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One said not to get close because shed eat me alive.
Another took a longer view.
Walk away, walk away.
I didnt walk away.
It was Pauline Kael, for fucks sake.
It was the movie I sawplus.
I said evoking and analyzing, but Kael wove analysis through her evocation.
The experience came first the mind trailed behind.
Her collections had sexual/romantic titles I Lost It at the Movies,Going Steady,Deeper Into Movies and …
It must have been emasculating for directors who didnt perform.
You werent aware of how tightly structured her reviews really were.
You experienced them as great monologues, often great comic monologues.
Notice I just slipped into writing you.
It was irritating if you werent feeling what she said you were feelingat all.
She claimed that you was because one was so stuffy.
But it was also a crafty mode of rhetoric.
She could wear you down.
I mean, wear me down.
A printout of her latest review was on her desk, full of cross-outs and additions in pencil.
Do you love it, the writing?
I said no, I found it torture, and she let out a sad sigh.
The process was joyous for her.
Her writing always seemed like a journey, an elevated form of thinking out loud.
Sometimes the parentheticals the curlicues that sprung into her head as she wrote were the best things.
Perhaps thats why her reviews got shorter in the last decade.
So did her frequent complaint that a given movie wasnt fun.
The charge is misleading, though.
Her idea of fun encompassed one of her favorite authors, Henry James.
She loved Baroque opera.
Some people cant remember when movies were anything else!
I never hung out with Pauline during herNew Yorkertenure, but Id see her at screenings.
Even at five feet, she stood tall.
But you noticed others, too.
(Her reviews, I think, were better for that.)
Her concentration was total.
During one act of violence, she leapt halfway out of her chair and her limbs moved spasmodically.
She loved the movie.
She quoted Noel Cowards line about how potent cheap music can be.
But but but I had only seen her a handful of times!
I was just an acquaintance!
I called Lopate and begged him to take me out of the lineup, and he did.
But then I walked around for a day wondering if Id have named names to HUAC.
Beside, shouldnt I behonoredby the association?
I phoned the editor and asked for my photo to go back in.
Now it was official.
My lone regret was it was a shitty photo.
And I told people I wasnt a Paulette but aPaulinista.
(Owls were a sort of jokey avatar.)
Maybe ten years earlier shewouldhave eaten me alive.
But shed mellowed some.
I never got any marching orders.
She was actually careful not to share her opinions before she wrote them up.
By then, I think, she was sensitive to that Paulette charge.
The critics and filmmakers she liked were those who made her do fresh thinking.
If she had an aesthetic, it was,surprise me.
Thats what she passed on to me.
Analyzing those responses is the challenge explaining them to yourself.
Pauline gave up reviewing in 1991.
Shed written plays herself when she was young.
She wouldnt show them to me she said they were heavy and pretentious.
She said that was probably why she was so hard on a certain species of High Seriousness.
It was easier to write than it looked.
We talked every week.
When are you going to send me something?
A week later: When are you going to send me something?
I protested that I liked those little people very much and she said that was the problem.
You have to make them smarter than you are, she said.
Even if theyre dumb, they have to bebrilliantlydumb.
They have to surprise you otherwise, why write about them?
If she could have been anyone else, it would have been Barbara Stanwyck.
Pauline hated getting old, but she never drew the curtains.
I thought of her as the antiMiss Havisham.
Friends would call and shed say, Tell me what youve seen.
Directors sometimes sent prints of new movies, which a local theater screened for her in the mornings.
When Id come up for a few nights Id drive Miss Pauline to whatever was around.
(She never learned to drive.)
When Id show her something Id written, the worst thing wasnt when she hated it.
It was when she said, Well, you could get by with it.
She did love my second play, a comedy calledBlaming Mom.
Id tried to make the charactersbrilliantlyinsane.
Id always tried to be a bohemian impressionist, she said.
She died in 2001, eight days before 9/11.
One magazine scribe marked the occasion by writing, The Paulettes are probably rending their garments.
No, just devastated over the loss of a friend and a capacious soul.
Reading her, youll feel more alive.
I interjected, Shes Pauline.
