Before I make Pauline Kael sound serenely all-embracing: I’m sure that she found your taste a little nutty, Jonathan; and, in the end, she did pal around with people who shared a certain aesthetic. Plus, she wasn’t thrilled at being branded a lively fount of philistinism, which was your general take on her work. But she read you with interest. I remember giving her a piece of yours—it was about a Godard film, maybe his Lear?—in which you wrote in passionate detail about the sound design, and she was impressed. You’d be surprised by how wide-ranging her taste in writers could be. (You know how much she loved Manny Farber, who had crankily dismissed some of her favorite movies.) I was visiting her a few years ago when the editor of a collection by Armond White called to ask for a book-jacket quote. The gist of what she came up with was that she didn’t share a lot of his opinions but that she loved him for being smart and rambunctious enough to force her to re-examine her own responses and do some “fresh thinking.” That’s the point of reading—and rasslin’ with—all kinds of lively people, however wrongheaded. She was fresh as a daisy till the day she left us (so fresh she’d have made a rude noise at that daisy cliché).
(In response to Roger’s request: These remarks were delivered on the occasion of “A Celebration of the Life of Pauline Kael” at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, Nov. 30, 2001. They were written to be spoken, not read, and incorporate [with the blessing of Pauline’s daughter, Gina James] several paragraphs that had originally appeared in a Slate appreciation that ran Sept. 7.)
My wife warns me against engaging you on politics, but I can’t resist pointing out that in 1990, Osama Bin Laden wanted to join forces with Saudi Arabia to crush Saddam Hussein. His jihad against the U.S., which was sparked by Desert Storm, was in direct response not to a war against Iraq (which he was itching to wage himself) but to the mere presence of American infidels—Jews, women, sundry other vermin—on Arabian soil. That was the “slight against his version of Islam” that broke the mullah’s back. Bin Laden would be all too happy bringing about the deaths of a million or more human beings (and not as “collateral damage” either) if he thought it would lead to a radical Islamist state in Iraq or anywhere else. That’s why he has to be stopped—executed, imprisoned, or at very least condemned to a life in the company of Susan Sontag.
Let’s return to the not-so-unrelated realm of cinema, shall we? You haven’t convinced me about A.I., but you have made me think about how much I might enjoy it someday as an opera. That’s the form in which I best appreciate certain “stuck-record” elements of character—in which I don’t hunger in the same way for dramatic evolution. As I said when I reviewed the film, what interests me about what you call “the human condition” is not so much the primal pain but what is made of that pain—the ways in which people repress it, displace it, act it out, or, in the happiest of cases, sublimate it. To make one’s protagonist a robot unable to do anything but hit the same plaintive note over and over strikes me as both torturous and unenlightening. I sat through the last hour thinking: Just turn him the fuck off.
Roger: Your reading of In the Bedroom is dead-on. Of course. This is a good example, by the way, of Kael’s belief that people’s responses go beyond them—that the brain, if you will, has to labor to keep up with everything else. It was precisely the relationship between the husband and wife in the bedroom that allowed me to accept the picture’s resolution; I chose not to explore the final moments it in my review for fear of spoiling the surprises. Which I fear we have just done …
Now how can a guy with so much heart cotton to the boorish Larry Clark, whose camera prowls over his smooth young actresses in the manner of a drooling old pervert? Renoir looked for beauty and humanity in the ugliest faces; Clark hunts for grossness in the most comely. I find his sensibility the most insistently reductive I’ve ever encountered—worse than Oliver Stone, who at least has some speed-freak grandiosity to go with his paranoia and misogyny.
I’m going to see Monster’s Ball later today. In the meantime, Roger: Care to say what you like about Black Hawk Down beyond its admittedly thrilling mise en scène? (Pardon my French.)
David
