So what she hated The Sound of Music

(Audience: New York Times)

Pauline Kael expected a lot from the cinema. Movies that others loved, epic films like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour”, she slammed. By the end of her career, she was exhausted by all the negative reviews she had given actors like Barbra Streisand, actors she believed had potential they weren’t displaying on screen.

Kael had a style unmatched by any of her peers at the time. She didn’t view movies the way the mass audience did, which was reflected in her criticism of popular movies like “The Sound of Music.” But film was her passion, it was what she loved, and, contrary to what Renata Adler declares in “House Critic,” film was what she cared about. She dedicated twenty-three years of her life to film criticism at the New Yorker.

Kael was criticized for talking about everything but the movie in her reviews. Adler believes Kael was never satisfied, that she used rhetorical questions to show off what she knew, and that her vocabulary really only consisted of nine words, most of which were some derivative of her favorite slang terms. Adler especially despised Kael’s use of the “we”, “you”, “they”, “ought”. In formal analysis one is taught to leave the “I” and “we” out of it, there is a time and place for opinion, and it’s not in a formal essay. Kael indeed put a large chunk of personality into her reviews and broke all the rules.

The conversation of personality in criticism would be a heated one between Oscar Wilde and Adler. Adler denounces Kael’s tendency to use “you” when she refers to her personal opinion. No critic has the grounds to say what the audience should feel, or what they do feel, which Kael is guilty of. But what she created was beyond criticism; it was a form of art. In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde says all criticism itself is an art, and with art, personality is inevitable.

Wilde was concerned with the realness and trueness of criticism, and believed the personal element made it richer, more satisfying and more convincing. And since what Kael created was in fact art, she hasn’t done anything wrong. Her work has served its purpose as a work of art, which is to provide pleasure to and stir an emotional reaction within the audience. Kael took a light-hearted movie like the “Sound of Music”, called it “the sugar-coated lie people seem to want to eat,” and unveiled a unique interpretation. The role of the critic is to discover a richer (or maybe just thought-provoking, in this case) meaning behind a work of art.

Kael revealed underlying messages that most people didn’t think to consider. In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde says, “the function of literature is to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvelous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon.” And that’s what she did. Kael brought films to life in a new light, and into a world common eyes didn’t see. It was a radically different world from her peers, but she gave us rare insight to last a lifetime.