by Renata Adler
The degree of physical sadism in Ms. Kael’s work is, so far as I know, unique in expository prose. What is remarkable, however, is how often, as a matter of technique, she imputes it. She writes, in one review, that a female character regards another female character as “a worm for squishing”; in another review, that a male character sees another male character as “a trivial whitey to be squished”; in a third review, of a female character, that “she’d crunch your heart to clean a pore”—without perhaps being aware that all the squishing and crunching attributed to characters, actors, anyone, is entirely her own idea.
“You half expect her to shove that little bug away and stamp on him,” she writes, in yet another review, of Candice Bergen. More in a moment about who that “you” might be; but the tactic is perfect. “You” have a violent expectation. Ms. Bergen would “shove” and “stamp on” the “little bug” (another actor). While Ms. Kael is just out there, writing it all down.
“You want to wipe it off his face.” “You want to kick him.” Your “guts are squeezed.” Guts appear a lot, in noun, verb, or adjective form: “The film’s discreet, gutted sensitivity,” for instance, “is self-sufficient.” What?
“You are caught up emotionally and flung about the room.” Thirty pages later, “we” are caught “by the throat” and “knocked about the room.” All this, of course, is standard, blurb copy. What is less usual is the attention to a specific limb or organ: the “maggot in his brain”; the filmmakers who “should stop lighting candles in their skulls, they’re burning their brains out”; the “punishment in the sinuses,” “punched too often in the vocal cords,” “vocal cords . . . you might think . . . had survived a rock slide.” All right, still in the realm of the usual, routine. But then, a pure Kaelism. Having described a scene in which a character “holds her hand over a fire until it is charred and bursts,” still apparently unsatisfied, Ms. Kael adds this joke: “(Did Altman run out of marshmallows?)”
I do not mean to suggest that this style, this cast of mind, is pathological—only that it is not just idiosyncratic, either. It has become part of a pattern, an instrument to a purpose—quite remote by now from criticism or even films. Another such instrument is the mock rhetorical question, the little meditation with the question mark. In this book, there are literally thousands of them, not just of the jokey, marshmallow sort, but of every sort, in tirades and fusillades, in and outside parentheses. An apparently limitless capacity to inquire:
Could it be that he’s interiorizing his emotions, in response to Schrader’s conception of the emptiness of Jerry’s life, and doesn’t realize how little he’s putting out?
Has he been schooling himself in late Dreyer and Bresson and Rossellini, and is he trying to turn Thackeray’s picaresque entertainment into a religious exercise?
Yet can we be meant to laugh at his satisfaction with his own virulence after we’ve seen Florence Malraux’s name on the credits as assistant to the director, and remembered that Resnais is the son-in-law of André Malraux, who died a few months ago after a long illness?
(Is Cimino invoking the mythology of Hawkeye and the great chief Chingachook?)
Is it just the pompadour or is he wearing a false nose?
How can the novelist have pain in his bowels when Providence has no bowels?
Have you ever bought a statue of a pissing cupid?
Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer?
Didn’t Alda recognize that his material is like kapok?
Why doesn’t he hear her voice first . . . and be turned on by it? And wouldn’t he then look to see whom it belonged to? And does she know who he is when she bawls him out? And if she does wouldn’t this affect how she speaks to him? And if she doesn’t when is the moment she finds out?
Why are we getting these union speeches now? Were the outsiders directing the strike? Were the pros working out strategy? Have we been conned? Have people become so accustomed? . . .
Why didn’t anyone explain to him that he needn’t wear himself out with acting?
Why is Doc in an unholy alliance with the Nazi villain, Szell?
Shouldn’t the movie be about why he imagines what he does?
Who is this hitchhiker on the road of life?
Allied Artists and Bantam Books, why are you doing this?
(Is it relevant that Bertolucci’s father’s name was Attilio?)
How can you have any feeling for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?
How can the Count’s arrival and his plea for a hasty marriage have any vibrations?
Why then does it offend me when I think about it?
And what is Sally doing when she holds out her arms to her husband?
Where was the director?
Does the cavalry return?
Who—him?
You shouldn’t risk losing thoughts like that. Has the tape recorder been stored in a safe place?
But, oh, God, why isn’t it better? Why isn’t there the daring and the exaltation that our senses fairly cry out for?
And so on.
It is difficult to convey the effect of hundreds of pages of these questions. Those that have answers—Yes. No. What? I don’t know, sweetie; you’re the one who saw the movie—badger the reader, who is courteously inclined to think when addressed with question marks, into a mindless, degrading travesty of colloquy or dialectic. Others are coy, convoluted displays of erudition. Ms. Kael wants us to know, for instance, that she knows that Resnais is related to Malraux, and that Malraux is dead; also, that she knows the first name of Bertolucci’s father. Others still, addressed, like script-margin annotations, to the film itself (“Shouldn’t the movie be about why, etc.?”), are proprietary, prescriptive. Ms. Kael, having lost any notion of where the critic sits, wants to imply that she was at the story conference, that the film is somehow hers. And others still, in particular the outcries—to God, and Allied Artists and Bantam Books—are meant to demonstrate that she cares, cares more than anybody. It is overwhelmingly clear, however, from the reviews in this book, that one thing Ms. Kael has ceased to care about is films.
She hardly praises a movie any more, so much as she derides and inveighs against those who might disagree with her about it. (“Have you ever bought a statue of a pissing cupid?”) And, like the physical assaults and sneers, the mock rhetorical questions are rarely saying anything. They are simply doing something. Bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying. The most characteristic of these questions, in its way, is the one about Alan Alda and the kapok. Had it been phrased declaratively—Alda doesn’t recognize that his material is like kapok—it would still be uninteresting; but it might raise a question of its own. How, in what sense, is it like kapok? (In the same way, perhaps, as Coma is like a prophylactic?) Or if the question had been, at least, addressed to Alda—Alda (God, Bantam Books), didn’t you recognize that your material is like kapok?—it would be clear what is being asked. I would point out, however, that the question (which permits only a yes or no) is still so framed as to compel assent: Yes, I did recognize; No, I didn’t recognize, etc. But to address the question to the reader effectively conceals what is being said (namely, nothing), and attempts to enlist him in a constituency, a knowing constituency—knowing, in this instance, about Alda’s ignorance about this nothing. The same with “Why didn’t anyone explain to him that he needn’t wear himself out with acting?” and all the other trivial, inane interrogations. They express what are not views or perceptions, but blunt devices to marshal a constituency—of readers, other reviewers, filmmakers if at all possible—which has, in turn, no views but a coerced, fearful, or bemused falling in line.
I do not mean for a moment to imply that every Kael review is in the vituperative or inquisitional mode. There are meditations of all kinds and, quite often, broad cultural allusions:
The images are simplified, down to their dramatic components, like the diagrams of great artists’ compositions in painting text
s, and this, plus the faintly psychedelic Romanesque color, creates a pungent viselike atmosphere.
A word heap, surely. The quality of observation may be characteristic of people who insist that films be discussed in visual terms. I am not certain that Ms. Kael has a clear idea what a “Romanesque color” might be, particularly in the “faintly psychedelic” spectrum, and even in the most “pungent, viselike atmosphere”; but I’d like to stay for a moment, in two simpler sentences, with the visual, the cinematic eye.
On page 398, there is an “upper lip pulling back in a snarl” to reveal “yellow teeth like a crumbling mountain range.” On 436, on the other hand, there are “jagged lower teeth that suggest a serpent about to snap.” Now, the vision, it’s true, is consistent. But surely the mouths are peculiarly observed, or both the mountain range and the serpent are upside down.
There are allusions as well to literature. Ms. Kael likes to mention Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare’s fools. “It’s like a classic passage in Tolstoy,” she writes, and before one can wonder Really? Which? she has dropped the subject. “We’re given the components of a novel at a glance,” she writes elsewhere, and fortunately drops that, too. But then:
It’s true that one remembers the great scenes from the nineteenth-century Russian novels, not the passages in between; but . . . there’s a consistency of vision in Turgenev or Dostoevski or Tolstoy.
One pauses. Can it be that there is actually a thought coming? Yes. It’s this:
We’re told what we want to know.
I’ll spare you further references to literature and Tolstoy. I’ll skip most of the recurrent, indescribable reflections on “art” and “artists”: “When artists are raging, straining to express themselves,” or “If De Palma were an artist in another medium.” Their intellectual content ranges from “An artist can draw a lot of energy from obsessive material”—unarguable, certainly, and not carried further—to this baffling Kaelism: “They are not plagued by the problem of bourgeois artists. They have loose foreskins.”
Historically, it is hard to know what to make of the little italicized eureka in “Truffaut is romantic and ironic”; “romantic irony” occurs so early and often in any liberal education. But even in the cultural province she claims most confidently as her own, Ms. Kael can go puzzlingly astray. When she calls King Kong “marvelous Classics-comics,” for instance, it seems almost pedantic to recall that Classics Comics were, in fact, condensations of classic books, the Bible, say, or her beloved Tolstoy, not at all the genre that she seems to have in mind. As for allusions to racial or social developments, they tend to take a jokey form. “He’s an equal opportunity fornicator.”
There are also, however, ruminations of the highest order:
For those who are infatuated with what they loathe the battle with themselves never stops.
Too true. Several reviews later:
And when your slavemaster is your father and he wants to kill you for your defiance that defiance must kill everything you’ve ever known.
Perhaps less true.
I’d like to say here that I didn’t expect to find this, and I wasn’t looking for it. I now think that no one has looked at the meaning of these sentences, or at their intellectual quality, in many years. I have also postponed, in some ways I would rather have avoided, Ms. Kael’s critical characterizations of specific performers and specific films. These are always largely matters of personal taste. In addition, the mere mention these days of a specific movie can distract moviegoers, with the sheer vehemence of widely held opinions, from what is actually being said, and by what methods and techniques. That situation is only partially a result of Ms. Kael’s efforts. Most writing about films now contains a degree of overstatement, meaninglessness, obfuscation. I won’t dwell on the advocacy, if that is the word, of Peckinpah, De Palma, Coppola, but turn to very quiet ground:
In repose, Lily Tomlin looks like a wistful pony; when she grins, her equine gums and long, drawn face suggest a friendly, goofy horse.
I’m not sure this is an insight worth restating, or amplifying, three times in a single sentence (“pony,” “equine,” “horse”). I am quite sure it is not an insight, it is wrong, to write of the characters in The Deer Hunter, that “they’re the American cousins of hobbits.” Then:
George C. Scott has to be dominating or he’s nothing.
It’s hard to know what to respond—except Petulia. Maybe Ms. Kael thought he was “nothing” in that film. Certainly, he was not “dominating” in it. Or:
In Nashville, Keith Carradine’s voice insinuates itself; that tremolo makes it seem as if he were singing just to you.
This, I submit, is no longer a matter of doubt. The whole point of what was probably the most beautifully thought-out and acted scene in Nashville, and perhaps in any movie since, was that Carradine could have been singing to nobody but Lily Tomlin. Each of the female characters who mistakenly believed that he was singing to her—not, however, because of any tremolo, but because he had slept with her—was portrayed as smugly but touchingly obtuse. Each soon recognized that he was singing to somebody else—again, not on the basis of his tremolo but from the direction of his stare.
The only reason this matters in the slightest is that if any “you” would be led by Carradine’s voice to the mistake made by specific female characters in that scene in Nashville, then there is no reason why those specific characters, and they alone, should have made it. The scene utterly loses its point.
About Coming Home:
Later, we watch her face during her orgasm with Luke; this scene is the dramatic center of the movie. The question in the viewer’s mind is, What will she feel when her husband comes home and they go to bed? Will she respond, and if she does, how will he react?
No one, I think, would disagree with Ms. Kael that the scene is the dramatic center of the movie; but it seems just as clear that one question that is not in the viewer’s mind is the one (or the two) Ms. Kael suggests. The question, if any, is another one, which has persisted almost from the movie’s start, and which Ms. Kael would have seemed uniquely designed, by temperament, to spot: What is it that Luke, the paraplegic, does in making love? This essentially clinical question is one that the movie deliberately suggests and then, I believe, dishonestly blurs throughout. Be that as it may, I don’t think a viewer in the world has in mind in that scene the question Ms. Kael ascribes to him. I happen not to have liked the movie, either. But, given the physical circumstances, I don’t think even Ms. Kael could have taken a cheaper shot, or one less apposite, than the last line of her review: “Are liberals really such great lovers?”
Let’s leave all that. Let’s leave her unusually many uses of the form so/that, such/that—from “so haughty that her name should be ‘Anastasia,’ ” “so endearing . . . that he should be billed as Richard ‘Cuddles’ Dreyfuss,” “so grasping that the film should be called ‘Tentacles,’ ” through this sort of meander-hype connective:
. . . so eerily sensitive that your mind may easily drift to the terrible (true) accounts of how people on the street sometimes laughed at Virginia Woolf.
. . . so lusciously, ripely beautiful in her peach-blond wig that her trained, accomplished acting suggests an intelligent form of self-respect.
Let’s leave aside her humor: “you feel she needs a derrick to lift her lids”; “each repositioning of her features requires the services of a derrick”; “you fight to keep your eyes open”; “people were fighting to stay awake”; “but after a while I was gripping the arms of my chair to stay awake”; “the audience was snoring”; “the only honest sound I heard . . . was the snoring in the row behind me,” etc. Let’s leave even her favorite deep/surface dichotomy, or paradox, or whatever she thinks it is: a director, “deep on the surface”; a film, “deep on the surface”; “deep without much surface excitement”; “rough on the surface but slick underneath.” Let’s leave aside, in short, all the relatively harmless mannerisms and devices.
A more impo
rtant, related stratagem recurs constantly in her work, and by no means in hers alone. I don’t know how to characterize it, except as the hack carom—taking, that is, something from within the film and, with an air of triumph, turning it against the film or a performer. “Gere looks like Robert De Niro without the mole on his cheek,” for instance, “but there’s more than that missing.” More than the mole. About a scene with a burning candle, “someone should have taken a lighted wick to [the scenarist’s] ideas.” About an actor’s expression within a role, “His face is stricken with grief and humiliation; that should be [his] face for what [the writer and director] do to him.” About a scene of begging for absolution, that the writer and director “ought to be the ones kneeling in penance.” Ms. Kael revels in this sort of thing. The only reason the device has any significance is the unpleasant, even punitive overtone—the notion that a film or a performer is not merely undistinguished, or unimportant, or untalented, but actually guilty of something. The image of filmmakers penitent is particularly congenial to her work. She speaks often, in this carom mode, of being “betrayed” and of what she (or “we”) can or cannot “forgive.” (“A viewer could probably forgive everything that went wrong”; “the script seems like a betrayal, of them, and of us.”)
