. The comparison may be unfair to Wolcott. On the other hand, he may surprise us. He’s an inspired metaphorist. And he’s closer to Diner’s culture than Kael is; he grew up near Baltimore, where Diner is set.

Both pieces are appreciative. Kael, in her “Comedians,” calls Diner “a wonderful movie,” “that rare autobiographical movie that is made by someone who knows how to get the texture right.” Wolcott, in his “French Fries and Sympathy,” describes the film as a “bittersweet reverie about the pleasures of noshing and chumming about until the squeak of dawn.”

Wolcott’s piece starts strong. His first paragraph contains this marvelous line:

As Baltimore pretties itself with crinkly gold Christmas decorations and rows of navy-blue Colt banners, Levinson’s characters – Eddie (Steve Guttenberg), Shrevie (Daniel Stern), Fenwick (Kevin Bacon), Billy (Timothy Daly), and Boogie (Mickey Rourke) – scheme and gamble, cop cheap feels and mull over impending marriages, blow warmth into their knotted fists, reminisce about high school escapades, razz each other into fits of helpless laughter.

That “blow warmth into their knotted fists” is very fine.

In contrast, Kael’s loveliest effect is her conclusion:

Levinson has a great feel for promise. At the diner, the boys are all storytellers, and they take off from each other; their conversations are almost all overlapping jokes that are funny without punch lines. The diner is like a comedy club where the performers and the customers feed each other lines – they’re all stars and all part of the audience. The diner is where they go to give their nightly performances, and the actors all get a chance to be comedians.

Both critics admire Diner’s talented young cast. Both are excited by Mickey Rourke’s Boogie. Kael calls Boogie “the sleaziest and most charismatic figure of the group.” Wolcott describes him as a “tattered prince of sleaze.” Wolcott’s depiction of Kevin Bacon’s eyes as a “bleary, amused scrunch” is very good, as is Kael’s notation of Steve Guttenberg’s “perfectly inflected Paul Newman-like grins.”

Both critics are superb noticers. In his piece, Wolcott points out that the drummer in the strip-joint scene is “portrayed by Jay Dee Daugherty , formerly the drummer for Patti Smith.” In “Comedians,” Kael notes “the kid wandering around quoting from Sweet Smell of Success.” Regarding the wedding scene, Kael mentions “the Baltimore Colts marching song and the bridesmaids’ dresses in the Colts’ colors (blue and white), and Beth trying to teach her record-aficionado husband to dance.” Looking at the same scene, Wolcott observes,

Here girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet, Earl affably picks his way through the buffet, Boogie and the gang gather around the table (ties loosened, smiles relaxed); the entire sequence has a hushed tenderness in which every character is given his dignified due and then suspended in time, to be remembered only with fondness.

That phrase, “girls in white gloves flex their fingers in anticipation of the flung bouquet,” is wonderfully alive. At the end of his piece, Wolcott says that Diner’s “world and feelings have the full crack of life.” So, too, do these two splendid, generous-hearted reviews.

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.”  

The Art of Quotation (Part III)

Portrait of Madonna by Andrea Ventura

Joanna Biggs, in her superb “ ‘Give Me Joy’ ” (The New York Review of Books, May 23, 2024), a review of Mary Gabriel’s Madonna: A Rebel Life, writes,

The image of the whore was crystallized in Susan Seidelman’s 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan: Madonna played the eponymous Susan, strolling East Seventh Street and eating cheese puffs like an “indolent, trampy goddess,” as Pauline Kael put it in The New Yorker. 

The quote is from Kael’s “Passion” (The New Yorker, April 22, 1985; included in her wonderful 1985 collection State of the Art), in which she says, “Nobody comes through in the movie except Madonna, who comes through as Madonna (she moves regally, an indolent, trampy goddess)....” 

Kael’s “indolent, trampy goddess” is very good. Biggs’ “eating cheese puffs like an ‘indolent, trampy goddess’ ” is brilliant! Biggs takes Kael’s phrase and makes it her own. 

Postscript: Biggs’ piece contains another inspired line: 

Halfway through Sex there is a beautifully composed, and hot, picture of her leaning over a full-length mirror masturbating, watching her own cheeks bloom pink with orgasm. 

I nominate that as the best sentence of 2024 (so far). Biggs is one of today’s best critics. I’d like to see more of her in The New Yorker. 

Top Ten "New Yorker & Me": #9 "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' "

Still from Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida (2013)

This is the second post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is "Minimal Realism: Pawel Pawlikowski's 'Ida' " (August 6, 2014):

I like the look of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, and the feel of it. Pawlikowski has a poet’s gift for using objects, landscapes, and people expressively, so that they all become part of his vision. It’s this gift, I think, that makes Ida a rich, emotionally charged experience.

The best description of Pawlikowski’s technique that I’ve read is found in David Denby’s " 'Ida': A Film Masterpiece" (“Culture Desk,” newyorker.com, May 27, 2014):

The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. “Ida” might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women’s relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut’s “The Wild Child,” and also Polish movies made in the period in which “Ida” is set. But I can’t recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns’ spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape.

That “minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention almost rapt,” is an excellent description of Pawlikowski’s style. I prefer it to, say, “stylistic austerity,” and variations thereof, which some critics are using to describe Ida’s form. See, for example, Dana Stevens, "Ida" (Slate, May 2, 2014): “In many ways, Ida feels like a film that might have been made anytime in the past 50 years. It’s set in the early 1960s, and its stylistic austerity and interest in theological questions often recall the work of Robert Bresson (though Pawlikowski lacks, I think, Bresson’s deeply held faith in salvation).”

The comparison of Ida with Bresson’s work is, I think, a mistake. Bresson’s films, particularly Diary of a Country Priest (1950), are austerely beautiful. But they’re also intolerably pious and inhumanly pure. In her capsule review of Diary of a Country Priest, Pauline Kael says of the young priest whose faith is neither understood nor accepted by his parishioners, “Does Bresson know what a pain this young man is? The priest’s austere spirituality may give the community the same sort of pain that Bresson’s later movies give some of us in the audience” (5001 Nights at the Movies, 1991). Ida is brief; it is spare; it is shot in black-and-white; it is dominated by the color gray, not because Pawlikowski wants to be austere, but because he wants to be true to the times (“What was that lovely city beneath Communism’s gray casing?” Adam Zagajewsky asks, in his memoir Another Beauty). But Ida also has jazz in it, and sex, and vitality. There’s a young naïve, pious Catholic nun in it, but there’s also a worldly, cynical, hard-drinking, nicotine-addicted aunt known as Red Wanda.

Ida is, as Anthony Lane says, in his "Road Trips" (The New Yorker, May 12, 2014), “a road movie, of sorts” (“Thus to our surprise, this small tale becomes a road movie, of sorts, and a journey back into a divisive past”). That “of sorts” is crucial. Most road movies (e.g., Thelma & Louise, The Motorcycle Diaries, Sideways) are wild rides. Ida is more solemn (Denby calls it a “spiritual journey”). But it’s still a thousand times wilder than Bresson’s painstakingly tedious and offensively holy Diary of a Country Priest. In Ida, two women – tough, wry Wanda and her young niece, Ida, a Catholic nun – set off by car to discover how Ida’s parents died. Their vehicle, a white Wartburg, has almost as much presence as the Norton motorcycle (“the Mighty One”) in Motorcycle Diaries. At one point, we see an intoxicated Wanda driving it, and in the next moment, we see it being hauled back onto the road by a handsome team of workhorses. I leaned forward to absorb this remarkable scene, but it vanished in an instant – just one example of Ida’s many wonderful, understated details.

Road movie landscapes are often ravishing (e.g., the gold-and-green Santa Ynez Valley in Sideways, the soaring Andean vistas in Motorcycle Diaries); not so in Ida. Well, let me qualify that. Ida’s landscape is ravishing if you relish, as I do, the beauty of bleakness – “the moon-gray landscape of eastern Poland,” as Lane describes it ("Ida," newyorker.com). This is a landscape soaked in repressed memory, and Ida is an opening to it, an excavation of horrific memory buried in the Polish ground.

January 15, 2024 Issue

I’m fascinated by the differences between the two versions of Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two” – one in the magazine, the other on newyorker.com. I know I’ve written about this before. I’ll probably write about it again. The situation is similar to the days when Pauline Kael provided two different versions of her movie reviews – one a long-form essay, the other a capsule review for the “In Brief” section of the magazine. It was interesting to see how she performed the reduction - what she cut, what she kept. It’s the same with Rosner. I take it she writes the long piece first. That’s the one that appears on newyorker.com. Then, for the print version of the magazine, she trims it down to fit the smaller space.

For example, the newyorker.com version of her “Tables for Two: Old John’s Diner,” in this week’s issue, begins,

I always read the whole menu at a diner, but I don’t really need to. My order is both predictable and unremarkable: a cup of soup, a cheeseburger with fries. Sometimes I’ll switch things up and have a Greek salad, with extra feta cheese, or corned-beef hash and scrambled eggs, though the side of fries always remains. A cup of coffee—lots of milk—and a slice of pie. If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands. 

For the print version, she cuts the first four sentences. The piece begins, “If I were to scroll back through my life, tallying every diner meal, every fat ceramic mug of watery coffee, I think they might number in the thousands.”

Another example: when she describes Old John’s lemon pie in the website version, she says, “The lemon-meringue pie is unimpeachable, with a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue.” In the print version, this is changed to “the lemon-meringue pie was impeccable, a buttery crumb crust and pucker-tart yellow curd under a snowcap of floaty meringue.” I devour both versions, but the web version’s “snowcap of floaty, marshmallow-like meringue” is slightly more delectable.

The piece has a great theme: the diner as time machine. The web version says, “Diners, as a rule, are time machines; whether through the formica sheen of the nineteen-forties, the chromium optimism of the fifties, or the pastel geometries of the eighties, a diner traffics in nostalgia for past decades and past selves.” In the print version, this is reduced to “diners, as a category, are time machines, fuelled by memory of past decades and past selves.” Again, both versions are excellent, but the web version is more detailed. Comparing the two affords a peek at Rosner’s compositional process, or at least her editorial process, which is a form of composition. Also, if you read only the print version, you’re missing out on many wonderful, delicious details. 

December 11, 2023 Issue

What to make of Parul Sehgal’s “Turning the Page,” in this week’s issue? It’s a survey of several recent memoirs by or about critics, including Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet (on life with her father, Peter Schjeldahl), and Robert Boyers’ Maestros & Monsters (on his long association with Susan Sontag and George Steiner). I’m a fan of the work of Schjeldahl, Sontag, and Steiner. The key word here is “work.” I don’t give a damn about their personal lives. Whether they were rotten parents or fickle friends is immaterial to me. It’s their work that matters. That was Flaubert’s belief; it’s mine, too. Occasionally, a memoir appears that is itself a work of art. Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), on his friendship with V. S. Naipaul, is an example that immediately comes to mind. Are Calhoun’s and Boyers’ books in that league? Sehgal doesn’t say. She doesn’t comment; she doesn’t quote. She’s flying at a ridiculously high altitude. Come down to the ground, Sehgal. Get some ink on your hands.

Postscript: As for Sehgal’s notion that the work of critics like Kael, Schjeldahl, and Sontag is a form of “unselfing” – “the ability to channel someone else” – that’s just crazy! Kael would hoot if she read that. She didn’t channel anyone but herself. Same for Schjeldahl and Sontag. That’s what made them such great stylists. To paraphrase Kael, unselfing is for sapheads. 

Ryan Ruby's "To Affinity and Beyond"

Great to see Bookforum back in business! There’s an absorbing piece in it by Ryan Ruby called “To Affinity and Beyond.” It touches on a lot of things I’m interested in – criticism, interpretation, argument, description. It’s a review of Brian Dillon’s new essay collection Affinities: On Art and Fascination. Ruby calls it “a kind of manifesto for an anti-critical criticism.” What’s “anti-critical” about it, says Ruby, is its lack of argument:

If nothing Dillon writes “pursues an argument” or is “built to convince,” it is, in part, an attempt to make a virtue of the limitation he confesses in Essayism: “I was and remain quite incapable of mounting in writing a reasoned and coherent argument.” He associates argumentation with the academy, whose procedures of making “judgments and distinctions” are foreign to a sensibility that prefers describing objects and noting correspondences between them. 

I relish argument. Many of my favorite critical essays are fiercely polemical, e.g., Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hell,” Janet Malcolm’s “A Very Sadistic Man,” James Wood’s “Hysterical Realism,” Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares.” Argument gives criticism a piquant bite. But I don’t think it’s essential to its effectiveness. Description, on the other hand, is key. “All first-rate criticism defines what we are encountering,” Whitney Balliett said in his Jelly Roll, Jabbo & Fats (1983). Peter Schjeldahl said something similar in his Let’s See (2008): “As for writerly strategy, if you get the objective givens of a work right enough, its meaning (or failure or lack of meaning) falls in your lap.”

The First Person Is Real (Contra Merve Emre)

Merve Emre (Photo from The New York Review of Books)

Merve Emre, in her profoundly wrongheaded “The Illusion of the First Person” (The New York Review of Books, November 3, 2022), argues that the “I” in personal essays is a fiction. She says, 

Most essayists and scholars who write about the personal essay agree that its “I” is, by necessity and choice, an artful construction. Watch, they say, as it flickers in and out of focus as a “simulacrum,” a “chameleon,” a “made-up self,” a series of “distorting representations” of the individual from whose consciousness it originates and whose being it registers. 

She goes further. She contends that individual subjectivity, on which the “I” is based, is also fiction. She writes,

What if individual subjectivity were as much a fiction as the “I” with which it so prettily speaks? What if stressing the artifice of the first person were, as Louis Althusser argued, a strategy for masking “the internal limitations on what its author can and cannot say”? What if the real limitation of the genre were its glittering veneer of expressive freedom, of speaking and writing as a self-determining subject? What if no performance of stylish confession or sly concealment could shake this ideology loose? What if these performances only intensified the enchantments of subjectivity?

My answer is that, if all these “what ifs” were true, the personal essay would die. It would no longer be a firsthand account of lived experience. To me (this is my own individual subjectivity speaking), the “I” of the personal essay authenticates the experience it describes. It’s what makes that experience real. For example:

I try to be the best-dressed person in the infusion room. I wrap myself up in thrift-store luxury and pin it together with a large gold brooch in the shape of a horseshoe. The nurses always praise the way I dress. I need that. Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.

After the infusion is done, I sit up until I fall over. I don’t give up until I give up. I try to win all the board games, remember all the books any of us have read, stay up late. Terrible things are happening in my body. Sometimes I will say it to my companions: “Terrible things are happening inside of me.” Finally, forty or forty-eight or sixty hours later, I can’t move and there is nothing to take for the pain, but, trying to be obedient to medicine and polite to my friends, I take something for the pain.

That’s from Anne Boyer’s brilliant “The Undying” (The New Yorker, April 15, 2019), her memoir of her experience fighting triple-negative breast cancer. “Then they infuse me with a platinum agent, among other things, and I am a person in thrift-store luxury with platinum running through her veins.” How I love that sentence! Subjective to the bone. Is it fake? Come on! It’s presented in the magazine as “personal history,” i.e., as fact. There’s no doubting the authenticity of her experience. And, I submit, there’s no doubting the authenticity of her “I.” She is who she represents herself to be. How do I know? Because her “I” is part of her glorious style. And her style is who she is. 

Here's another example, this from one of my favorite personal essays – Edward Hoagland’s “Of Cows and Cambodia” (included in his great 1973 collection Walking the Dead Diamond River):

During the invasion of Cambodia, an event which may rate little space when recent American initiatives are summarized but which for many of us seemed the last straw at the time, I made an escape to the woods. The old saw we’ve tried to live by for an egalitarian half-century that “nothing human is alien” has become so pervasive a truth that I was worn to a frazzle. I was the massacre victim, the massacring soldier, and all the gaudy queens and freaked-out hipsters on the street.

That’s from the essay’s remarkable opening paragraph. Whose “I” is that if not Hoagland’s? No one else writes that way. His style is as identifiable as a fingerprint. Subjectivity is at the heart of it. He has his own distinctive way of looking at things. His use of the first person to express himself is as natural to him as breathing. I can’t imagine him writing any other way.

Take another example. This is from Aleksandar Hemon’s wonderful “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011), his account of leaving Sarajevo and learning to live in Chicago. He writes,

I was still working for Greenpeace at this point, walking different city neighborhoods and suburbs every day, but every night I came back to the Edgewater studio I could call my own. I was beginning to develop a set of ritualistic practices. Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

I think it’s just plain common sense to interpret Hemon’s “I” as signifying Hemon himself. If it isn’t Hemon, who is it? Who is splurging on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway? Who is watching the Bulls’ games at Gino’s North, “high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar”? Who is spending weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. Some ideal version of himself? I don’t think so. Hemon isn’t into writing ideal versions of himself. On the contrary, his aim is to bring us as close as he can to his immigrant experience. The piece is represented as fact, and I think it is fact, every word, including Hemon’s “I.” The onus is on Emre to prove otherwise. Invoking Adorno doesn’t cut it. 

Another example:

I had written about movies for almost fifteen years, trying to be true to the spirit of what I loved about movies, trying to develop a voice that would avoid saphead objectivity and let the reader in on what sort of person was responding to the world in this particular way.

That’s Pauline Kael, from her wonderful “The Movie Lover” (The New Yorker, March 13, 1994). There’s no chameleon here, no glittering veneer. Individual subjectivity exists. It thrives! It’s the key to great writing, nothing less. 

One more example:

I do not take notes as I read. I dog-ear—verso-top, recto-bottom—and underline sentences and paragraphs. I create a document and type out every underlined sentence and paragraph, sorted by book. Then I create a second document and sort the sentences and paragraphs by subject. The process of doing this usually gets me to a preliminary articulation of the argument I want to make, its beginning and its end, its arc, and its subclaims. I handwrite outlines in a very haphazard way, on the backs of bank statements and other stray envelopes strewn across my worktable. 

Seven “I”s. Who do they belong to? Answer: Merve Emre: see “Educate, Entertain, Scold, Charm: Merve Emre, interviewed by Lauren Kane” (The New York Review of Books, April 16, 2022). Is it really her? Perhaps those “I”s are just made-up versions of herself. But I don't think so. I think it’s really her in full individualist subjective mode. Writing outlines on the backs of bank statements? How bourgeois!   

September 5, 2022 Issue

Not a whole lot in this week’s issue to get excited about. Richard Brody reviews an old movie, Pretty Poison, that I recall seeing when it first came out in 1968. I can’t remember a thing about it, other than that Pauline Kael liked it, and that’s probably why I went to see it. Brody likes it, too, calling it “a hectic pastiche that takes off from Psycho and grafts tropes from spy thrillers, teen romances, domestic melodramas, and police procedurals onto the highly textured realism of life in a small New England town, complete with its narrow-minded moralism.” I might give it a second look, although that "pastiche" isn't exactly enticing.

There’s a line in Anthony Lane’s review of Fernando León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss that made me laugh. The film stars Javier Bardem. Lane says, 

Think of the parts that Bardem played last year—the expansive Desi Arnaz, lording it over a broadcasting fiefdom in “Being the Ricardos,” and the sapphire-eyed chief of the Frenemy tribe, or whatever it was called, in “Dune.” Bardem has confessed that, in the sequel to the latter, he would very much like to ride a giant sandworm. Wouldn’t we all?

Best sentence in this week’s issue also belongs to Lane: “His hand alone is enough to fill a room, and my favorite shot shows his wandering finger, as big as a canoe, brushing against the keyboard of a laptop, which, with a soft pdoing, powers up” (“What You Wish For”). 

My Favorite Book of 2021: Geoff Dyer's "See/Saw"

My favorite book of 2021 is Geoff Dyer’s brilliant See/Saw: Looking at Photographs. Dyer is to photography what Pauline Kael was to movies – its greatest critic. Kael’s memory was a bottomless reservoir of movie associations. She could watch, say, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and see reflections of, among other films, William Wyler’s Dead End (1937), Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), and John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). William Shawn, in his Foreword to Kael’s superb 5001 Nights at the Movies (1991), said, “It is unlikely that anyone in the world carries around in his or her head more information about movies.” The same goes for Dyer; his head is packed with photographic precedents; he looks at a picture and sees countless allusions and influences – what he calls “visual echoes.” In almost every one of See/Saw’s fifty-two essays (including the excellent Introduction), he traces the echoes. For example, in his review of a Zoe Strauss exhibition, he writes,

It’s obvious, to anyone who visits this show that Strauss is an artist with a distinctive visual style; and it’s equally obvious that this distinction is impossible to separate from the way that so many threads of American photographic history seem to have found their way into the tightly bound forms of her pictures. The tattooed girl—Monique—with a beaten face and a black eye recalls a self-portrait made by Nan Goldin after she’d been battered. There’s a lot of Eggleston—most notably a green version of his famous red ceiling—and a lot of Stephen Shore too. And there are traces of Walker Evans—how could there not be?—everywhere. No sooner have these influences—or presences—been registered, however, than one becomes conscious of how Strauss’s relationship to photography and to the world adds to or alters them. She never simply ‘does’ an Evans or an Eggleston. Take Goldin, for example. The pictures in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency are frank, intimate, beautiful and profoundly narcissistic. They are advertisements for a life being led: a bohemia that was longing to be recognised, a bunch of people whose poverty was a form of indulgence, who believed they were artists—even if there was no chance of their ever creating works of art. Except they were justified in their belief after all because they ended up in works of art, in Nan’s pictures. It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia, where the poverty is as matter-of-fact as it is in an Evans photograph of rural Alabama. The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted. By the time she began ranging further afield—in Vegas, say—she was able to take this home-grown familiarity and confidence with her. As she puts it, rather beautifully, in a Facebook exchange with a friend (included in the catalogue for the Philadelphia/ICP exhibition): “I just always let everything in and keep everyone who’s ever mattered as a part of myself.” To which the friend replies, rightly: “Wow… That is a phenomenal outlook on life.” [“Zoe Strauss”]

This is quintessential Dyer. Note the move from identifying the “presences” (Goldin, Eggleston, Shore, Evans) to analyzing the differences (“It’s a very different world here in Strauss’s Philadelphia …”) to distinguishing Strauss’s work from Evans’s and Arbus’s (“The difference—from Evans—is that Strauss is not an outsider, is as intimate with the facts as Nan was with her fictions. And Strauss didn’t have to insinuate herself into situations as Diane Arbus did; she was already there, in the midst of the lives depicted”). That delightful Facebook quote at the end is inspired!

Zoe Strauss, Monique Showing Black Eye, Philadelphia, 2006

“Zoe Strauss” is one of See/Saw’s best pieces. Another one is “The Boy in a Photograph by Eli Weinberg.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Times Magazine, August 30, 2016. It blew me away then; it blows me away now. It’s an essay on a remarkable photo by Eli Weinberg called “Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg December 19, 1956.” Dyer describes it in detail, providing context and history, noting the way “the demonstrators fill the frame so that – in a way familiar to any film-maker who has to do crowd scenes with a limited number of extras – the feeling is unanimous, the solidarity absolute.” He says, “Filling the frame with the demonstrators like this would seem to be the extent of the aesthetic choice made by the photographer. Aside from that, it’s strictly of photojournalistic value.” That seems to end the matter: nothing more to build on there. Instead, it’s just the overture. The next paragraph raises a fascinating question: 

Except, of course, there’s one crucial component that I haven’t mentioned. Squeezed in at the front, visible in a gap between the placards, is a solitary boy. I’m guessing he’s about 13. His right arm is reaching across and touching his left, a gesture that people sometimes make when they are nervous. He’s wearing shorts, sandals and a short-sleeved patterned shirt. He’s smiling slightly. And he’s white. We look at the photograph, and the question on our lips articulates its mystery and magic. Or, to put it the other way around, the photograph remains stubbornly silent in response to the question that it insists on our asking: What is he doing there?

Eli Weinberg, Crowd near Drill Hall on the first day of the Treason Trial, Johannesburg, December 19, 1956

The essay now becomes a work of detection. Dyer makes inquiries and finds out that it’s highly likely the boy is Eli Weinberg’s son, Mark. Dyer then wonders why Weinberg included Mark in the picture. He says, “In a sense, then, Weinberg could be said to have staged the picture, to have worked on its magic.” He further observes, “Of all the people in the picture, the boy is the one who, by virtue of his youth, is most likely to still be around, to answer the questions raised by his presence. We want to hear his version of what happened.”  

This line of thought causes Dyer to remember another photo – Will Counts’ 1957 shot of a solitary black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, surrounded by an angry mob of whites, including a young woman named Hazel Bryan. Dyer says, 

In 1997, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of the school, the women [Eckford and Bryan] met in person – at the suggestion of Counts, who photographed them again, this time as symbols of racial healing and togetherness. They became friends, spoke in public about the need for harmony and — the apotheosis! — appeared on Oprah together. A wonderful ending and an advertisement for the long-deferred, much broken promise of racial equality.

But that’s not the end of this story either. Dyer provides a coda: 

Except that this wasn’t quite the end. There were lingering resentments, doubts on Eckford’s side about Bryan’s motives. Perhaps she was just trying to make herself feel better. So their relationship ended as it had begun, with estrangement. And, in a way, Counts’s original picture refuses the possibility of redemption. If it contains a suggestion of the future, it is in the way that the future will insist on remembering Eckford and Bryan. The people in the picture are stuck in the amber of history: a history the photograph played its part in creating.

Dyer then refocuses on the Weinberg photo and concludes with these two extraordinary paragraphs:

Let’s go back in history to that day in December 1956 in Johannesburg, to other photographs of the same scene. One of them, taken by an unidentified photographer from a different angle, shows a musician conducting the crowd in songs and hymns. In the background, slightly blurry, we recognize many of the same faces from the previous picture, including the ladies on either side of the boy. Frustratingly, the conductor’s raised arm is exactly where the boy’s face would be, but if we look down, there is no sign of his bare legs and sandals. Which made me realize something that hadn’t quite registered about the earlier photograph: he’s dressed for completely different weather than almost everyone else. The people around him are dressed as if for a rainy, cold day and a long stay. In the second picture, they are still standing by their leaders, but he is nowhere to be seen. He has disappeared from history.

I kept wondering how he came to regard this picture later in life. Presumably it was a source of pride and happiness in the same way that the image from Little Rock became, for Hazel, a source of shame: a memory of solidarity and a lovely souvenir of a day out with his dad. This was all just speculation, rendered pointless by the two things I did find out about Mark. First, that he had died in 1965 at the age of twenty-four – so his dad was the one left to look back with love and pride at the vision of belonging he had witnessed and created. Second, that as a result of a car accident Mark had been deaf since he was a young child. So there is isolation in the midst of solidarity. These facts change nothing about the photograph, but they add to its mystery. A picture of history — a moment in history — and of fate, it is documentary evidence of the unknowable.

Wow! What an amazing unpacking of a photograph that, at first glance, seems strictly documentary! The whole book is like that. If you relish close readings of photos, as I do, you’ll surely enjoy Geoff Dyer’s masterly See/Saw. 

Kael v. Kracauer

Pauline Kael (Photo by Jerry Bauer)

Stuart Jefferies, in his “Human Spanner” (London Review of Books, June 17, 2021), a review of Jörg Später’s Kracauer: A Biography, mentions that Pauline Kael panned Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). He quotes Kael’s “Is There a Cure for Film Criticism?” (included in her 1965 collection I Lost It at the Movies), and says, “Kracauer was worse than a pedant, she said, he was a lunatic to take cinema so seriously. Perhaps Kael was the lunatic for making her own career out of writing about a medium she couldn’t take seriously.” Sorry, I can’t let that pass without pointing out that (1) Kael didn’t say Kracauer was a lunatic to take cinema so seriously; she said he was a lunatic because his aesthetic rejected art; and (2), saying Kael couldn’t take movies seriously is like saying Wayne Gretzky couldn’t take hockey seriously. Come on! She wrote some of the best movie criticism ever written: see, for example, “Bonnie and Clyde” (The New Yorker, October 21, 1967); “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1971). Stuart Jeffries, you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. 

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.” 

November 16, 2020 Issue

Peter Schjeldahl is the most original New Yorker stylist since Pauline Kael. His tone, rhythm, texture, diction, syntax are instantly recognizable. One of his favorite words is “drench.” It figures in some of his most ravishing lines. This one, for example:

Kiefer’s Pollockian machines - with heart-grabbing yellows, blacks, and browns that affect like tastes, sounds, and smells and their incorporation of photographs that drench the mind in tones of memory – evoke a quasi-religious feeling of delicious melancholy, slightly masochistic abasement before sheer ancientness. [“Our Kiefer,” The Hydrogen Jukebox, 1991]

In this week’s issue, he deploys it again, to marvelous effect:

Gilliam broke ranks with the movement—or extended it—in the mid-sixties, when he began draping vast unstretched paint-stained and -spattered canvases from walls and ceilings, creating undulant environments that drenched the eye in effulgent color. [“Off the Wall,” a review of Sam Gilliam’s “Existed Existing,” at Pace Gallery, New York]

Brody Distorts Kael

Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz

I see Richard Brody is at it again – distorting Pauline Kael’s great “Raising Kane” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 1971). In his “Herman Mankiewicz, Pauline Kael, and the Battle Over Citizen Kane” (newyorker.com, November 14, 2020), he says that Kael “argued that much of what’s great about Citizen Kane in fact arose not from Welles but from the contributions of Mankiewicz and the rest of the cast and crew.” Wrong! Kael never said that. What she said is this: “Though Mankiewicz provided the basic apparatus for it, that magical exuberance which fused the whole scandalous enterprise was Welles’.” That’s the exact opposite of what Brody says she said. In case there’s any doubt about Kael’s position, she went on to say, “Citizen Kane is a film made by a very young man of enormous spirit; he [Welles] took the Mankiewicz material and he played with it, he turned it into a magic show.” Where are The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checkers? Anytime Brody refers to Kael, he should be checked. He seems incapable of accurately stating her views. 

Movie Love

My father taught me many things – how to ride a bike, how to catch and throw a baseball, how to tie a necktie, how to swim, how to throw a Frisbee, the pleasure of drinking Beaujolais, the pleasure of listening to jazz piano, and many other things. He also introduced me to the pleasure of movies. That happened in 1967. I was fourteen; he was thirty-seven. We lived in Saint John, New Brunswick. He took me to at least three movies that year – Cool Hand Luke, Bonnie and Clyde, and In the Heat of the Night. They impressed me immensely. There’s a scene in Cool Hand Luke in which Paul Newman eats a whole lot of boiled eggs. I’ve never forgotten it. Newman is my father’s favorite actor. He’s one of mine, too. But that year, the actor who made the strongest impression on me was Rod Steiger. As the blundering Mississippi police chief in In the Heat of the Night, he was transfixing. 

What did Pauline Kael think of these three movies? Kael’s writing was unknown to me in 1967; I discovered it nine years later, when I started reading The New Yorker. She disliked Cool Hand Luke, calling it “a tearjerker for hip high-school students” (“The Freedom to Make Product,” The New Yorker, March 16, 1968). Of In the Heat of the Night, she said, it “isn’t in itself a particularly important movie; amazingly alive photographically, it’s an entertaining, somewhat messed-up comedy-thriller” (“Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Going Steady, 1970). Of Bonnie and Clyde, she wrote, “I think that Bonnie and Clyde, though flawed, is a work of art” (“Bonnie and Clyde,” The New Yorker, October 21, 1967). 

All three of these movies are significant to me. They hooked me on the pleasures of cinema, an addiction that – half a century later – still grips me.