Charles Taylor on Pauline Kael

In her famous review of Last Tango in Paris, Pauline Kael said that watching the movie was like seeing pieces of your life, so you could never resolve your feelings about it. I will never be able to resolve my feelings about Rob Garver’s documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael.

For me, watching it means once again being in the presence of a close friend I miss keenly, and seeing her celebrated and discussed by colleagues and friends, one of them my closest friend. It means hearing old arguments rear their heads once more, old slanders repeated, reliving old battles. It may be a confirmation that she is the greatest writer to ever practice film criticism, and one of the four or five essential American critical voices of the 20th century, that the perception and estimation of Pauline Kael remains unresolved nearly 20 years after her death. But for those of us who knew her and loved her, it doesn’t make things any easier.

One battle still being fought is against the conspiratorial fantasy that Pauline mind-controlled a cadre of men, dubbed the Paulettes. They would slavishly follow her and, through their work, disseminate her opinion. Dissenters were banished from her orbit. That fantasy is a lingering insult to Pauline’s generosity to young critics, and it hardly meshes with my own experience: During our 15-year friendship, Pauline and I disagreed frequently, and I suffered no banishment. I remain convinced that much of the disparagement directed at Pauline comes from the fact that people can’t tolerate a strong, unbowed female voice. (Just as I have to come to believe that her being a Jew is at the heart of claims that she orchestrated a cabal of influence.)

If her public persona has been defined by fantasies, Pauline’s writing was defined by her ability to ferret out and punctuate the fantasies that, for good or bad, animated certain artists. She saw the male fantasies that lay at the heart of some of that work, and understood that for certain filmmakers they were starting points, not dead ends: Bertrand Blier satirized those fantasies; Brian De Palma, in Blow Out and Casualties of War, elevated them to the height of tragedy. Her friend Sam Peckinpah thrashed about in those fantasies, sometimes gloriously, sometimes like a man who couldn’t free himself of the knots he himself had tied.

The most amusing thing about What She Said is the way Pauline remains able to reveal other people’s bullshit from beyond the grave. We hear an inadvertently hilarious 2017 interview with Ridley Scott complaining that the really unfair thing about her pan of Blade Runner was that he didn’t get to answer it. Here’s a director who got a major studio to give him $28 million to realize his vision, complaining he hasn’t had his say. Keep in mind Scott has spent much of the four decades since the film's release putting out endless director’s cuts. If you don’t like the latest “definitive” version, wait two years. There’ll be another.