“Go fuck yourself”: the story of Pauline Kael, the worst movie critic in history
One thing that’s evident in this new world of ever-rising prices, continuous global war, technocratic mayhem, endless investigations into the behaviour of the most powerful and promises that ‘lessons will be learned’ is that just because some people rise to the very top of an organisation, or even a profession, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are any good at what they do.
The air of capability and authority is often a false one; sometimes, imposter syndrome is entirely deserved, but when it comes to the worst movie critic of all time, it is not exactly a modern phenomenon.
That’s because Pauline Kael rose to prominence during the 1960s, an era when ‘hot takes’ had never been heard of and having contrary opinions for the sake of clickbait was still 50 years away. It didn’t stop Kael however, who worked her way up from doing acerbic film reviews on public radio to getting an offer to write a book of movie criticism called ‘I Lost it at the Movies’ in 1965, to becoming head film critic at The New Yorker all the way up to 1991, during which she published some of the most ridiculous, short-sighted and just plainly wrong opinions of any analyst in history.
Opinion, of course, is not fact. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and to paraphrase a more vulgar way of putting it, everyone has one. But the majority of us rely on cultural critics to arbitrate the sheer volume of music, movies, books and art slung at us on a daily basis, in order to filter out what is worth our ever-diminishing time and attention. And so they serve, and have always served, a very important purpose. What Kael did, over a number of decades, was wilfully ignore that, publishing the kind of invective that nearly derailed the careers of incredibly talented people and went against the correct majority repeatedly.
Kael got to the lofty position she enjoyed thanks to a number of factors; she was certainly not a bad writer and that aforementioned book became a surprise bestseller, and by all accounts she was also very passionate about her subject, she was a film obsessive and rather like a broken clock, she was also occasionally right; see her support of Warren Beatty’s 1967 crime drama Bonnie and Clyde amidst the face of other critics dismissing it as violent rubbish for example.
But elsewhere, Kael’s influence and opinions were a complete disaster. No director or actor, no matter how gifted or creative, was safe from her writing. One example of her aiming her sights at the top was an incredibly lengthy attempted takedown of Orson Welles and his astonishing directing and acting work on 1941’s Citizen Kane, arguably the best film ever made and one of the most influential in Hollywood history. Kael said it was all down to the efforts of screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz – in return, Welles almost sued her.
She called Stanley Kubrick’s jaw-dropping masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey “ponderous” and “monumentally unimaginative”, which is insane, quite frankly. Alfred Hitchcock’s universally adored Vertigo was dismissed as “stupid”. Even foreign films and directors didn’t escape her pointless wrath; Federico Fellini’s groundbreaking La Dolce Vita was summarily compared to sticking one’s head in a bag of excrement.
Kael’s list of mistakes in the face of the opinions of literally anyone who wasn’t blind goes on and on. George Lucas responded to her personality by naming the villain in 1988’s Willow, ‘General Kael’ – a move which at least pandered to her ego enough to prompt her to respond to it by claiming it as an ‘homage a moi’. Kael was one of those terrible cultural elitists, a firm believer that just because something was popular, it was loved by the masses, which made it redundant or somehow less artistically important.
She didn’t like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws because lots of people enjoyed it and went to the cinema because of it, and hated Star Wars because it had made appreciating films more accessible to everyone. She was a spiteful gatekeeper of a medium designed specifically for pleasure.
And her words proved just as vicious for those trying to make a career in bringing entertainment to audiences, revelling in the fact she had the ability to make or break livelihoods. She said the late Robert Redford had incorrectly insulted Native Americans in a film, forcing him into a public correction and saying she had gone “beyond the limits of responsible criticism”. She even said she “despised” four-time Oscar winner Oliver Stone simply because she didn’t like his films.
Then there was Ridley Scott, who was making some incredible films in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and had his seminal sci-fi movie Blade Runner completely eviscerated by Kael, who called it “ugly and unpleasant”, revealing that he took the four-page review to heart so badly that once he had gone on to have decades of success he framed it and hung it in his office as a reminder never to be influenced by a critics’ opinion ever again.
“I never met her. I was so offended,” he said. “I haven’t read critiques ever since… I think (Blade Runner) is terrific – go fuck yourself, Pauline.”
