No Criticism for Old Ethos

What is the difference between a critic and polemicist? That is, where does one draw the line between criticism and opinion? This is precisely the question Renata Adler raises with respect to the venerable Pauline Kael whose tenure at The New Yorker elevated her to the pantheon of film criticism. Who could be a better case to test this delicate and fragile distinction? And what time more appropriate to raise the question, considering that so much of contemporary criticism has devolved into mere punditry?
There is no doubt that Pauline Kael revolutionized the practice of the critic. If it wasn’t for her poignant and clear writing, then it was most certainly for her unapologetic opinions with respect to those edifying topics in cinema that result in the residual dogmatism of social morality. No topic – not the even Holocaust! – was important enough to escape the critical scrutiny of Kael. Rather, Kael wanted to talk about sex, abjection and the violence that shoots through the sinews of American culture; the sustenance of culture that takes on its phantasmal form in cinema.
One of the most compelling examples of Kael’s refusal to submit to the pressures of piety is with respect to the work of Steven Spielberg. In Afterglow, Kael laments the work of the young Spielberg disgusted with his turn the heavy-handed moralism of Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan (we need only cite Munich and Flags of Our Fathers to complete this list). This criticism is far from unsubstantiated. Kael makes the keen observation that this high-handed morality affects the quality of the film in everything down to the actors. Kael points out that the very presence of Liam Nielsen anticipates the resolution, thus negating the moral ambiguity required for Schindler. Furthermore, Kael is quite right to object to directors like Spielberg who feel entitled to awards by virtue of topic alone.
Renata Adler, however, raises the important question as to whether Kael is simply a critic or polemic. To add weight to her claim, Adler suggests Kael’s tenure is to be taken as an exemplar of the negative effects of institutional support’. Adler identifies a ‘’turn’ in the career of Kael, noting that when she secured the position of ‘staff critic’ her writing degenerated: “A voice that may have seemed, sometimes, true and iconoclastic when it was outside can become, with institutional support, vain, overbearing, foolish, hysterical.” From here, Adler unleashes an entire arsenal of critical vocabulary to identify this phenomenon (e.g., In her later works, Kael exhibits a knowingness that sets her apart from the audience). In addition to this, Adler dissects the writing of Kael for the purpose of exposing the minutia that constitutes Kael’s otherwise robust rhetoric. Finally, the most devastating critique of Kael comes with Adler’s assertion that Kael relies on her own set of uncritical dogmatism, namely ‘abjection.’
Adler’s points are well taken and her close-reading of Kael is telling. In many senses, Adler’s piece suggests that the flaws of Kael are endemic of an entirely different phenomenon (e.g., the above mentioned punditry). Likewise, Adler’s assertion that ‘institutional support’ has deleterious effects on critics is well received. There is something that Adler elides in the course of the piece, however, that was intimated in the above passages on Kael. That is, the ability of the critic to make fluid those ossified opinions (e.g. heavy-handed morality), which themselves have institutional support. Thus, there is something anemic about the ideal that Adler espouses and that which Kael seems to have devoted her career to undermining.