A Blind Following

Pauline Kale’s unique style and loud opinions won her a long-time job as lead movie critic at the New Yorker for more than twenty years. From this post she and her work became influential in the world of film critique. Her love for movies drove a storied career that built up her sense authority on the subject as well as people’s acceptance of that authority.

A major pitfall in the creation of her argumentation, though, comes in her sense of authority on the subject. This authority comes, in large part, from the successful release of her first book I Lost It at the Movies. The result of such success was to create a voice of Kale that assumed authority over what was and wasn’t good movie making.

This authority, though, was often a false authority and Kale often proved to be largely uninformed. As Renata Adler points out in her article “House Critic,” Kale once made bold statements about the indoor shooting of Cutch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid only to find out that the film was shot outdoors by the demand of director George Roy Hill. “When informed of such errors, Ms. Kael never acknowledged or rectified them,” the article goes on to explain.

Instead of searching for some sort of objective truth about why the movie is good or bad she draws from her own authority as “Ms. Pauline Kale, lead critic for the New Yorker.” She dosen’t write to prove why the movie is good but to prove why her opinion of the movie is good and well informed. To do this she often uses manipulative tactics. For one, she draws on her previously mentioned authority as a way to make statements like
I walked up to the street, crying blindly, no longer certain whether my tears were for the tragedy on the screen, the hopelessness I felt for myself, or the alienation I felt from those who could not experience the radiance of Shoeshine,
sting line this line does in her review of Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine. Certainly no one wants to be unable to experience the radiance of a movie like Ms. Kale does.

Take also, for example, her trademark use of a familiar tone throughout her writing. She talks about the difference between academic English and “the way people spoke about movies” in her interview with Francis Davis chronicled in the book, Afterglow.

Renata Adler also talks about this affect in her overuse of certain fraises. “She also likes words ending in ‘ized’ (‘vegetablized,’ robotized,’ ‘aestheticized,’…) and a kind of slang (‘twerpy,’ ‘dopey,’ ‘dumb,’ …)which amounts, in prose, to an affectation of straigforwardness.” This, though, conflicted with an elevated language in discourse that acted to alienate any readership that was much less educated that that over her New Yorker readership.

These tools fooled many a reader into agreeing with her take on the movie or at least respecting it. I am not so easily fooled. Though. Her increased involvement with movie studios, even taking a position as a consultant to Paramount Pictures, prove to be a conflict of interest in my eyes and further to separate her voice from any objective truth in media critique.