Pauline Kael: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. We may become even more aware of the way we have been turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming the sickly, goody-goody songs. The dauntless, scrubbed-face heroine (Julie Andrews), in training to become a nun, is sent from the convent to serve as governess to the motherless Von Trapp children, and turns them into a happy little troupe of singers before marrying their father (Christopher Plummer). She says goodbye to the nuns and leaves them outside at the fence, as she enters the cathedral to be married. Squeezed again, and the moisture comes out of thousands--millions--of eyes and noses. Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn't act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa's party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage? The only thing the director, Robert Wise, couldn't smooth out was the sinister, archly decadent performance by Christopher Plummer--he of the thin, twisted smile; he seems to be in a different movie altogether.”

Pauline Kael

"The Sound of Music," p. 697
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Children , Smile , Way , Feeling

“I am mystified. I know only one person who voted for Nixon.”

Pauline Kael

Attributed to Kael after the 1972 American Presidential election, which Nixon won easily. This misquote is presumably based on "I live in a rather special world." above, but there is no evidence that Kael was mystified or surprised by that election's outcome.
Misattributed

Personality

“What's disgusting about the Dirty Harry movies is that Eastwood plays this angry tension as righteous indignation.”

Pauline Kael book Hooked

"Pop Mystics," review of Pale Rider (1985-08-12), p. 17.
Hooked (1989)

“Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.”

Pauline Kael

Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998).
Interviews

Women , Thinking

“One of the biggest box-office successes in movie history — probably because for young audiences it's like getting a box of Cracker Jack that is all prizes. Written and directed by George Lucas, the film is enjoyable in its own terms, but it's exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids to the circus. There's no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the only attempt at beauty is in the image of a double sunset. The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, and the relentless pacing drive every idea out of your head, and even if you've been entertained, you may feel cheated of some dimension — a sense of wonder, perhaps. It's an epic without a dream.”

Pauline Kael

"Star Wars," p. 714.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Beauty , Dreams , Feeling , History

“Earlier generations went to see what was forbidden in life and developed a real excitement about the movies. Today’s rating system keeps kids out of the good ones. I wouldn’t want them to see movies like Natural Born Killers, but my tendency is you’re better off seeing things than not. That glazed indifference kids develop can be worse than over-excitement.”

Pauline Kael

Interview with Susan Goodman, Modern Maturity (March/April 1998).
Interviews

Life , Nature , Indifference

“The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

People

“The recurrence of certain themes in movies suggests that each generation wants romance restated in slightly new terms, and of course it’s one of the pleasures of movies as a popular art that they can answer this need. And yet, and yet — one doesn’t expect an educated generation to be so soft on itself, much softer than the factory workers of the past who didn’t go back over and over to the same movies, mooning away in fixation on themselves and thinking this fixation meant movies had suddenly become an art, and their art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Pleasure , Education , Art , Thinking

“Apparently, Lillian Hellman couldn't shake off the predatory Hubbards after "The Little Foxes"; she wrote this play about the same family, setting it back 30 years earlier in their dark history. The Hubbards, who are supposed to be rising Southern capitalists, are the greatest collection of ghouls since "The Old Dark House" of 1932. Hellman must combine witchcraft with stagecraft — who else could keep a plot in motion with lost documents, wills, poisonings, and pistols, and still be considered a social thinker?”

Pauline Kael

"Another Part of the Forest," p. 30.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)

Family , History , Housing

“At the movies, we are gradually being conditioned to accept violence as a sensual pleasure. The directors used to say they were showing us its real face and how ugly it was in order to sensitize us to its horrors. You don't have to be very keen to see that they are now in fact desensitizing us. They are saying that everyone is brutal, and the heroes must be as brutal as the villains or they turn into fools. There seems to be an assumption that if you're offended by movie brutality, you are somehow playing into the hands of the people who want censorship. But this would deny those of us who don't believe in censorship the use of the only counterbalance: the freedom of the press to say that there's anything conceivably damaging in these films — the freedom to analyze their implications. If we don't use this critical freedom, we are implicitly saying that no brutality is too much for us — that only squares and people who believe in censorship are concerned with brutality. Actually, those who believe in censorship are primarily concerned with sex, and they generally worry about violence only when it's eroticized. This means that practically no one raises the issue of the possible cumulative effects of movie brutality. Yet surely, when night after night atrocities are served up to us as entertainment, it's worth some anxiety. We become clockwork oranges if we accept all this pop culture without asking what's in it. How can people go on talking about the dazzling brilliance of movies and not notice that the directors are sucking up to the thugs in the audience?”

Pauline Kael book Deeper into Movies

"Stanley Strangelove" (January 1972) http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0051.html, review of A Clockwork Orange
Deeper into Movies (1973)

People , Pleasure , Fools , Sex

“Object to the Hollywood film and you’re an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you’re a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a Philistine.”

Pauline Kael

"Movies, the Desperate Art" (1956)

“I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.”

Pauline Kael

Quoted in Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (Da Capo, 2003, ISBN 0-306-81230-4).

Love , Pain , Art , Thinking

“Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials — which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Men , Future

“And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made — which is more or less implicit.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Beauty , Art , Tear

“If you can't make fun of bad movies on serious subjects, what's the point?”

Pauline Kael

Interview with Hal Espen, The New Yorker (1994-03-21); reprinted in Espen's Conversations with Pauline Kael (University of Mississippi Press, 1996, ISBN 0-878-05899-0), p. 162.
Interviews

“I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them.”

Pauline Kael

Quoted by Israel Shenker, "Critics Here Focus on Films As Language Conference Opens," http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50A11FF3E59107A93CAAB1789D95F468785F9 The New York Times (1972-12-28)
Often quoted as "How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him"; referring to George McGovern's loss to Richard Nixon in in the 1972 presidential election.

World , Feeling , Personality

“The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else. We are looking at the dead, and they move and grin and wave at us; it's an almost unbearable experience. When our wonder or our grief are interrupted or followed by a commercial, we want to destroy the ugly box. Old movies don't tear us apart like that. They do something else, which we can take more of and take more easily; they give us a sense of the passage of life. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a plump matron and here, an hour later, as an exquisite child.”

Pauline Kael book Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

"Movies on Television"
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968)

Life , Beauty , Sense , Tear

“De Mille's bang-them-on-the-head-with-wild-orgies-and-imperilled-virginity style is at its ripest; the film is just about irresistible.”

Pauline Kael

"The Sign of the Cross," p. 680.
5001 Nights at the Movies (1982)