What She Said

Kael was sensitive to the cultural atomization of the sixties, and saw the movies as a second chance for American art.Illustration by Robert Risko

In the fall of 1965, a season that brought movies as distinct as “Alphaville” and “Thunderball” to the screen, Pauline Kael came to dinner at Sidney Lumet’s apartment, in New York. Lumet was then a prolific young director, having just finished shooting his tenth feature, “The Group,” for United Artists. Kael was a small-time movie critic who had recently arrived from Northern California. Her hardcover début, “I Lost It at the Movies,” had appeared that spring, to critical and popular acclaim, but she had never been on staff at any publication, and had only recently begun to write for major magazines. Lumet liked Kael’s work. Over the previous few weeks, he had allowed her on his set as a reporter, hoping she would learn something about shooting technique. Also present that night was the caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, and after a few drinks—actually, after quite a lot of drinks—Hirschfeld and Kael started quibbling about the uses of movie criticism. Finally, Hirschfeld asked her point-blank what she thought critics were good for. Kael gestured toward Lumet. “My job,” she said, “is to show him which way to go.” The evening ended soon afterward. Lumet later explained, “I thought, This is a very dangerous person.”

Within a few years, most of Hollywood agreed. From the moment Kael began as a film critic at The New Yorker, at the start of 1968, she presided over the movies in the manner of Béla Károlyi watching a gymnast on the balance beam—shouting directives, excoriating every flub, and cheering uncontrollably when a filmmaker stuck his landing. She spent much of her career chastening Hollywood’s excesses while brushing off complaints about immoderation on her own part. She did not regard this as a hypocritical endeavor. Kael wrote quickly and at length, regularly pulling all-nighters into her Tuesday deadlines with the help of cigarettes and bourbon (till she gave up both). Her kinetic passion, her chatty-seatmate prose, and her detail-heckling made her a pop-culture oracle in an era that desperately needed one.

These qualities also formed the basis of her style. Kael had found her critic’s voice writing radio broadcasts, and her concern for the way a piece of work “played” in real time and on first encounter shaped her reviews and her concept of the moviemaking craft. Writing on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” in 1969, she explained:

It’s a facetious Western, and everybody in it talks comical. The director, George Roy Hill, doesn’t have the style for it. (He doesn’t really seem to have the style for anything, yet there is a basic decency and intelligence in his work.) The tone becomes embarrassing. . . . George Roy Hill is a “sincere” director, but [William] Goldman’s script is jocose; though it reads as if it might play, it doesn’t, and probably this isn’t just Hill’s fault. What can one do with dialogue like Paul Newman’s Butch saying, “Boy, I got vision. The rest of the world wears bifocals”? It must be meant to be sportive, because it isn’t witty and it isn’t dramatic. The dialogue is all banter, all throwaways, and that’s how it’s delivered; each line comes out of nowhere, coyly, in a murmur, in the dead sound of the studio.

The ping-pong quality of these short setups and zinging indictments is typical of Kael’s prose—as are the quick ricochets between fact and judgment, which occasionally got her into trouble. In this case, George Roy Hill, who had been at pains to shoot the movie outdoors, read her last line and wrote her a letter. “Listen, you miserable bitch,” he began, “you’ve got every right in the world to air your likes and dislikes, but you got no goddam right at all to fake, at my expense, a phony technical knowledge you simply don’t have.” To say that Kael enjoyed the note more than she’d liked the movie conveys the state of her critical armor at that time.

Courage is not a virtue frequently associated with the criticism beat, but it lies near the heart of Kael’s achievement—not because she was unsqueamish about praising and slamming movies (though she was) but because, from the time she wrote her first review until the moment she retired, in 1991, her authority as a critic relied solely on her own, occasionally whimsical taste. This was not the norm in the milieu where she started writing. Kael cut her teeth reviewing for small, specialized or highbrow journals at a moment when criticism aimed at being systematic, intellectually lucid, and tightly defended. “Intuition” was a gooseflesh-raising word in this context—it still is in many circles—but it was one that Kael flaunted in the face of formalism. At inspired moments, she performed her criticism like a driver cruising down a familiar mountain road: braking rarely, speeding around the tricky turns, and swerving, with the faith of instinct, through a maze of potholes. It’s an approach that accounts for a lot of paradoxes and self-contradictions in her taste. It also made for a thrilling, inimitable ride.

A new selection of Kael’s writing, edited by her friend Sanford Schwartz, culls from her ten main collections and provides a useful overview of that route, beginning in the fifties and reaching to her retirement. (Kael died in 2001.) The book is called “The Age of Movies” (Library of America; $40), and although that title is supposed to represent her whole career, it might refer, more aptly, to the fifteen-year stretch between 1964 and 1979, when Kael wrote almost all the reviews on which her reputation rests.

A couple of theories have arisen to explain Kael’s critical ascendancy during this period. One holds that movies in those years were just exceptionally good. It was the time of “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), “The Godfather” (1972), “Nashville” (1975), and “Taxi Driver” (1976), and Kael praised those pictures’ innovations at length. Another theory suggests that Kael changed the rules of criticism, setting up a new way of evaluating popular art, without concern for prestige or self-conscious sophistication: in her view, a freshly entertaining or arresting movie was successful, and a movie that seemed tired or required unpacking was a flop.

Both theories are true. Still, neither is entirely satisfactory. The art and the criticism of the sixties were blurring the boundaries of high and low culture—and finding a language to talk about that change—long before Kael’s influence was felt. Beat-inflected critics like Seymour Krim helped bridge the gap between the literary tradition and the vernacular mainstream; cultural theorists such as Susan Sontag argued, in the early sixties, for appraising art outside the straits of hermeneutic habit. And, though these decades did produce extraordinary new movies, so did almost every other era; many of the seventies’ classics—“The French Connection,” “Chinatown,” “Manhattan,” almost everything by Kubrick and Cassavetes—Kael actively opposed. She was constantly goading the industry to try harder, but dismissed pictures that seemed to try hard.

Brian Kellow’s illuminating new biography, “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark” (Viking; $27.95), dutifully attends to both theories. The book traces a plot in which Kael rises up against an élite critical establishment; champions mainstream pleasures in the movie house; makes a name as a critical iconoclast; and, at The New Yorker, ushers in a great age of American filmmaking. A more surprising story, though, is hidden in the shadows of his narrative. The Kael who comes into focus in the long shot is a different sort of critic, haunted by the old classics and obsessed with the place of movies in the canon of lasting art. Her key insight, it becomes clear, was seeing American creativity in the context of a culture whose premises were being overturned.

For years after she became famous, Kael suggested that moviegoing had been her first, eclipsing passion. (It’s the point made by her books’ porny titles: “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “Going Steady,” “Reeling,” “When the Lights Go Down,” “Hooked,” and, not least, “Deeper Into Movies.”) In truth, most of her early pursuits reached for higher cultural ground. Kael was born in June, 1919, in Petaluma, California, a small agricultural community north of San Francisco that referred to itself proudly as “the egg basket of the world.” Her parents, immigrants from Poland, had come West to join a group of Jewish chicken farmers in the area; when Kael was nine, they lost their ranch and their savings in the stock market and moved into San Francisco, where they ran a grocery store. Kael studied philosophy at Berkeley—she worried that a degree in English would commit her, as a woman, to a future as a schoolteacher—and spent much of her free time hanging out with avant-garde poets. In the end, these arty gambols won out, and she flunked all but one of her courses in the fall of her senior year. She left in the spring with no degree. What she wanted, she decided, was to write.

It is hard to know whether this ambition was in earnest at the time or simply the fallback position of a hyper-urbane young person with a mild case of disaffection. As a writer, Kael had such lodestars as Partisan Review, which she read avidly, and Dwight Macdonald, then its editor, with whom she tried to correspond. (In 1943, when she learned of his plans to launch Politics, she wrote to him, “I am looking forward to a magazine which will stand for the principles and position you represented on Partisan Review.”) As a reader, Kael had tastes that ran to Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Céline, Nabokov, Proust, and late Henry James, and she entertained a glamorous perception of what would now be called the public intellectual. In 1941, Kael and her sometime lover Robert Horan hoped to interest magazines in “a rather complex essay” (her phrase) on the literary critics R. P. Blackmur, Kenneth Burke, and Lionel Trilling. No one bit. That fall, they concluded that San Francisco was too small for them, and hitchhiked to New York.

Kael was dissatisfied with her reception in the big city. “Her letters from this period consistently indicate her low opinion of most of the people she encountered in New York artistic circles,” Kellow notes. Having low opinions of people in New York artistic circles happens to be a long-standing tradition of New York artistic circles; still, she grew frustrated by the lack of headway she was making in her chosen career. In 1946, when life out East proved too tenuous, Kael, still having published nothing, moved back to the Bay Area to live with her mother.

Decades later, Kael glossed over these early efforts at writing as youthful caprice, the intellectual equivalent of a tacky butterfly tattoo from some wild long-ago summer. But the ink never completely faded. The aspirations that had launched her from San Francisco and back again marked the way she thought about art and its cultural role. And when she started to write seriously about movies, much later, it was her passion for the high-art canon that helped set her bearings.

Kael published her first movie review in 1953, when she was thirty-three. The editor of a small film magazine, City Lights, had been eavesdropping on a conversation about movies she was having in a Berkeley coffee shop. He offered her a chance to review Charlie Chaplin’s new vehicle, “Limelight.” Kael had by then worked a string of increasingly odd jobs—at one point, she ran a laundry—while trying to raise the daughter she had conceived with an experimental filmmaker who dumped her immediately afterward. By the time the first assignment came, she was keen for any break at all. She happened to hate Chaplin, too, and the piece she wrote tore into the comedian for taking up the mantle of a comic “artist” rather than claiming his roots as a slapstick clown. It was a complaint Kael went on to make in many different hues, about a range of upward-reaching entertainers, and that stance helped to define her as an advocate of mainstream pleasures over the pipe-chewing pretense of “cinema.” What people rarely point out is the view from the other side of the fence. A standard that attacks Chaplin for his pretensions doesn’t just champion the mainstream. It also guards a certain idea of “art” from popular encroachment.

The Chaplin piece turned out to be more than a welcome byline. Kael fell in love with writing about movies, because, unlike every other creative form at the time, they had no “tradition” from the audience’s point of view. No movie canon was included in high-school reading lists; there was no time-tested consensus about which efforts were works of art and which were not. This under-construction aspect of the form excited her. In a 1965 lecture, she explained, “We were—and I am, of course, only guessing about you—driven to the movies as a compensatory necessity—a flight, and I don’t mean a mere escape, to a world more exciting than the deadening world of trying-to-be-helpful teachers and chewed-over texts. We were driven to it by our own energies, which were not sufficiently engaged, not imaginatively used in the rest of our lives.” It’s a concept of movies as all good things at once—beguiling, unself-conscious entertainment and the recourse of brilliant kids far too smart for school. And it let Kael think about moviemaking as a craft that could perform seemingly irreconcilable tasks: plying the artistic vanguard while providing unforced popular entertainment.

This was the idea behind “I Lost It at the Movies,” which Kael finished during an extended stay in New York, on a Guggenheim grant. The book had two goals. On the one hand, she was trying to sketch out a canon for a young art form. On the other, she was rejecting any theory or system that was predisposed to build a canon.

She did it in a more sophisticated way than she is often given credit for. Kael didn’t just say, This is a bad movie because it fails to turn me on. Instead, she strung movies loosely together, as if mapping out the lines of tradition, and weather-tested them against a couple of things: authenticity of experience and the proved canon of noncinematic art. “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “The Misfits,” and “La Vérité” failed the first test by moralizing and pathologizing what happened onscreen; certain clued-in viewers were supposed to feel virtuous for watching those films, she thought, which was a contrived and contingent experience. “La Notte,” “Last Year at Marienbad,” and “La Dolce Vita” failed the second test, because their anomie lacked the unmistakable logic of, say, Chekhov’s. (“At a performance of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters,’ only a boob asks, ‘Well, why don’t they go to Moscow?’ We can see why they don’t.”) Kael was often accused of watching for plot and character more than for technical craft, and it is not hard to see why. Plot and character communicate effortlessly across time. The finer points of cinematic grammar require cultural education to be appreciated. She cared about audiences’ raw responses—amazement, laughter, recognition—because those responses indicated whether a movie could speak for itself in the long run. She was dowsing for film classics with her nervous system as a guide.

“Instead of poison, I introduce liberal, intellectual ants into the population, eroding the ants’ patriotism and causing them to question the authoritarian rule of the queen. Slowly, over generations, it weakens the ants’ genetic resolve to the point where they stay in the nest at all times, watching television and writing letters to the editor.”

Depending on your point of view, the late sixties was either an exalted or a terrifying time to turn an eye to the horizon of popular art. What had started as a few puffs of smoke on a distant hill—“Naked Lunch,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Oxford Town”—intensified into a ground-shaking eruption of smoldering matter, some of it in violent hues, which scorched the landscape and altered the nation’s cultural topography. Today, “the counterculture” is a catchall term used to denote such mixed delights as George Carlin, paisley caftans, and Gruppensex. But the word was conceived to stand for something more focussed in time: a challenge to “bourgeois culture,” or the life style and the aesthetic values of the postwar era. Hollywood helped to narrate these changes, dispatching outré bulletins like “Easy Rider” and “Zabriskie Point,” and movies—at least, in the eyes of a certain kind of critic—underwent the most exciting period of upheaval in years.

Pauline Kael was that kind of critic, and, in her first years on the job at The New Yorker, she reviewed many of these movies with gusto. She’d scarcely started, though, when something cooled and hardened in American life. The engines of sixties upheaval were losing their youthful drive (between 1971 and 1973, the proportion of college-age students who considered America a “sick society” eased from forty per cent to thirty-five per cent), and no charismatic force replaced them. Stagflation and the oil crisis loomed. Nixon became—well, Nixon. Hunter S. Thompson, the era’s burnt-out balladeer, famously described the early seventies in terms of an ebbing tide: “that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

As anybody who has received “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” as a gift will have figured out, this waning presented certain bizarre symptoms in the cultural imagination. The creative problem of the seventies was not the creative problem of the previous few decades—how to make new art within, or against, cultural constraints. It was, rather, how to make art with no constraints—how to innovate at a moment when nearly every inhibition had exploded, when the old, “bourgeois” order of values had been rejected but the new order had lost its bloom and promise as well.

Kael’s construction-site ideas about movie criticism—her belief that the canon was still being formed, tested for durability, and weighed against the old arts—made her the perfect ambassador for this moment in our national life. She had celebrated the counterculture’s accessible, charismatic products (“Easy Rider”) but was not, in general, a fan of hippie cinema. And she had seen, quite early, the dark side of the sixties’ legacy in art. In a 1964 essay (published in The Atlantic and later adapted into the introduction to “I Lost It”), Kael fretted about “structural disintegration” in movies, a loss of the “narrative sense” that used to make even the bad ones palatable. She saw it as a symptom of an atomizing culture. Now Kael went about the business of building a structure in the rubble.

She did this in two ways. One was negative: tossing away everything that seemed perishable. This made her Debbie Downer to a lot of the period’s upstarts. The seventies brought to the screen an era of nostalgia, as if wistfully denying the counterculture. Neo-noir, with period pieces like “Chinatown” (1974) and “Farewell, My Lovely” (1975), lay at one end of the spectrum, and it shaded into comedy with Steve Martin’s vaudevillian romps and Woody Allen’s Jazz Age pageantry. (By no coincidence was Diane Keaton’s singing “Seems Like Old Times,” in “Annie Hall,” a touchstone of seventies romantic vérité.) The era also turned out its fair share of counterculture-colored girandoles—“Jesus Christ Superstar” (1973), “A Star Is Born” (1976), and “Hair” (1979)—as if to keep the sixties flames burning. Kael generally disdained both sorts of movies. She called “Jesus Christ Superstar” a “masochistic revel for eight-year-olds,” and, although she adored thirties comedies, “Chinatown” represented to her “something dialectically new: nostalgia (for the thirties) openly turned to rot.” She worried—and this is essentially an avant-garde worry—that audiences suckling a teat of cynicism and easy entertainment would lose their appetite for creative urgency, even as she was inflamed by bogus claims to vanguard innovation. (Kael once described a John Cassavetes film as having “the kind of seriousness that a serious artist couldn’t take seriously.”)

The second way that Kael approached seventies movies was positive: praising those she thought were daring, fresh, and well made—not just in the context of the season’s releases but by the measure of all art, ever. After Kael saw “Last Tango in Paris,” Kellow tells us, she spoke not a word, rushed back to her Central Park West apartment, and wrote:

Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” was presented for the first time on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, October 14, 1972; that date should become a landmark in movie history comparable to May 29, 1913—the night “Le Sacre du Printemps” was first performed—in music history. . . . The movie breakthrough has finally come.

Kael considered the “Last Tango” review one of her most important, and it anticipated her enthusiasm for other fare. “Nashville” was deft like “Ulysses.” “Mean Streets” had the air of “Buñuel steeped in Verdi” (whatever that means). Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

In the years following Kael’s rise to influence, her career swiftly acquired the social rhythms of a fall term in the seventh grade: best friends announced themselves; enemies followed; friends soured into enemies; enemies warmed into friends; and several people, friends and enemies alike, tired of the raillery and went off to play on their own. The underside of Kael’s contrarianism was a constant hunger for material to rage against, and many conflicts were (as seventh graders say) her own fault. She had no compunction—admirably—about dumping on directors, such as Woody Allen and Sam Peckinpah, with whom she had broken bread. But she also—much less admirably—had few qualms about blackballing young writers on her turf, and otherwise using her influence for ill. In 1970, Kellow tells us, Kael conned a U.C.L.A. assistant professor, Howard Suber, out of publishing an essay on “Citizen Kane”: she promised a collaboration, vanished with Suber’s proprietary research, and ultimately used it for an extended piece of her own, “Raising Kane” (1971). It’s seen today as one of the defining works of her career.

Some of Kael’s imbroglios help illuminate the boundaries of her taste. Her spat with Joan Didion is one example. Kael and Didion had parallel flight paths: both were Northern California kids who had close-read Henry James at Berkeley, gone East to get their bearings, and returned to California to forge their styles. Both were exceptionally sensitive to the cultural atomization of the sixties and its fractured narratives. But where Kael’s ambition was to piece together a new culture through a shared experience of the movies, Didion’s genius was in finding language to emboss this fractured landscape on the page. Kael hated what she viewed as Didion’s fashionable despair. She used the adaptation of “Play It as It Lays” (1972) as an occasion to sneer, in print, at the novel’s style. (“I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles.”) The following year, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, published an essay pointing out that Kael’s ignorance of the moviemaking process meant she sometimes praised or chastised directors for choices they didn’t make. It may have cleared the air in Malibu. A few years later, Dunne sent Kael a friendly invitation to meet. “I’m only a part-time shit,” he explained.

Other people were full-time fans. A seraglio of critics played audience to Kael’s New York life across the years, sitting by her in the back row of the theatre and vying for her attention afterward. The list of writers who passed under her wing at various points is illustrious—David Denby, David Edelstein, Joe Morgenstern, Terrence Rafferty, Michael Sragow, and Stephanie Zacharek, to name just a few—and her impress on this younger generation is one reason that Kael’s mood and method reach beyond her era.

James Wolcott’s new memoir, “Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York” (Doubleday; $25.95), gives a colorful account of one critic’s experience circling Kael’s flames. Wolcott, who is now a columnist for Vanity Fair, was part of Kael’s innermost circle for nearly a quarter century, and his book is an attempt to feed her legend. This may strike some readers as ironic. Wolcott is best known among Kael fans for a scathing 1997 assault on her legend, mocking her disciples, or “Paulettes,” for dogmatism. If “Lucking Out” is an attempt to renew his fan’s credentials (at one point, he cheers on Kael for “pinning the bony tail of Didion’s pretensions”), his motives for the change of heart are never clear.

Wolcott’s portrait of Kael differs strikingly from Kellow’s self-made, Joan Crawford-type heroine. Here she’s Bette Davis—rolling her eyes at “leechy, well-intentioned liberals,” making hash of her disciples’ girlfriends, and rattling off snide aperçus. (On Gore Vidal: “Whatever he said, he’ll be sure to repeat it on some other show.” On setting up Wolcott with a lesbian woman: “Aren’t you up for a challenge?”) At various points, Wolcott proudly plays Kael’s talk-show wingman, consultant on youth culture, dinner-party date, and wide-eyed Glaucon. He listens closely, Laura Hunt style, as she reads him drafts over the phone. He refers to her in passing as “the greatest film critic then or now.” It can sometimes be hard to get a clear image of Kael with Wolcott’s breath steaming the lens.

In fact, the keenest material in Wolcott’s book has little to do with Kael, or with the movies she reviewed. It has to do with the creative landscape of the seventies. Wolcott came to New York, in the fall of 1972, because Norman Mailer liked an article he had published in his college paper—the article, not coincidentally, was about Norman Mailer—and had written a letter of introduction to Daniel Wolf, who then edited the Village Voice. Wolcott eventually finagled his way into a job answering phones in the paper’s circulation department, from which he edged into print. Wolcott has an avid eye for detail, and students of the New York worm jar will enjoy his anecdotes of being line-edited by the music maven Robert Christgau (“wearing nothing but red sheer bikini underwear”), crossing paths with the Voices long-form star Ron Rosenbaum (“whose orange-red beard burned with biblical fervor and Blakean prophecy”), and seeing the young Patti Smith at CBGB for the first time (“Even when chewing gum, she seemed to be chewing it for the ages”). His title, “Lucking Out,” refers not so much to these encounters, though, as to the experience of living in Manhattan at that time. As he puts it:

How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell. . . . It’s only later, when the haze burns off, that you can look back and see what you were handed, the opportunities hidden like Easter eggs that are no longer there for anybody, completely trampled. To start out as a writer then was to set out under a higher, wider, filthier, more window-lit sky.

Where Kael made demands of the future, though, Wolcott has essentially produced a book-length complaint that the world is not the way it used to be. He wants readers to share his yearning for a time that started well before “the gold medallions and furry testicles of disco descended” (one of several baffling bons mots Wolcott dangles before his readers). This nostalgia-mongering is the opposite of what Kael stood for as a critic. “They want something that can’t come back,” she complained of people who, in the mid-seventies, clung to John Wayne’s leathery image. She thought the great romantic hero of that time was David Bowie.

Wolcott is the Wayne fan thirty years advanced. His specialty, for decades now, has been the takedown—the prancing boxer’s dance that beats the opponent playfully about the ears, then fells him for the count—and his assaults are usually a delight to read (even when you don’t agree), because he makes the stakes seem sportingly low. Ultimately, he seems to take up the pen for reasons overshadowed by his first hero, Mailer: the joy of the ring, the thrill of the fight. Kael wrote as if the future of creative life lay on her shoulders.

In 1979, Kael left The New Yorker to work as a producer and developer in Hollywood. She hated the unctuous bureaucracy of the studios, and many people in the industry were no happier to have her in their hallways than they’d been to see her criticisms in print. When she tried to return, less than a year later, William Shawn balked. One of her former editors prevailed on him, but the homecoming was awkward. And, although she continued to review prolifically, her prose, which could run ragged under the strain of her deadlines, came increasingly under fire. In the summer of 1980, Kael’s colleague Renata Adler published in The New York Review of Books a long attack on Kael’s approach and style—she called her writing “worthless”—emboldening many of her critics. Movies were changing, too, as Hollywood started to re-shellac itself; the eighties saw a resurgence of slick thrillers, family entertainment, and rom-coms. (Pictures that might once have supported the innovative mainstream became the new floorboards of “independent cinema.”) By the time Kael came out with her ninth collection, in 1985, filmmakers seemed in no mood to rebuild anything according to her specifications.

This resetting of the eighties’ mainstream rarely gets the same attention as the sixties’ fracture. But it was, in certain ways, an equal trauma. A lot of people now—even people much younger than James Wolcott—dream of a lost moment when the opportunities were truly “hidden like Easter eggs,” when the paths were not yet mapped and overrun. How can we be expected to create properly, the thinking goes, without the tools of past success? How can we write without the old serious publications, make movies without risk-taking Hollywood producers, live without cheap urban housing, discover art without the underground, make a career without the circulation-desk jobs?

Kael’s great achievement was to fight this way of thinking, to persuade her readers that work is always done with the machinery at hand. It was, for her, a liberating insight. The last movie that Kael reviewed for The New Yorker, in 1991, was “L.A. Story,” a small Möbius strip of entertainment-biz insiderism nothing like the New Hollywood chefs d’oeuvre that had once thrilled her. Yet she loved it. In the last line of the piece, praising Sarah Jessica Parker as the ultimate Tinseltown child, it’s possible to see Kael wink twice. The first wink turns this closing statement into an epigraph for her career. The second alludes to the modern classics that she never lost touch with. The line that ended that review was “She keeps saying yes.” ♦