In my first few months as a film critic, some years ago, I made what so many readers and not a few editors thought was the foolhardy sin of the young neophyte. It was a bold move, even I admit, but it came from the heart and what I felt were sufficiently honed critical instincts. It triggered great, hyperventilating controversy that unsettled though did not unseat me.
It was the summer of 1998 and I bestowed glowing praise upon Michael Bay’s unabashed, noisy, gargantuan slab of entertainment “Armageddon,” while weeks later I slammed Steven Spielberg’s embarrassingly trite and sentimentally pandering WWII melodrama “Saving Private Ryan.”
How the letters poured in. I won’t recount their content (mostly about how I’d be speaking German if the U.S. hadn’t rescued Europe during WWII), but reading Brian Kellow’s new superlative biography of preeminent film critic Pauline Kael jogged those old troublesome memories. (Yes, I still stick to my verdicts, yet the episode can’t help but twist the stomach a tad.)
Kellow quotes from Kael’s famous essay “Trash, Art and the Movies” — “perhaps,” he writes, “the boldest statement yet of her own moviegoing personality.”
He quotes her: “There is so much talk now about the art of film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.”
Then Kellow adds: “Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed — not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like ‘Wild in the Streets,’ that was fine, ‘because,’ she wrote, ‘it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.’”
“The genuine movie-lover,” he writes, “knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity.”
Kael: “At the movies we want a different kind of truth, something that surprises us and registers as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful.”
Kellow finishes up with, “Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow — the good, vital lowbrow — was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience.”
Kael: “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies.”
Everyone, I think, has indeed enjoyed trashy American movies, be it “Dirty Dancing” or “Kill Bill.” But Kael’s argument seems to help vindicate, if just a bit, my predicament those years back. For I sincerely think that even if she would dismiss “Armageddon” as onanistic bombast and a scalding machismo vision of world-saving junk, she would at least find it offering integrity and a little fun. Meanwhile, I think she would be merciless to “Private Ryan.” All that flag waving hoo-ha and humorless heroics — I think it would make her wretch.
