You don’t start out wanting to be a sportswriter. At least, I didn’t. I wanted to be in the game, not on the sidelines taking notes.
I wanted to be a ballplayer. Not just because it’s where everyone’s attention is focused. It’s not only where the contests are decided. It seemed a cleaner, simpler way to live. I was a boy who liked running, throwing, and seeing things settle with a clear verdict. Like Alexander Portnoy, I “longed to be a center fielder, a center fielder and nothing more.”
Actually, I wanted to be a shortstop.
And I saw no reason I couldn’t be that, other than the obvious fact that some boys were stronger and faster than I was. But Coach Clair Bee’s books promised that if I ran the extra lap, focused harder, or simply wanted it more I could overtake my betters.
So I trained. I carried bricks in either hand as I ran up and down stadium steps. I read The Art of Hitting by Ted Williams, believing that if I absorbed it, greatness would follow. I sharpened my reflexes by hitting tennis balls I’d thrown against a concrete wall. Among all the boys I knew, I was the best at catching a spinning bottle cap with a swung broomstick.
I told myself the lie we all secretly believe: that I was different, that within me lay a kernel of greatness that would inevitably bloom.
But as Harry Callahan famously advises, a man’s got to know his limitations. I found mine early enough to start negotiating compromises. Life became a process of offering trades to the universe: Maybe I couldn’t be the quarterback, but I could still chase after or block for him. Maybe I wasn’t the one to stand front and center in the band, but I could keep the beat or, if nothing else, load the equipment on the bus.
And so, finding myself less exceptional than I’d hoped, I did what many of us do. I went to school and obtained credentials. I acquired skills that would allow me to be useful in a world indifferent to my ambitions.
We come to know ourselves as our possibilities foreclose. As we are thwarted, we are shaped.
I didn’t want to be a sportswriter, but I became one.
I left law school intending to take just one year off. To make ends meet, I took a job as the sports editor of a small newspaper in Jennings, Louisiana. I wasn’t exactly qualified. The Jennings Daily News published only six days a week. It had no Sunday edition. This schedule made it a manageable trial by fire.
After a year, an opportunity opened at The Shreveport Journal, a scrappy afternoon paper in the city. They hired me partly because they needed someone who could play on their slow-pitch softball team; the editor took the team far too seriously; most of the players had played beyond the high school level. I filled the gap on the left side of the infield and, suddenly, was also filling the role of a cop reporter, covering stories of murder, loss, and all the sadness of life on the front lines.
Then, at 25, I became a columnist. Three days a week, my columns ran from the bottom of the front page of the newspaper, with the continuation—the jump —inside. I still felt like a failed athlete and an inchoate person, a young man biding his time until he could return to law school and pick up where he’d left off. But writing those columns started to change something in me.
One day, my city editor, Tom Mitchell, called me over. He was a gruff man with a biker mustache and an Elvisian mop of hair. (“A swatch of hot buttered yak wool” was how Time described Evis’s pompadour in 1966; that was probably what Mitch was going for.) Looking me square in the eye, he asked, “Are you a writer, or are you a reporter?”
Until that moment, I hadn’t seen the act of writing as a way of getting off the sidelines and into the action. I told Mitch I’d be a faithful reporter, and I meant it. But as I began to write my columns, I started to see that a critic isn’t just a spectator. There’s a rhythm, a strategy, a chance to shape and influence the story unfolding in front of us. Writing was its own way of being in the game.
Before Mitchell’s question I’d never considered myself to be anything more than a dumbass kid waiting for life to start. Even if he was joking the question seemed to suggest I was more than that, and I was taken aback. I was smart enough to know what he wanted me to say, though, so I told him I would never abuse the freedom and trust the paper had given me by imagining that my style was more important than the story. I told him I was—and always would be—a faithful reporter.
But the question lingered, echoing in my mind. For the first time, I began to see myself differently, to wonder if maybe I was something else, or at least becoming something else.
Looking back now, it seems obvious. I’d been writing for years—record reviews, regional publications, even under a pseudonym, “Jim Gatz” (the real name of Jay Gatsby). As a teenager, I wrote songs, won poetry contests, and filled my head with the words of authors I loved. Yet until that moment, I never thought I shared anything with the writers I admired. Writing had been an escape, a skill, even a secret—never something to claim as my identity.
Tom was probably teasing, but his question broke open something inside me. In a single moment, I’d gone from someone waiting for life to begin to someone actively making sense of it.
•••
Pauline Kael was one of those writers I devoured.
When I first started reading her, I was still convinced of my own specialness. I thought writing was something that everyone did from necessity but I gave no thought to the possibility of it as a profession.
I also thought very little about the movies.
They were just movies, something to do on a Saturday night. (Or, more often, a Tuesday night when we could go for a dollar.) I liked them, because who doesn’t like movies? But I gave no more thought to how they came into existence, to who made them or why, than I considered the manufacturing processes of vanilla ice cream or Coca-Cola.
The exact reasons I sought out Pauline Kael’s review of Last Tango in Paris in The New Yorker at the Airline High School library are hazy to me now. Maybe it was because of the whispers I’d heard about Marlon Brando and a stick of butter, or perhaps it was Maria Schneider’s raw, unfiltered presence on screen—she seemed different, more vulnerable and honest than other actors I’d seen. Either way, I was unprepared for the explosion of language I encountered in Kael’s review: a wild, technicolor plume of words, filled with excitement and revelation. Her prose struck me like a revelation, something that left me breathless. In that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt with movies before—a curiosity to understand not just the plot, but the deeper pulse of the story, the emotions and ideas that made the film feel alive. Kael wasn’t just recounting the story; she was using the film as a launchpad for something bigger, a way of examining the world itself:
The movie breakthrough has finally come. Exploitation films have been supplying mechanized sex — sex as physical stimulant but without any passion or emotional violence. The sex in Last Tango in Paris expresses the characters’ drives. Marlon Brando, as Paul, is working out his aggression on Jeanne (Maria Schneider), and the physical menace of sexuality that is emotionally charged is such a departure from everything we’ve come to expect at the movies that there was something almost like fear in the atmosphere of the party in the lobby that followed the screening. Carried along by the sustained excitement of the movie, the audience had given Bertolucci an ovation, but afterward, as individuals, they were quiet. This must be the most powerfully erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made. … Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form. Who was prepared for that?
Certainly not me, the fourteen-year-old infielder.
Don’t misunderstand. I wasn’t a feral kid. My parents evinced a touching suburban veneration of books that verged on fetishism. Our house had bookcases tight with yards of Reader’s Digest condensed hardbacks, book club editions of popular novels, a rich trove of paperbacks and a few volumes that reflected some fairly esoteric interests in Greek mythology and poetry.
My father was a fan of Philip Larkin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. He also had a copy of E.E. Cummings’ Collected Poems 1922-1938, though I got the feeling he didn’t much care for any of them aside from “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” which he could recite from memory.
We had two sets of encyclopedias — Grolier’s Encyclopedia Americana and their New Book of Knowledge (which I imagined I had outgrown by the time I went looking for intelligence on Last Tango) and a ten-volume set of Grolier’s Classics bound in red leatherette, which I was studiously working my way through. I read abridged versions of Lamb’s Essays for Elia and La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and Reflections before I ever read Pauline Kael.
My parents did not subscribe to The New Yorker, but they took many magazines — among them National Geographic, Time and Newsweek, Redbook and, for a time, McCall’s (briefly Kael’s employer, though I never noticed). I had my own subscriptions to The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated.
I was a reader, often absorbed by text. They tell me as a child I would sit for hours cross-legged on the floor with a book in my lap, my elbows on my knees and my hands cupped over my ears. My mother says I would tune out the world, to the point where my attention could only be gain by placing a hand on my shoulder. She says she might have worried about me had I not had other interests, and that today such behavior might be mistaken for high-functioning autism.
All I know is that I could dive deeply into books that were above my grade level. I remember reading Nancy Freedman’s sci-fi political thriller Joshua, Son of None, about a boy, Joshua Francis Kellog, cloned from a dying American president (who also had the initials “J.F.K.”) in a single sitting.
I remember the next book I attacked, with similar enthusiasm, was Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. (I was going to write about the novel on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of it’s publication in 2024 but in my research I came across an essay on the book by Emma Brockes, a New York-based columnist for The Guardian, which boiled down everything I wanted to say into one perfect sentence: “It was the first time I’d read about adult relations and not been bored witless.” I don’t think I can say it any better than that.)
In high school I was very much aware of Kurt Vonnegut, whose Breakfast of Champions was loaned to me by one of my friend’s mothers, and John Cheever and John Updike. I read Falconer and Rabbit, Run. I was self-consciously aware of the people who wrote books; I was even more aware of sportswriters like Joe Falls, Furman Bisher, Jerome Holtzman, Dick Young and Jim Murray who I read every week in The Sporting News. I noticed writers.
But Kael was different from the other writers I noticed — there was a sense of urgent performance driving her words. She wasn’t just talking about the show in the manner of the genial (and sometimes not) sportswriters I liked reading; there was a sense that, at least in some sense, her work was the show. Or at least a show.
Kael wasn’t simply describing what was happening in the movie — reading the review, I didn’t even get much of a sense of what happening in the movie — she was using the occasion of the movie to talk about things unrelated to whether Last Tango in Paris was an amusing diversion or not. She seemed to be communicating something important about the way we could live in the world. And though I didn’t completely understand what she was saying, I was intoxicated by the rhythm and rack of her words, mesmerized by the sparks they made as they knocked one against the other:
His first sex act has a boldness that had the audience gasping, and the gasp was caused — in part — by our awareness that this was Marlon Brando doing it, not an unknown actor. In the flat, he wears the white T-shirt of Stanley Kowalski, and he still has the big shoulders and thick-muscled arms. Photographed looking down, he is still tender and poetic; photographed looking up, he is ravaged, like the man in the Francis Bacon painting under the film’s opening titles. We are watching Brando throughout this movie, with all the feedback that that implies, and his willingness to run the full course with a study of the aggression in masculine sexuality and how the physical strength of men lends credence to the insanity that grows out of it gives the film a larger, tragic dignity.
This was not what I had expected; it was different from the way my friends and I talked about or thought about movies, and at the time I doubt I understood much of what Kael was going on about. I thought of Francis Bacon as some dead Englishman in a ruffled collar (thank you, Encyclopedia Americana). I had a vague notion of Stanley Kowalski as the character who hollered “Stella!” in A Streetcar Named Desire but I’m not sure I associated the role with Marlon Brando — who at that point I knew mostly as Don Corleone.
The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange beige-browns and pink — the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse pink. They are so delicately modulated … that romance and rot are one.
I was in no position to have an opinion about Kael’s opinion; her verdict was inconsequential to me. What mattered to me in that moment, and what matters to me today, was that voice — erudite yet chatty, and charged with an urgent, rapturous enthusiasm that made me want to understand whatever foreign language she was speaking.
It would be years before I’d have a chance to see Last Tango.
When I did, I couldn’t help but be a little disappointed. Bertolucci’s film didn’t strike me the same way it had Kael a decade before, in part because we hadn’t seen the same film. It wasn’t fresh for me as it was for her; I’d seen various paler and more lurid iterations of the film in the meantime, I had seen the Mad magazine parody (and possibly a Saturday Night Live skit? Maybe I dreamed that one — the Internet won’t give it up). I had been wised up about Brando and seen One-Eyed Jacks and On the Waterfront and become the sort of person who took movies more or less seriously. But I knew that didn’t matter because I’d been attending to Pauline Kael since that moment in early 1973.
I knew it was OK to disagree with that insistent, clangorous voice. I knew that was one of the things consenting adults did — disagree about works of art.
I was writing a column that ran on the front page of a newspaper three days a week before I realized that a writing life was possible for me. It is only in retrospect that I realized that the crazy lady writing about movies in the back of The New Yorker was one of the chief influences on my so-called career.
Kael’s review of Last Tango didn’t just talk about the film; it played with it, pushed against it, and sometimes even reshaped it. She was a force of her own—her criticism had a kind of life, a way of wrestling with ideas. For the first time, I felt criticism could be more than a commentary. It could be a way to participate, a way to feel something deeper. I could almost sense her on the field, engaged in a game of her own making.”
She was a firestarter. I was a box of tinder.
•••
Kael wasn’t the only flashy writer I have ever loved; she probably wasn’t even the first. But she is one who has stayed with me, even as I’ve outgrown other enthusiasms. I think fond thoughts for Bukowski and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vonnegut, but when I read them these days I am slightly embarrassed by the avidity with which I consumed them in my youth. I love them still, but I understand that at least part of why I love them has to do with a nostalgia for my own callowness. I imitated them, I stole what I could, and now I feel a little sheepish in their presence.
Other novelists retain their difficulty — I still wrestle with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Updike (and Donald Harington and others more obscure and too numerous to mention), though sometimes I am too aware of what the wise money says about them.
And I think of Kael in the same way I think of those enduring novelists of the mid- and late-20th century, coming to grips with a world that changed faster than it ever could have before, between my 12th and 16th birthdays, when I still thought it possible that I could still wind up a shortstop.
•••
The first movie I reviewed professionally was Platoon; the first one I almost reviewed was Prince’ Purple Rain in 1984.
I regularly wrote about music in my role as the Journal’s de facto pop critic; I’d been a Prince fan since I’d seen him open for the Rolling Stones in the New Orleans Superdome a few years before. (I was in law school at the time, and in my memory the concert was the night before my contracts final. I did well on the exam, though I was a little rattled when I handed my paper in and my professor, Gerald Levan, who terrified me more than any authority figure before or since, gave me a conspiratorial wink.)
But the Journal’s feature editor, David Connelly, a kindly man who, despite being just a few years older than me, had quite a bit of cultural gravitas, reviewed Purple Rain for the newspaper.
After David’s review ran, the newspaper’s executive editor, a former Marine named Stan Tiner, called me into his office to ask me what I thought about it. After being assured that he wanted me to speak freely, I told him I thought the review had missed the point and that as capable and conscientious as our feature editor was, it was really unfair to ask him — a classical music specialist — to write about a rock’n’roll film for which he had no feeling.
Stan agreed with me, and told me he had asked the feature editor to consider assigning the review to me and that he’d been disappointed when he hadn’t. But Stan admitted that he also understood the feature editor’s point — I was a sportswriter turned cop reporter turned columnist who played rhythm guitar in a punk band and wrote record reviews for product under an alias. What made me qualified to write about the movies?
That struck me as a good question, though in a way I think almost every American who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s with access to a television might have acquired the faculties necessary to parse movies.
I had watched Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel on their show, and I knew that their thumb-rendered verdicts were the least interesting thing about them. I had see enough movies to have internalized their grammar — while I might not have had the specialized vocabulary, while I might not have understood how movies were put together, I knew in my bones what they were.
I told Stan I’d be interested in reviewing movies, Stan told the features editor and nothing happened for a while.
Then, in November 1986, there was an advance screening for Oliver Stone’s Platoon. Local Vietnam veterans had been invited to attend. I went to interview some of them after the screening for my column. And since I was going to the preview screening anyway, Connelly, who’d gained some confidence in me over the intervening years (I’d begun reviewing books for the newspaper and had been charged with editing a Friday tabloid arts section with the aspirational name The Shreveport Journal Magazine), asked if I wouldn’t mind reviewing the film as well.
I had an idea about what a war movie was —even then I knew the truism that every good war movie was actually an anti-war movie.
I hadn’t yet seen the 1930 Lewis Milestone film, or read the Erich Maria Remarque novel, but I knew All Quiet on the Western Front from the Classics Illustrated comic book; Maurice del Bourgo’s drawings, which had unflinchingly and realistically portrayed the gore and splatter of the battlefield (causing them to be scrutinized in public hearings by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954) were imprinted on my mind.
I had grown up on movies Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), Brian G. Hutton’s Kelly’s Heroes (1970), and Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967). I had been awed by Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
But I was also familiar with the old style patriotic war movies, like Allan Dwan’s Sands of Iwo Jima, which opened in 1949, when Hollywood movies were at the very height of their popularity, some 70 million Americans went to the movies every week, and John Wayne was the country’s most popular movie star.
(Actually, Sands of Iwo Jima was a better film than the two-dimensional war movies that had preceded it. It used authentic combat footage and the three surviving Marines who — in the famous photograph— raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi were given small parts. While modern audiences might find it corny, with cardboard characters, it was just right for the times. It acknowledged that there was a human cost to war, that it was not all glory and ribbons, but the general tone was celebratory — Sands of Iwo Jima was like a souvenir coin struck by the Franklin Mint. Who knew that over time it would come to seem silly and tawdry and wasteful?)
The Platoon screening was, if not an epiphany, at least a watershed event in my life, for I was not prepared for the effect Stone’s work would have on those men. I went to see a movie and saw a room of combat veterans reduced to blubbering. Some of the vets walked out of that screening, not because they were offended by Stone’s politics or bored by the film. They had tears in their eyes. For some, the movie was too much like what they had lived through. When I tried to talk to some of them, they were unable to articulate the complicated feelings watching the film engendered. Platoon flat tore those old boys up.
I didn’t know movies could do that.
Watching those veterans react to Platoon not only changed my sense of what movies could do, but also what I could do as a critic. Here was my chance to engage, to find a way of conveying that visceral experience to readers who couldn’t be there. Writing about movies—or anything else—wasn’t just observing from the sidelines; it was another way of engaging with the heart of the game, amplifying the roar of the crowd, calling out the plays.”
This power of the movies to emotionally obliterate grown people seemed — and in some respects, still seems —odd to me.
While people are touched by movies all the time—they cry at sentimental trifles like Steel Magnolias and The Notebook—I figured combat veterans might be offended or annoyed by Platoon; I never expected that a man who’d been in country would be reduced to wracking sobs by a mere movie.
I remembered how my father had scoffed at John Wayne’s The Green Berets, which in the summer of 1968, a few months after the beginning of the Tet Offensive. My father might have agreed with Renata Alder’s assessment of the film in The New York Times: “a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything and becomes an invitation to grieve, not for our soldiers in Vietnam or for Vietnam (the film could not be more false or do a greater disservice to either of them) but for what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in this country. Simplicities of the right, simplicities of the left, but this one is beyond the possible. It is vile and insane.”
My father thought it was stupid; that Wayne was over-compensating for having missed out on the real battles of World War II.
Wayne had meant The Green Berets to be the Vietnam analogue to the Sands of Iwo Jima. In a way, it was. It was a huge box-office success, the highest-grossing movie of 1968. Maybe that serves mainly to demonstrate the divided nature of the American psyche. Vietnam was not World War II; it did not lend itself to easy homilies. Vietnam veterans spoke of war-related stress disorders as “John Wayne Syndrome;” crippled veteran Ron Kovic — as played by Tom Cruise in the Stone’s 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July— laments that he was wounded fighting “for John Wayne.”
Anyway, I had expected the veterans to re-act to Platoon the way my father had to The Green Berets. To dismiss it as Hollywood pandering or wishfulnesss. To make fun of its pretend soldiers. But as I gathered my quotes, my notebook filled up with a half dozen vets repeating some version of the same thing: “That’s how it was.”
Or that was almost how it was.
That so many of these men expressed this precise sentiment still seems amazing to me — I had assumed any cinematic treatment of war would seem inauthentic to men who’d been in country, that they would laugh at or be angered by the idea of actors playing at the horror they’d lived through. Knowing they were affected deeply by this film — which, in my amateur way I’d adjudged as excellent (if elegiac and poetry-stuffed)— deepened my respect for Stone and changed the way I looked at the movies.
What I knew about Stone at that point was filtered through Pauline Kael; earlier that year I’d driven nearly 200 miles to Dallas to see his film Salvador after reading her review, even though she hadn’t seemed to like it much.
“The director,” she wrote, “is probably aiming for a Buñelian effect—a vision so intensely scummy that it clears the air.”
If the result, with its grime and guilt, comes closer to suggesting a hyperkinetic, gonzo version of Graham Greene, that’s still nothing to be ashamed of. Written by Stone and the free-lance foreign correspondent Richard Boyle, the movie presents the civil war in El Salvador during the years 1980 and 1981 as some kind of ultimate bad trip… What Stone has here is a right-wing fantasy joined to a left-leaning polemic. He writes and directs as if someone had put a gun to the back of his neck and yelled “Go!” and didn’t take it away until he’d finished.
Kael could obviously take or leave this sort of thing, but Salvador was the sort of movie I genuinely loved, in part because it seemed a part of authentic experience, a gritty artifact that reflected what I pretended was my own jaded worldview. Having come of age in the 1970s and 1980s, having just missed being exposed to the draft (as well as the lures of free love), Stone’s wised-up sensibility appealed to me. But I wasn’t prepared for Platoon.
Until Platoon, I thought movies were entertainments, and that because of the collaborative nature of the form, they would always be less thoughtful and subtle, less transcendent, than the best work produced by a novelist or a painter. A movie was like a novel written by committee, a brokered deal circumscribed by compromise. I liked them, but I thought I understood their limitations.
In retrospect I could say that I’d recognized the possibilities earlier, that Taxi Driver or Apocalypse Now or A Clockwork Orange had opened my eyes to the potential of the form, but the truth is it took this gritty war drama, with Charlie Sheen and Kevin Dillon (and Johnny Depp in a small role) to make me recognize how powerful the movies could be.
•••
Platoon is famously based on Stone’s own experiences in Vietnam and, as the veterans I watched the film with would attest, it rings with authenticity. While Stone set up a dichotomy between two platoon sergeants, saintly Elias (Willem Dafoe) and murderous Barnes (Tom Berenger), both characters remain recognizably human. It was a stroke of genius to cast them against the type they had heretofore played. Dafoe was an established villain, and his cinematic resume lent some ballast to his portrayal — it was not hard to imagine that Elias had battled back some demons of his own.
And Berenger, then (and perhaps now) best-known for playing the lightweight sub-Tom Selleck TV actor in The Big Chill, played Barnes less as a monster than as a ruined, disillusioned man clinging to his belief in himself as one of the good guys. Barnes is disgusted by Elias and his dope-smoking followers; he believes, or at least wants to believe, in the rightness of his cause. We understand how a young soldier might be caught between these two poles: Elias wants his guys to make it through the madness and come out the other side. Barnes finds meaning in his role as a warrior, a soldier sent to do a job whether he understands it or not.
Fresh recruit Chris Taylor (Sheen) serves as surrogate for Stone and the audience; we watch as he’s tossed into the surreal world of war. As he steps off the plane with the other new recruits, the first sight they encounter is body bags being sent home. Then the new meat is taunted by a group of soldiers who’ve served their hitches. The implication is that these replacements are staring at their own future — some will go home bitter and snarling, others will be zipped into bags.
While Platoon wasn’t the first movie about Vietnam, it was a de-mythologizing tonic that, in an odd way, also seemed like a gesture of reconciliation. Some vets didn’t like it (I suspect most of them never saw it) because it proliferated an image of the American fighting man as scared and vulnerable, given to self-medication as well as self-doubt.
I wish my father had been alive to see it, and that we could have talked about his experiences in Southeast Asia in light of what the movie had revealed.
I wrote a column and a review.
I haven’t the heart to dig that old review up. I searched for it online but it doesn’t exist there. I’d probably could find it by scrolling through library microfiche, but I have no reason to believe I wrote anything other than a standard newspaper story. I got the names right, probably. I didn’t mangle the quotes.
I hope I was honest enough with myself and my readers to communicate at least a little of the revelatory nature of my experience with the movie. I doubt I was, because at that point in my life I hadn’t watched enough movies or thought hard enough about them for it to have been anything but misbegotten. I was probably more worried about being considered urbane and sophisticated, the sort of person who could take an experience like that in stride, than with being honest about what happened to me in the dark with those vets.
Still, I know I tried to write the hell out of it. Like someone had put a gun to the back of my neck and yelled “Go!”
•••
I haven’t watched Platoon in a long time, I wonder what I would make of it today.
I am like Kael in that I rarely re-watch movies, but unlike her, I don’t make a fetish of the non-habit. There are a handful of films — The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Animal House and Hiroshima, Mon Amour — I have seen a dozen or so times. I could watch a ball game in the time it takes to watch Platoon, and I think (but don’t know) that my estimation of the picture would go down.
I’ll watch it again someday but for now I prefer the version in my head. No one ever sees the same movie twice.
No one ever sees the same movie as someone else.
•••
There were lots of times Kael and I saw different films. She disapproved of many of the films I loved. She had some good things to say about Platoon, but not that many, as she ended her review by saying:
I know that Platoon is being acclaimed for its realism, and I expect to be chastened for being a woman finding fault with a war film. But I’ve probably seen as much combat as most of the men saying, “This is how war is.”
Of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) she wrote:
At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don’t have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact de-sensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you’re offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don’t believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there’s anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don’t use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it’s eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it’s worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what’s in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?
I agree with Kael on this point — the point of thinking critically about art is to not become a clockwork orange. And I agree with her that we have become desensitized to brutal acts.
Yet I loved some vicious films, like Clockwork Orange and even Stone’s much maligned Natural Born Killers, which is essentially a movie about how pretend violence inures us to real violence. It’s essentially about two white trash American kids who’ve watched too much TV — about how junk culture wrecked America.
•••
Kael was not the first movie critic I ever read, but she was the first one to get under my skin, who served as more than a consumer guide to the movies. She was the first one whose byline I sought out. And to this day, I haven’t shaken off or outgrown her influence. This point was driven home to me a few years ago when I received a note from one of her old New Yorker editors, William Whitworth, who said he detected her mark on me. I took that as the compliment he meant; I’m not embarrassed to be a third-generation Paulette.
But I have read — and still read — lots of critics; I’ve made a study of them. A few of them have been friends.
I didn’t appreciate Roger Ebert much when I just knew him from the TV, but after I started reading him seriously in the 1990s I was awed by his generosity and nimble intelligence. We finally became friends — sort of, it was a friendship enabled by social media — in the last years of his life. Somewhere I have the notebook we passed back and forth during a screening of some movie I’ve forgotten at the Toronto International Film Festival. He was a humane, decent man who I wish I’d known better.
But Kael was my first, and probably remains the prime source, even as I delight in dismissing some of her judgments. She was wrong a lot, and when she was wrong she was often audaciously wrong.
I can remember the first time I caught sight of her, being interviewed by Tom Snyder on Tomorrow, a show I often made a point of staying up late to watch. She was talking about how the old, tired aesthetic standards didn’t apply to movies — that movies were all about the way human beings respond to human faces and subversive gestures, “moments of excitement sustained longer and extended into new meanings.”
A fifteen-year-old Quentin Tarantino saw the same program; he remembers thinking “Who is this wild old woman?” as she defended her review of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 re-make of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (She called it “maybe the best film of its kind ever made.” I’m inclined to agree.)
Kael found words to express what I felt I understood, or at least hoped to understand: movies were, or at least could be, important.
They could be — and sometimes were — more than mere commercial ventures, entertainments plotted by sleek professionals driven by the profits they might realize.
Even, or especially, in trashy movies she often found a glimpse of something fine and provoking. She knew movies didn’t have to make “sense” to be worthwhile, taht they didn’t have to follow the the rules established by those she called “schoolmarms” — the guardians of official high culture. She understood it was okay for movies to be incoherent, to take on the textures of our dreams, to be what they were: allusive comminglings of light and sound.
At William Shawn’s New Yorker, she was the house hysteric, the one capable of being impolite, the one who wasn’t perpetually bemused and above the fray. Kael was the fierce one, the sometimes-vulgar one, the one capable of making an absurd judgment and yet plunging ahead, grasping at loose threads like a Tarzan swinging on jungle vines, a force gathering then spurting across the page. She was the show.
And that’s the trick, isn’t it? No one starts out wanting to be the sportswriter, everyone wants to be Willie Mays.
A critic is such a pale and stupid thing to want to grow up to be. No one wants to write about the movies; they want to be in movies, to make movies, to live movies.
They don’t want to recap the show, they want to be the show.
Kael, more than any other critic since Edmund Wilson, demonstrated the difference between the hack and the artist. Real criticism — the kind that’s always been rare and is hardly ever seen in daily newspapers anymore — is more than consumer information reporting. It’s more ego-driven and personal. It’s closer to making art than pulling the wings off it.
One secret is to be willing to fail big, to make huge leaps, to say apparently absurd things in the service of expressing your ideas. Kael thought actors more important than directors, that Orson Welles was overrated, that Jean-Luc Godard was “the Scott Fitzgerald of the movie world,” by which I guess she meant he was all beautiful style unencumbered by intellectual rigor.
It didn’t matter whether she was “right” or not. What mattered was her willingness to engage. In the game. In the ongoing conversation.
It’s always been easy to get sick of movies — for most of them have always been exceedingly average advertisements for dubious notions. A lot of them are just insincere flattery of their presumed audience made by people who would never go to see the sort of dull movie that gets made for money in Hollywood. Can you imagine “Sir Ben” Kingsley actually watching many of the movies he’s appeared in over the past 30 years?
Yet as an audience, we’ve become scared of the best films, afraid to embrace the possibilities of the form. We say we go to the movies to escape, not to have our consciousness raised — we have elected to spend our hard-won dollars for comfort rather than challenge. It is easy to think we probably shouldn’t encourage the movie factories, that they only churn out product to pick our pockets.
Maybe Kael felt more and more that way as she went along and maybe that’s why she retired. I don’t know and probably shouldn’t presume to guess, although, in keeping with the spirit of her work, I just did. All I know is that she wrote about movies with lust and understood that the act of writing about the movies was in itself a creative action. She wasn’t embarrassed to make her own art; she didn’t worry that her snap judgments might not, in the long run, prevail.
I love her writing; the way she anvil banged noun on verb. I imagine a lot of people were glad to see her go when she retired. She was a romantic who sometimes seemed to love the lowbrow and sensual beyond all reason, but a lot of people though she was pretentious (which is just a word they use when they wish you’d shut up).
I never met her.
But I have met Oliver Stone a couple of times.
I like him. Kael didn’t, calling him a “brazen vulgarian” (though maybe she didn’t mean that as an insult) without “an ounce of variety or nuance in his work.”
He called her an “elitist bag lady.”
I don’t know that either one of them are wrong, though I like an awful lot of Stone’s work. (And, this must be said, he was on a couple of occasions been kind to me when he didn’t need to be.) But my own outrageous opinion is that Kael is as important to our film culture as any director — maybe as any movie star. She was always in the arena.
Kael didn’t watch from a distance—she threw herself into the work, a player in every sense. Real criticism, I realized, wasn’t just analyzing art. It was participating in the world of ideas, creating a conversation, sometimes even changing the rules of the game. To write with her kind of boldness, you had to be in it for real, with the stakes high and the risks worth taking. Criticism wasn’t a retreat from the field; it was my way of finally getting in.
Where Kael Now Need? 