“I despise his movies”: the director Pauline Kael hated with a passion
In an era where anyone with an opinion, a keyboard, and an internet connection can review a movie and upload it for the world to see, it stands to reason the industry may never see a critic like Pauline Kael again.
She revolutionised the world of film analysis with her thoughtful, eloquent, and regularly withering putdowns that didn’t beat around the bush when it came to showcasing her positive or negative feelings on any given feature, with Roger Ebert arguably the only one who comes close in terms of name recognition and influence.
He worshipped at the altar of Kael, too, which says everything about how she was viewed within critical circles. It wasn’t just her fellow professionals who held her in such high esteem or placed her on a pedestal, though, with Quentin Tarantino making a point of clarifying that his since-scrapped tenth and final film wasn’t about her.
Unlike many critics of the time, Kael embraced cinema’s shifting attitudes towards previously taboo subjects like sex and violence in the 1960s and the decades to come, but there were nonetheless certain auteurs she could never get behind. One of them she hated with an obvious and intense passion, even using on-screen violence as an entry point into her denigration.
“Violence that makes you identify with the killer. There’s a lot of violence at the beginning of Grand Illusion, but you’re appalled by it. Bonnie and Clyde suffered for their indifference and casualness about using weapons,” she explained to Susan Goodman. “Whereas in a Clint Eastwood movie, you identify with the guy with the biggest gun, not the victim. That’s a big difference emotionally.”
It’s a distinction she felt Oliver Stone wasn’t particularly adept at handling, which is putting it lightly. “Natural Born Killers is a horrible movie,” she said. “The victims are made ludicrous and pathetic, so you’re supposed to cheer the killers on.”
Kael was even quoted as saying she welcomed the idea of retirement because “the prospect of having to sit through another Oliver Stone movie is too much,” and it was a viewpoint she refused to budge from despite his four Academy Awards and back catalogue of classics.
“I despise his movies,” she declared. “If you care about movie art, there are certain people whom it’s legitimate to despise. JFK and Nixon are historically so dubious and yet accepted by audiences as accurate. All you can do as a critic is point out the distortions.”
Stone has rubbed plenty of people the wrong way for a number of reasons throughout his career, but when the entire point of film criticism is to be as unbiased and objective as possible, Kael harbouring such disdain for his work speaks volumes to how much she hated him on a personal level.
