Dear Roger,
Pauline Kael didn’t write for “actual moviegoers like herself”; she wrote for ideal moviegoers like herself. She wouldn’t praise a film she found offensively treacly or that trafficked in positive stereotypes because she thought it would ennoble the folks in rural America who saw only a handful of pictures a year. She went to the opposite extreme–she even hated films like To Kill a Mockingbird that arguably have done humanity good, especially if they’ve been seen by kids at an impressionable age. (The words “Boo Radley” are lodged in the back of any kid’s mind who thinks about making fun of some seeming weirdo on the block.) She could be a gleeful provocateur, like one of those Ibsen characters who lives to hurl sticks of dynamite into “the damned, compact majority.” And she loved to throw her own disciples off balance by praising both the rare piece of populist entertainment she thought was beautifully made or rooted in truth (Oliver!, In the Heat ofthe Night, E.T.) and the foreign-made art film that could never be seen by more than a sliver of moviegoers.
When I called you the conscience of the American cinema, I was being neither ironic nor, I hope, patronizing. Because of your stature and the size of the TV audience you’ve built for film criticism, you’ve saddled yourself with what seem like political responsibilities. I don’t mean to suggest that your response to The Green Mile (or that damn Jar Jar picture) isn’t genuine–only that you seem to be responding both for yourself and for the unsophisticated moviegoer who will be better off seeing a movie in which a black man is a mystical healer wrongly executed than one in which a black man is, say, a drug pusher gorily dispatched by some action hero. You might be right, but you’re grading on a different curve than I am.
Does that make me an elitist? I hope it makes me exactly the opposite. I’d like to think that the “common man/woman”–whoever they might be–are as capable of responding to works of complexity as I am. Maybe A Taste of Cherry–although I was scratching my head over that one for a long time. Certainly Three Kings or Being John Malkovich or–duhhh–South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. I’d also like to think they could see TheGreen Mile and be moved and impressed by parts of it (as I was) and still be able to say, when it’s over: “There’s something really creepy about that …”
