I am
resolved to start the New Year right; I don’t want to carry over any
unnecessary rancor from 1962. So let me discharge a few debts. I want to say a
few words about a communication from a woman listener. She begins with, “Miss
Kael, I assume you aren’t married—one loses that nasty, sharp bite in
one’s voice when one learns to care about others.” Isn’t it remarkable
that women, who used to pride themselves on their chastity, are now just as
complacently proud of their married status? They’ve read Freud and they’ve
not only got the illusion that being married is healthier, more “mature,”
they’ve also got the illusion that it improves their character. This lady is
so concerned that I won’t appreciate her full acceptance of femininity that
she signs herself with her husband’s name preceded by a Mrs. Why, if this Mrs.
John Doe just signed herself Jane Doe, I might confuse her with one of those
nasty virgins, I might not understand the warmth and depth of connubial
experience out of which she writes.
I
wonder, Mrs. John Doe, in your reassuring, protected marital state, if you have
considered that perhaps caring about others may bring a bite to the voice? And I
wonder if you have considered how difficult it is for a woman in this
Freudianized age, which turns out to be a new Victorian age in its attitude to
women who do anything, to show any intelligence without being accused of
unnatural aggressivity, hateful vindictiveness, or lesbianism. The latter
accusation is generally made by men who have had a rough time in an argument;
they like to console themselves with the notions that the woman is
semi-masculine. The new Freudianism goes beyond Victorianism in its placid
assumption that a woman who uses her mind is trying to compete with men. It was
bad enough for women who had brains to be considered freaks like talking dogs;
now it’s leeringly assumed that they’re trying to grow a penis—which any
man will tell you is an accomplishment that puts canine conversation in the
shadows.
Mrs.
John Doe and her sisters who write to me seem to interpret Freud to mean that
intelligence, like a penis, is a male attribute. The true woman is supposed to
be sweet and passive—she shouldn’t argue or emphasize and opinion or get
excited about a judgment. Sex—or at least regulated marital sex—is supposed
to act as a tranquilizer. In other words, the Freudianized female accepts that
whole complex of passivity that the feminists battled against.
Mrs.
Doe, you know something, I don’t mind sounding sharp—and I’ll take my
stand with those pre-Freudian feminists; and you know something else, I think
you’re probably so worried about competing with male egos and those brilliant
masculine intellects that you probably bore men to death.
This lady who attacks me for being
nasty and sharp goes on to write, “I was extremely disappointed to hear your
costic speech on and about the radio station, KPFA. It is unfortunate you were
unable to get a liberal education, because that would have enabled you to know
that a great many people have many fields of interest, and would have saved you
from displaying your ignorance on the matter.” She, incidentally, displays her
liberal education by spelling caustic c-o-s-t-i-c, and it is with some expense
of spirit that I read this kind of communication. Should I try to counter my
education—liberal and sexual—against hers, should I explain that Pauline
Kael is the name I was given at birth, and that it does not reflect my marital
vicissitudes which might over-complicate nomenclature?
It
is not really that I prefer to call myself by my own name and hence Miss that
bothers her or the other Mrs. Does, it is that I express ideas she doesn’t
like. If I called myself by three names like those poetesses in the Saturday
Review of Literature, Mrs. Doe would still hate my guts. But significantly
she attacks me for being a Miss. Having become a Mrs., she has gained moral
superiority: for the modern woman, officially losing her virginity is a victory
comparable to the Victorian woman’s officially keeping hers. I’m happy for
Mrs. Doe that she’s got a husband, but in her defense of KPFA she writes like
a virgin mind. And is that really something to be happy about?
Mrs.
Doe, the happily, emotionally-secure-mature-liberally-educated-womanly-woman has
her opposite number in the mailbag. Here is a letter from a manly man. This is
the letter in its entirety: “Dear Miss Kael, Since you know so much about the
art of the film, why don’t you spend your time making it? But first, you will
need a pair of balls.” Mr. Dodo (I use the repetition in honor of your two
attributes), movies are made and criticism is written by the use of
intelligence, talent, taste, emotion, education, imagination, and
discrimination. I suggest it is time you and your cohorts stop thinking with
your genital jewels. There is a standard answer to this old idiocy of
if-you-know-so-much-about-the-art-of-the-film-why-don’t-you-make-movies. You
don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good. If it makes you feel
better, I have worked making movies, and I wasn’t hampered by any biological
deficiencies.
Others
may wonder why I take the time to answer letters of this sort: the reason is
that these two examples, although cruder than most of the mail, simply carry to
extremes the kind of thing so many of you write. There are, of course, some
letter writers who take a more “constructive” approach. I’d you to read
you part of a long letter I received yesterday:
I haven’t been listening to your
programs for very long and haven’t heard all of them since I began listening
… But I must say that while I have been listening, I have not heard one
favorable statement made of any “name” movie made in the last several
years…. I have heard no movie which received any kind of favorable mention
which was not hard to find playing, either because of its lack of popularity or
because of its age. In your remarks the other evening about De Sica’s earlier
movies you praised them all without reservation until you mentioned his “most
famous film—The Bicycle Thief, a great work, no doubt, though I
personally find it too carefully and classically structured.” You make me
think that the charge that the favorability of your comments on any given movie
varies inversely with its popularity, is indeed true even down to the last
nuance.
But even as I write this, I can almost feel you begin to tighten up, to
start thinking of something to say to show that I am wrong. I really wish you
wouldn’t feel that way. I would much rather you leaned back in your chair,
looked up at the ceiling and asked yourself, “Well, how about it? Is it true
or not? Am I really biased against movies other people like, because they liked
them? When I see a popular movie, do I see it as it is or do I really just try
to pick it apart?” You see, I’m not like those other people that have been
haranguing you. I may be presumptuous, but I am trying sincerely to be of help
to you. I think you have a great deal of potential as a reviewer…. But I am
convinced that great a potential as you have, you will never realize any more of
that potential than you have now until you face those questions mentioned
before, honestly, seriously, and courageously, no matter how painful it may be.
I want you to think of these questions, I don’t want you to think of how to
convince me of their answers. I don’t want you to look around to find some
popular movie to which you can give a good review and thus “prove me wrong.”
That would be evading the issue of whether the questions were really true or
not. Furthermore, I am not “attacking” you and you have no need to defend
yourself to me.
May I interrupt? Please, attack me
instead—it’s this kind of “constructive criticism” that misses the point
of everything I’m trying to say that drives me mad. It’s enough to make one
howl with despair, this concern for my potential—as if I were a cow giving
thin milk. But back to the letter—
In fact, I would prefer that you make no reply to me at all about the answers to these question, since I have no need of the answers and because almost any answer given now, without long and thoughtful consideration, would almost surely be an attempt to justify yourself, and that’s just what you don’t have to do, and shouldn’t do. No one needs to know the answers to these questions except you, and you are the only person who must answer. In short, I would not for the world have you silence any voices in you … and most certainly not a concerned little voice saying, “Am I really being fair? Do I see the whole movie or just the part I like—or just the part I don’t like?”
And so on he goes for another few paragraphs. Halfway
through, I thought this man was pulling my leg; as I got further and read “how
you missed the child-like charm and innocence of The Parent Trap … is
quite beyond me,” I decided it’s mass culture that’s pulling both legs out
from under us all. Dear man, the only real question you letter made me ask
myself is, “What’s the use?” and I didn’t lean back in my chair and look
up at the ceiling, I went to the liquor cabinet and poured myself a good stiff
drink.
How
completely has mass culture subverted even the role of the critic when listeners
suggest that because the movies a critic review favorably are unpopular and hard
to fine, that the critic must be playing some snobbish game with himself and the
public? Why are you listening to a minority radio station like KPFA? Isn’t it
because you want something you don’t get on commercial radio? I try to direct
you to films that, if you search them out, will give you something you won’t
get from The Parent Trap. You consider it rather “suspect” that I
don’t raise more “name” movies. Well, what makes a “name” movie is
simply a saturation advertising campaign, the same kind of campaign that puts
samples of liquid detergents at your door. The “name” pictures of Hollywood
are made the same way they are sold: by pretesting the various ingredients,
removing all possible elements that might affront the mass audience, adding all
possible elements that will titillate the largest number of people. As the CBS
television advertising slogan put it—“Titillate—and dominate.” South
Pacific is seventh in Variety’s list of all-time top grossers. Do
you know anybody who thought it was a good movie? Was it popular in any
meaningful sense or do we just call it popular because it was sold? The tie-in
campaign for Doris Day in Lover Come Back included a Doris Day album to
be sold for a dollar with a purchase of Imperial margarine. With a schedule of
23 million direct mail pieces, newspaper, radio, TV and store ads, Lover Come
Back became a “name” picture.
I
try not to waste air time discussing obviously bad movies—popular though they
may be; and I don’t discuss unpopular bad movies because you’re not going to
see them anyway; and there wouldn’t be much point or sport in hitting people
who are already down. I do think it’s important to take time on movies which
are inflated by critical acclaim and which some of you might assume to be the
films to see.
There
were some extraordinarily unpleasant anonymous letters after the last broadcast
on The New American Cinema. Some were obscene; the wittiest called me a snail
eating the tender leaves off young artists. I recognize your assumptions: the
critic is supposed to be rational, clever, heartless and empty, envious of the
creative fire of the artists, and if the critic is a woman, she is supposed to
be cold and castrating. The artist is supposed to be delicate and sensitive and
in need of tender care and nourishment. Well, this nineteenth-century
romanticism is pretty silly in twentieth-century Bohemia.
I
regard criticism as an art, and if in this country and in this age it is
practiced with honesty, it is no more remunerative than the work of an
avant-garde film artist. My dear anonymous letter writers, if you think it is so
easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film
experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few
critics, so many poets.
Some
of you write me flattering letters and I’m grateful, but one last request: if
you write me, please don’t say, “This is the first time I’ve ever written
a fan letter.” Don’t say it, even if it’s true. You make me feel as if I
were taking your virginity—and it’s just too sordid.
KPFA broadcast, January 1963