Remarks on Pauline Kael

I thought I'd prepare for today by reading over some eulogies that Pauline herself wrote. How did she grapple with the death of someone close to her? How did she put his or her life and work into a meaningful context? How did she manifest her faith, given her comprehensive disdain for the religious impulse? Well, Gina couldn't remember Pauline speaking at any services; she actually couldn't remember Pauline going to any services … or funerals … or wanting to talk at all about what happens after death. Great works of art—especially movies—are in the present tense. And so is Pauline.

I'm not sure she'd have wanted to be here even if she could be; although I thought we could try to smoke her out with a chorus of "Amazing Grace"—see if the thunder clouds roll in or the roof starts to rattle. I know she'd want a celebration in her name to be "bilge-free," which was one of her fondest terms of endearment. She'd say, "Don't be a sap," she said it all the time; it was one of those Preston Sturges turns of phrase she made sound better than anyone, even Barbara Stanwyck. It was that voice like a feathered quill that would tickle you as it skewered. It always surprised you with its intensity, its unquenchable youthfulness, its disarming blend of jaundice and wonder.

This is obvious: She would never hold a movie at arm's length. She'd let it way inside her. Those sexual book titles are devilishly purposeful. She'd go to bed with any movie, even the ones she'd call the bums. She'd say what they did right and wrong—and that's what made directors so crazy furious. You can steel yourself against lofty criticism, imperial criticism. But it's hard to shrug off someone who has your moves down cold—and shows you moves you didn't even know you had.

She was the best lover a movie ever had; the most receptive to surprise—to being swept off her feet. But except on famous occasions like Last Tango in Paris and Nashville, her surrender was conditional. Pick up any review, look at any paragraph: Now she's inside the movie, enveloped by it, evoking what she sees and feels; now she's outside, analyzing, making connections to other movies, literature, philosophy, the "real" world; now she's back inside, living there, surrendering and then arguing back and then surrendering again. Feeling and reason in Pauline's writing are happiest when they dance, like Fred and Ginger. She called it "the fusion of art and love."

A colleague once suggested to me that it was important to be able to go beyond one's own responses to something—which struck me as the most anti-Pauline thing I'd ever heard. For Pauline, your responses go beyond you. They're smarter than you are, they go deeper, they're more complicated than any ideological construction. If you can't resolve them, try harder. If you still can't resolve them, make music of your irresolution. That's what she did, like a jazz singer, she sung her responses back to the artist and outward to the reader. That was her rapture; that was what connected the movie, the audience, and the critic in a kind of holy trinity. The people who need God most are the ones whose sense of connectedness falters, but for Pauline it was always there. In her writing she used "we" and "you," because she wanted to believe the best about her readers, that they had in them what she had, even if they couldn't aticulate it as well—and no one could articulate it as well.

That was her humanism—a word she hated because she thought people took it to mean goody-goody or loving people indiscriminately, without judgment. But her humanism was rowdy and profane and smart-alecky; it was Jean Renoir but it was also Bloody Sam Peckinpah and Altman and Scorsese and Demme. She didn't have as much respect for directors who weren't open to surprise, either the surprise of a location or, more important, the spontaneous emotion and creativity of an actor. She hated judgmental filmmaking; she hated when directors tried to score points off the characters and repressed their actors. She hated dogma, even dogma extrapolated from her own writing, which is why she didn't write film theory, or any kind of theory. She loved writers like Henry James and Henrik Ibsen, who wrote novels and plays in which characters' ingenious theories were always getting them into trouble. Poor Siegfried Kracauer, she wrote, having to twist his film aesthetic into knots to account for why he liked to watch Fred Astaire dance. The author of Trash, Art, and the Movies wasn't even much of a trash maven. She wasn't big on genre pictures or a connoisseur of bloody junk. Her fun was too sacred.

I've read that she was a sensationalist. Bull. More than anything, she taught her readers to discriminate among sensations. She hated pure horror movies—even masterworks, like Psycho—because they were mostly about manipulation and assault (on the characters and the audience). And she hated when violence was treated casually or with lazy cynicism. She warned, as early as The French Connection about movies turning into "jolts for jocks." Her problem with A Clockwork Orange and the Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, is that they "sucked up to the thugs in the audience," that they desensitized the audience to brutality. She said over and over that violence in movies like Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather and Taxi Driver is supposed to upset you—and to gum up your responses.

It was sometimes hard to reconcile ourselves to this woman who treasured the unruly and detested the sloppy, who treasured elegance and detested neatness. She had a special place in her heart for crazy comedies like John Guare's Marco Polo Sings a Solo and Beetlejuice, for the overflowing tomes of Norman Mailer and David Foster Wallace. She loved the writer as exuberant performer. The first time I met her she said, "Is it fun for you, the writing?" It was always a blast for her (when it wasn't, she stopped—at the peak, I want to add, of her powers). Her mind moved so fast that in the old days, she told me, she'd have a few glasses of cognac while she wrote to make her "jazzier." But even after she stopped drinking, she was pretty jazzy. Her lingo was jazz, her syntax was elastic like jazz. Some of the funniest things she ever wrote were in parentheses. She wanted to keep the momentum of her argument, but she could never resist a curlicue.

Pauline was 5 feet at her peak, and she just worshipped the tall girls. Sigourney Weaver, Christine Lahti, her dear friend Polly Frost. I often wondered if she envied the way in which they naturally took the space she commanded by force of will. The point is that size mattered. She loved a heroic fool. She wrote of Laurence Olivier in The Betsy that the secret of his greatness was that he wasn't afraid to be foolish. She adored Brando, of course, and the great bull Mailer. She didn't mind if people embarrassed themselves in the name of their passion—as long as there was brilliance to go with it.

Her generosity to young critics has often been darkly interpreted, and she is said to have fostered a school of slavish, inferior imitators. Shortly after I'd met her, several well-meaning colleagues told me to keep my distance, that it would hurt my career to be branded a "Paulette"—a word that's used as purposefully as "fellow traveler." It's true that Pauline wanted you to agree with her; but she also loved to be surprised, and no "Paulette" could say something she hadn't thought of first. Ladies and gentlemen, Yo soy un Paulinista!

Viva Pauline!

There certainly was a tension in Pauline between the friend and the critic; I guess there were some who found it hard to take; it made others want to be better. No, not better; truer to the better part of themselves.

When I was thinking of leaving criticism and trying my hand at writing plays, she said, "Well, if you're going to do it, do it when you're young and you have all that crazy energy." While it was scary to imagine Pauline at a time in her life when she had MORE crazy energy, I figured she knew what she was taking about, so I moved to San Francisco, and I tried to tap into my own crazy energy, and I started writing, and one day the phone rings: "It's Pauline; how are you dear? When can I see something?" I said, "Hold on, Pauline, just getting my sea legs here"; so next week the phone rings, "It's Pauline, anything to show me yet?" "Not yet Pauline, I'm in the zone though, it's really flowing." Next week: "It's Pauline. Got anything?" "Almost, Pauline, I got a draft, just gotta buff it a little and it's on its way." "I can't wait, sweetie."

So I finish the draft, I'm so excited, I FedEx it from San Francisco airport, Next Day, MORNING delivery, so at 10 a.m. my time, 1 p.m. hers, my phone rings, "Oh, honey that's not ready to show anyone. You shouldn't be sending that out."

I said, "Oh? uh, well, uh, it's a rough draft."

"Yes, you can say that again. It's very coarse, dear, and it doesn't have an elegant structure."

Well, I said it's a farce, it's an unruly farce. And she said the great unruly farces have an elegant structure, "that's what makes them so delicious." And I said, well, I'll tighten up that structure—

"—and you hate all your characters," she said.

Hate all my characters? Now wait a minute, Pauline—

"You have contempt for them."

Contempt????!!! That's … nuts, Pauline. I love those … little … people.

And there was a silence, a long silence, and then she said, "You know you have to make them smarter than you are. Even the dumb ones. Make them brilliantly dumb. Let them surprise you. If they can't surprise you, honey, then why write about them?"

Yeah; that was the best advice. That was the key to everything. You have more in you than you think you do. As a playwright, as a critic, as a moviemaker, as a movie-lover.

Of Mean Streets, she wrote about the courage it took for Martin Scorsese to "descend into himself and bring up what neither he nor anyone else could have known was there." And elsewhere she said, "When an artist works right on the edge of his unconscious, not asking himself why he's doing what he's doing, but trusting the instinct, a movie is a special kind of gamble."

That was her grail—her Intolerance, her Rules of the Game, her Lady Eve, her Bonnie and Clyde and Loving and Last Tango and Mean Streets and Nashville and Melvin and Howard and Night of the Shooting Stars and Casualties of War—movies that she adored and in some cases movies for which she helped to build an audience.

One last passage, about a movie she liked but didn't love called called Payday: "The good scenes are memorable because something larger and not easy to define is going on in them. They have what a work of film art has in its approach—a sense of wonder."

Surprise yourself. Surprise me. Touch something in us both that's there but we don't know is there. I ask you: God or no God, have you heard a greater testament of faith?

In her last year Pauline was increasingly hunched-over, but her eyes never stayed on the ground. She had to characterize things, and by characterizing them make the world more alive. She needed to keep surprising herself; and she did; and so the wonder never dimmed.

My friend Stephanie Zacharek wrote a beautiful appreciation of Pauline, to which an editor appended the headline, "R.I.P." As Pauline might say: Balls. She would dread the thought of resting in peace. No past tense here. She wanted to be dancing and drinking, seeing movies, talking about them all night, and singing her responses to the heavens.

So don't rest in peace, Pauline. Rest in passion. Rest in wonder. Rest tall.