Posted on 07/16/2008 9:09:35 AM PDT by AreaMan
Pauline Kael & trash cinema
Will Smith's films are the endgame of a critic's take on Bonnie and Clyde
Robert Fulford, National Post Published: Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Happy as a clam, rich as a minor Rockefeller, Will Smith turned up recently on a 60 Minutes update of an item from last December. He was there to promote his current movie, Hancock, but his main theme was his huge success and the way he's engineered it. He left me thinking sad and rueful thoughts about, of all people, the late Pauline Kael, the most passionate, stimulating and argument-starting critic in the history of film.
Will Smith has proven himself a talented movie star, no doubt worth the $20-million or so that he receives for a film. His movies have, after all, grossed about $4.5-billion. He's apparently an amiable chap, on-and off-screen. At the same time, he's emerged as the living embodiment of the crass mechanical Hollywood that Kael, by accident, helped to usher in.
Her part in the process began four decades ago when she wrote an article for The New Yorker defending Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Warren Beatty film that treated two 1930s bank robbers with sympathy and raucous humour.
Most critics found Bonnie and Clyde empty and trashy. The crusty old New York Times guy, Bosley Crowther, then one of the most influential American critics, decided that Bonnie and Clyde failed to meet his narrow, simple-minded, painfully respectable standards. It was too violent, and he thought the love story of its doomed, hare-brained title characters was "sentimental claptrap."
Kael, whose critical reputation was in its early stages, used Bonnie and Clyde as the opening shot in what turned out to be a war against middlebrow, middle-class, middle-of-the-road taste. Her New Yorker piece began: "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on? Bonnie and Clyde is the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate. The audience is alive to it."
She announced no less than a revolution in taste that she sensed in the air. Movie audiences, she said, were going beyond "good taste," moving into a period of greater freedom and openness. Was it a violent film?
Well, Bonnie and Clyde needed violence. "Violence is its meaning."
She hated earnest liberalism and critical snobbery. She liked the raw energy in the work of adventurous directors such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese. She trusted her visceral reactions to movies.
When hired as a regular New Yorker movie critic, she took that doctrine to an audience that proved enthusiastic and loyal. She became the great star among New Yorker critics, then the most influential figure among critics in any field. Books of her reviews, bearing titles such as I Lost it at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and When the Lights Go Down, sold in impressive numbers. Critics across the continent became her followers. Through the 1970s and '80s, no one in films, except the actual moviemakers, was more often discussed.
It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."
Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"
This brings us to Will Smith, the perfect post-Kael moviemaker. In the 1990s, as he set out to become a big star, he and his manager examined a list of the 10 all-time most popular movies. They discovered that all of them used special effects. Nine out of 10 were special-effects movies with creatures (from another planet, or maybe the future), eight out of 10 were special-effects movies "with creatures and a love story."
As Smith summarized on 60 Minutes, " Independence Day and Men in Black were really no-brainers." This was presented with pride and satisfaction.
A witty script can sometimes bring to life a special-effects movie, like Men in Black. But these films are in essence technical rather than artistic achievements. Under the pressure of the effects, imagination crumples. Last year, Popular Mechanics chose the Top 10 special-effects films, including Terminator 2. One reader responded by claiming to have watched it more than 70 times --but still loved it.
In truth, of course, neither the weird cramping of that fan's taste nor the generalized malaise of the movie houses can be blamed on Pauline Kael. Equally, those of us who read her, quoted her and took what she said seriously have no compelling reason to enter a guilty plea. Kael, an independent spirit if ever there was one, turned out to be part of a much larger shift, which she didn't understand any better than the rest of us.
It was the dynamic that turned most of the slick magazines into abject publicity sheets. It was the same mysterious impulse that drove university professors to write books about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was the trend that made the programs of the CBC sound silly even on the rare occasions when they aren't trying to be.
It was the spirit of the age, that old devil Zeitgeist, unstoppable as always. In 1933, Aldous Huxley wrote, "The Zeitgeist is a most dismal animal, and I wish to heaven one could escape from its clutches." Not possible, as it turned out. Huxley went to Hollywood and wrote films that left him with a sense of shame. Later he became renowned for helping to popularize LSD.
Not long before she died, Pauline Kael remarked to a friend, "When we championed trash culture we had no idea it would become the only culture." Who did?
Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved
I didn’t always agree with Kael but she was a genius.
I see about one movie a year. Last week I found myself in the theater watching Wanted. Exceedingly bad and filled with unnecessary violence. An example of why I see so few movies.
wasn’t it Pauline Kael who remarked she couldn’t believe anyone was Republican because nobody she knew was Republican? Or something like that..I’ll go look it up...
"I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."
“wasn’t it Pauline Kael who remarked she couldn’t believe anyone was Republican because nobody she knew was Republican? Or something like that..I’ll go look it up...”
When Nixon won in a landslide she said something to the effect that she didn’t know anyone who voted for him.
I’m spekaing strictly to her abilities as a writer and critic.
I liked Will Smith in “Six Degrees of Seperation”, that wasn’t a creature or special effects movie.
I also liked Hancock. I found myself getting giddy over the silly stuff, like a five year old girl. “He blew out of prison to get a basketball. Oh look, he blew back in!” I was entertained, that is what I paid for.
She hated “The Wild Bunch”, called it the first fascist western. She hated “A Clockwork Orange” called it porno.
Don’t see no genius in that.
She did - and this writer can says what he wants but movies like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark are good, even great movies. In that, they are no different than past greats like Gunga Din and The Four Feathers (i.e. the Korda version)
Man ole man, do I ever miss: Randolph Scott, Walter Brennen, Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Mr. Jimmy Stewart (my favorite). Men who made good movies and did not need to yell F*** to get someone’s attention. Dang, getting old sucks. All my heroes gone.
Sorry, Pauline. You're NOT a tragic hero. Trash culture has always been with us and always will be with us, whether you make the calculated mistake to praise it or not.
But high art -- true culture -- will always be with us too.
In celebrating low art, you made your bed. Now lie in it.
And ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ certainly wasn’t empty.
You want Mozart? You want Opera? it's available.
You want slapstick? You want the Three Stooges? We got that.
You want good drama? Jimmy Stewart? Henry Fonda? No problem.
But our entire culture decided to focus on what the mob wants. The mob wants gladiators and Christians thrown to the lions. Bread and Circuses. We have no time for Virgil or Longfellow. Give the people what they want? The people want Barabbas.
Part of the blame has to go to a lot of people around here who refuse to engage the culture. They think it’s a moral badge to not see movies and then they complain about the fact there are no longer movies aimed at them. It doesn’t make any sense.
In the early 70's when "The French Connection" came out. I was working with (not for) Grumman on Long Island. The guy who worked with me was a former Marine and a WWII vet. We bought a pizza one night and went to see the FC at a drive-in movie. When they slammed the bad guys up against the wall and called them MF's, Jerry and I were completely shocked. That was the first time we had ever heard the F-word in a movie.
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Ridin' the train alone
Whatever happened to Gene and Tex
And Roy and Rex, The Durango Kid
Oh, whatever happened to Randolph Scott
His horse plain as could be
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Has happened to the best of me
Everybody's tryin' to make a comment
About our doubts and fears
True Grit's the only movie
I've really understood in years
You gotta take your analyst along
To see if it's fit to see
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Has happened to the industry
Whatever happened to Johnny Mack Brown
And Alan Rocky Lane
Whatever happened to Lash LaRue
I'd love to see them again
Whatever happened to Smiley Burnette
Tim Holt and Gene Autry
Whatever happened to all of these
Has happened to the best of me
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott
Has happened to the industry
I believe the first mainstream film to use the word was M.A.S.H. which came out in 1970.
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were among the first celebrity criminals of the modern era. Certainly Parker knew how to enhance the pair’s popular appeal by manipulating the media, and newspapers were quick to publish her poem The Story of Bonnie and Clyde. Her other poetry, especially Suicide Sal, shows her flair for underworld vernacular that owed much to the detective magazines she avidly read. According to Geringer, Bonnie appealed to the out of work and generally disenfranchised third of America shattered by the Depression, who saw the duo as a Robin Hood-like couple striking blows at an uncaring government.
Video of actual car & Bonnie after they were shot and killed by police at link above about 3/4 of way down the page.
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