Word: kael
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READ Pauline Kael's I Lost It at the Movies and all the autobiographical sidetracks over psychic frustrations and coed heartbreak, though usually filled with raucous humorous, seem part of an introverted cultural temperament spent somewhere in the '50's, dated with Salinger and old Italian films. Read Wilfrid Sheed's Max Jamison, the chronicle of an honest theater critic's fall, and the author's ruthless lapsed-Catholic cynicism as he looks at a mass culture eating its discriminators might take you back to the self-protective cliques of '60's bourgeois intelligentsia...
...three. Its values are only those of a racist, authoritarian cop; it offers no unifying ideology by which to live in its jungle. Straw Dogs and Dirty Harry do offer such a rationale, and it is not a misuse of the word to call this rationale fascism. Pauline Kael called Straw Dogs "a fascist work of art." It is. Its director. Sam Peckinpah uses the actors and the camera to teach his lesson with skill and finesse. The lesson, however, is classic fascism: the quest for the meta-experience of violence as a validation of existence, along with a contempt...
...Melville and Poe were beginning to show what Historian David Davis had called "un disguised sympathy for sublime murders and amoral supermen moved by demonic urges." That sympathy seems to have deepened recently, especially among movie directors. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. speaks of "a pornography of violence," and Critic Pauline Kael complains that "at the movies, they are desensitizing us." She objects to a film like Straw Dogs because it equates violence and masculinity. Few psychiatrists would argue with her. Nor would they disagree with critics who object that filmed violence has become the ultimate trip, the stimulus for mind-blowing...
...good people--Kael (The New Yorker), Hatch (Nation), Kauffmann (New Republic), and Sarris (Village Voice)--each have an axe to grind, and make no bones about grinding it. Kael has a perversely radical culture-consciousness, loving most those films which, rooted to a trashy crowd-pleasing base, manage to transcend it. Simon is a classicist, and treats film with the same stern regard as theater; his occasional fault is literary pretension. Hatch and Kauffmann retain the social concern of the more serious '50's liberals, while Sarris's devotion to the Great God Cinema is at least more passionate...
...against these losers from the NSFC, Wilfred Sheed's virtues look better and better. First, he at least has some goal for the kind of art he likes: he hopes it will preserve vital distinctions in human consciousness. If it is a claim less grandiose than that of Kael or Simon, he applies it to more different kinds of subject matter. Second, he has what it takes to know when to tub-thump hard, and when to leave well enough alone. It's called "Balance". Third, he's a better writer than even the smoothest of the slick mags' stable...