In some ways, Pauline Kael's writing on film reads as the antithesis of criticism proper. At times extremely personal, idiomatic and lacking any pretences of authorial neutrality, her work signals a shift away from the ideal of objectivity enjoyed by literary critics and towards the immersive, personalized style of writing that would seize journalism full force with the rise of Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and (later) the gonzo babblings of Hunter Thompson or Lester Bangs. So, in other, more accurate ways, Kael's body of work amounts to precisely the embodiment of great criticism-of the stuff that intrigues us and affects us and (maybe even) shakes us to the core with as much force as the art-objects they investigate.
Her foremost move as critic was to distance herself from theory of the day, which, inherited from the work of Marxian-Freudian academics such as Adorno, had mutated the simple task of reviewing a film into the verbally exhaustive exercise in analyzing the ideologically dictated schema of mass culture itself. In a particularly amusing piece in her best-selling collection I Lost It At the Movies, Kael describes German cultural critic and film theorist Siegfried Kracauer as "the sort of man who can't say 'It's a lovely day' without first establishing that it is day, that the term 'day' is meaningless without the dialectical concept of 'night,' that both these terms have no meaning unless there is a world in which day and night alternate, and so forth. By the time he has established an epistemological system to support his right to observe that it's a lovely day, our day has been spoiled."
The problem was not that academics like Kracauer or American auteur theorist and Kael's sometimes-nemesis Andrew Sarris spoiled movies necessarily-indeed, she writes that while theory always works to distort experience, it "helps us to see more sharply for having done so"-but rather that they work in necessarily insulated circles, using convoluted prose and confused talk of "interior meaning," "hegemony" and "universals" simply in order to, as she writes in "Circles and Squares," "give some semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless, repetitious commercial products." Such theoretical systems are in place only to help the theorist excuse his own tastes, lest he risk embarrassment to himself or his colleagues. The function of real criticism, according to Kael, was much easier to glean: "The role of the critic is to help people see what is in the work, what is in that shouldn't be, what is not in it that could be."
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