Pauline Kael did indeed lose it at the movies. She lost "it" in a sexual sense as implied by her first book's title. Other titles of her movie review collections in book form had a sexual connotation. Certainly movies had become her passion. One can affirm that her loss was akin to losing virginity. She did swoon over some films like the effect on her was sexual. To use Mr. Ebert's term - she was "knocked-up" by those movies.
The lack of virginity was repeated over the years. There were states of immediate gratification, over and over, per movie by movie, if so affected. It was expected to go on and on, more movies, more of the unexpected. But the lack of expectation could not be of reality. There would have been a framework of the expected otherwise the unexpected would have been incomprehensible. Such expectation implies standards. At least those standards could have been acknowledged, implicitly or explicitly. Neither possibility occurred. Her history, writing style, and enthusiasms were not in service to standards.
Her home region was not standard. She self-defined herself as a Westerner and in opposition to New York City. That is, she was from the "out West" part of the United States. This, for her, was a thin and short sliver of the West coast near and in San Francisco, but it could not be and was not representative of the West. Her West wasn't a part of New York City. Historically she had nothing to keep her apart from New York City. The Western family life was dreary. Presumably the Eastern family life was dreary also. So it was no surprise that family entertainment as a category of movie appreciation would be reviled by her. She preferred trash. School ties, meaning high school Eastern or Western, were deplorable. For example, how could anyone have gone through high schools like the one Wiseman showed in Philadelphia and then have a meaningful, useful future, she asked.
She didn't ask, but how could the New York City of the 70's, caught up in cinema-du-zap, go on to other venues? For example, on to other venues that included lewd nuns violated on the altar. Or how did the 50's become the 60s and then how did the 60s get to the New York City of the 70s? Did one decade "cause" the next? For her, whatever came of being alive during the Depression, WW II, the Cold War, and the pain of Vietnam?
She thought those years of the 50's were formed by a classless society characterized by dull jobs, unduly influenced by television (that did not seize our souls) that fed into consumerism and so helped to foster the nihilism of youth. Pascal's concerns about boredom were not considered. The 60's she did not characterize though she thought its violence acceptable if blood and cruelty made for the appearance of a good movie.
Her appearance and manners left something to be desired as did her writing style. She was photographed in atrocious garb; she was short, unattractive, foul-mouthed and gregarious with Wild Turkey and cigarettes at the ready. She was very bossy, always at boil, fluttery, bird-like and bawdy. In her writing style, never much appreciated by the British, she went in for wild subjectivity, aided by a ragged conversional stance, pursuing, jazz-like, a lack of structure and adopting a tone of declarations with certainty and assertions not lacking in surety. She got into extended digressions. Sentences did not necessarily explain, or amplify or limit a preceding one.
Such a style was, perhaps, forgiven because of her enthusiasms. Some of those enthusiasms included Art. She added to the 60's enactment of a lack of separation of parts within culture, within civilization, and between culture and civilization. She admired movies characterized as being garbage. She appreciated Art and wanted commercial ventures, what with the profit motive, to be beside the point. Nevertheless, Art is about valuable experiences. The movies lump elements of books, music, and photography into a heady or toxic mix. Lumping them together creates confusion. But is it Art?
Because Art can turn a profit, then that should not be held against it. Either it is or it is not Art. Veering in and out of the definition of Art endangers the classification of Art. Then what is valuable becomes beside the point. The uncomfortable feeling is that if the movie is a commercial success, it can't be Art. That is, if it is a moneymaker, many people have seen it and Art was never of the many. If Art can be defined, at least implicitly, by what commercial interests had put forward, then the self-styled artists will have only their self-designations as being representations of Art.
Other people, like Kael, defined Art in her reviews, in her appreciation of some movies. Those movies, were like ones involving butter and sodomy, a rape as "one of the few truly erotic sequences on film", "Nashville", and "Bonnie and Clyde" with its politically "brilliant" fusillade. The shooting was in the service to a suggestion of violence which would have been grotesque, but rather it was violence we needed to see for what was cool, untouched by morality. The violence of "Bonnie and Clyde" was, Kael wrote, a sophisticated response to a contemporary society that demanded it.
It may have also "demanded" Véronique of "La Chinoise", characterized by Kael as being so much like girls on college campuses then. Véronique was a terrorist who killed the wrong person and so killed again to get it right. Véronique was said by Kael to be like so many female college students of that anti-war era – not self-conscious, frightened, yet assured. Certainly they were not so prissy as to adopt an accusatory tone and declare, dismissively, "I don't like violence".
Also, beyond the campus, they would know that the anti-war political power of "Bonnie and Clyde" had no reference to prissy Viet Cong. Remember, blood and cruelties by whomever were acceptable if it made for a good movie. They also thought violence was for animals but, we who centuries ago found that animals could not do arithmetic, divided reality into at least two large nonintersecting groups - animal vs. us. In short, animals, without using mathematics, aren't violent, we, using arithmetic, are violent. Animals are as they are, without choice, we have a choice. We can be additive until violence occurs.
Kael could touch on many subjects in a review, from butter and bullets as in the above. Almost anything could be in a review of hers. Those movies were dots. She was one of the lines connecting them. But, once connected, and you got there, then where were you? Nearly all aspects of life could pop up in a review by her. So what? You had arrived, and where were you? No standards there. No tradition there. On tour you went carried along by Kael and it got you nothing of value unless it was for the ride. Was, the ride, at least, placed in a frame of reference? Was it "I have arrived here" and "I came from there"? No, then nothing truly got connected. You could start with the first word of one of her reviews and get to the last one and you were nowhere. You were always being "here", but no one writes in the present.
In the past, circa WWII in England, a book about writing nonfiction as good English noted that faults of writing can reflect faults of character and that good English writing is a moral matter. A review is not an excuse for risk taking. It is rather a dry form and to be inaccurate about achievement or attempt to get at impressions of indescribable feelings puts one into "suggestion and parable". The review writing need not have devices or tricks. An individual’s review, in error, may aspire to a peculiar range of expressions, logical weaknesses, and stylistic extravagancies. Writing down to the many, the inexpert, and we must not have been as expert as Kael, (so she indicated), can lead to mental confusions such as if there was violence in Vietnam, then violence must be on the screen. Attempting to give figure to such nonsense is, in a Puritan's terms, "mere idolatry".
Kael's colloquialisms, slang, contractions and constructions gained what? Lost what? Not a paradise lost, but what was lost was sense and sensibility and what was gained was surly and sick. She acted as if all civilizations have at least a minimal culture. But after the lost culture, there may be a civilization as residue. In any event, we now are tending to a un peu culture, thanks to the likes of Kael. Culturally, we are on the approach to zero like "The Chelsea Girls", as they were once characterized to be representing a godless civilization. In the little space and time we have left there is more than one level within our culture. It is the sum of perhaps many parts. Even so, in its entirety, it is paltry.
With culture is Art. Now is it, pornography or Art? What's the difference? Now is it violence, crudity, and vulgarity or Art? Who cares? Now is it the trivial, animalistic, and stupid or Art? Don't ask. Now is it inhumanity, greed, and a cult of personality as morality or Art? Go away. Now is it incoherence, irrationality, and the intractable or Art? Why continue? Now is it lies, alternate realities, and the global diabolical or Art? No escape.
The questions asked and the answers given are not of parity. The one persisting element, Art, is not an independent variable. It depends on a high order of disciplined reason. With such, it should never disappear but, if it is difficult to know if it is there, then we may be without it. It doesn’t seem to be gone so then we have a un peu culture? Some among us want the culture to disappear. Others, like Everett Ruess, who engineered his own disappearance so well that he could not be found, want more. The Ruessians want the end of culture without the option of return.