Entertainment!

Rick Santorum's defense of Rush Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke hinged on what Santorum described as the right of "an entertainer" to be "absurd." The first thing to say about this is that, as defenses of Limbaugh go, that's fairly sane. The second thing is that it's fun to think about the sounds that would have come out of Santorum's mouth if someone said something similar in defense of Ice-T at the time of the "Cop Killer" controversy, or used the same formulation to criticize the way Lenny Bruce was driven out of the business by cops and judges who considered bits such as "Christ and Moses" blasphemous. If someone were to call Santorum on this, he might have a hard time giving a coherent explanation for why Limbaugh should be judged by a different standard than the kinds of performers he thinks have turned the country into a cesspool. He can't very well just come out and say that, while he doesn't find it entertaining to hear a middle-aged man talk about how a young woman owes it to him to provide him and other middle-aged men with homemade sex videos, he would never criticize Limbaugh for anything the man says, because Limbaugh, as a Republican kingmaker who hates the same people Santorum hates, is allowed to say anything. The only thing we know is that he would be unlikely to say that Limbaugh is allowed more license than entertainers like Ice-T and Lenny Bruce because he's so much more gosh-darned entertaining.

Limbaugh has been pulling the Get Out of Jail Free card that is his sometime designation as an "entertainer" for a long time now. I remember it starting more than twenty years ago, and back then, it seemed to be part of an epidemic. In fact, it was an epidemic that was largely spread by people on the left. Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, and Michael Moore were all like Limbaugh in that they would turn out work that made egregiously stupid and offensive statements and told outright lies, work that was designed to have a political impact (or at least get them on Nightline), and then, when their facts were questioned, they retreated and hid behind the words, "Hey, I'm just an entertainer." One minute, a movie like JFK was presented as an historical document meant to blow the lid off an actual cover-up conspiracy; a few pinpricks applied to its bullshit later, and you'd hear the director bleating that he wasn't an historian, for Christ's sake, he was just a little guy trying to give the paying customers a good show for their time and money.

Even Moore, who presented himself from the get-go as a crusading journalist, was quick to respond to the fact-checkers who went after Roger & Me by whining, in effect, hey, why do you want me to bore the people who love my film with a bunch of boring, accurate information that never breaks out of the film-festival/public broadcasting circuit reserved for honest documentaries? (Like Santorum, Moore regards knowing what you're talking about as a form of snobbery.) More sophisticated political comedians like Stephen Colbert, who turns things inside out by insisting that he be taken as seriously as any respected activist while parodying positions he disagrees with in order to bring real attention to the causes he cares about, make this kind of pose look threadbare. But it's still all Limbaugh's got to hang his credibility on. A few years ago, after his fellow blowhard Don Imus got in trouble for talking shit about black women basketball players, Imus tried to get out from under it by saying that his comments were merely "intended to be amusing." No doubt this is true. But, as I wrote at the time, the question that got mislaid in all the arguments about whether someone who was nice to kids with cancer and was a good friend to the likes of Chris Matthews could really be a bad person, the really relevant one, was, what the hell kind of degraded excuse for a human being thinks it's amusing to apply a term like "nappy-headed ho's" to some people whose only crime was being black, female, and having had their existence brought to his attention at the precise moment when he had five seconds of air time to fill?

Dave Weigel, who hates this kind of "manufactured outrage" story, tsks tsks that "Limbaugh is a private citizen who has not endorsed any Republican candidate. (The closest he's come is praise for Santorum, which the candidate quotes on his campaign lit.) There is not a pressing public interest here." This is like describing the theater critic for the New York Times as just some guy in a Broadway men's room trading opinions about what to see and what not to see with the guy standing at the next urinal. Rush Limbaugh sets the agenda for what tone is acceptable among Republicans politicians if anyone does. When the then Chairman of the Republican Party criticized Limbaugh, Chairman who was made to back down! A lot of people who style themselves as serious conservatives, Weigel included, think that the Republican Party has both lost its mind and shot itself in the knees by establishing an extremist litmus test for candidates who don't want to be pegged as RINOs. Limbaugh is as personally responsible for this as anyone alive.

The general consensus among media professionals is that the response to Limbaugh's remarks is so bewildering that it must be the result of a vast conspiracy, orchestrated by Democratic players and organized on the Internets, to claim his scalp. I'm sure there are lot of people enjoying this, and I don't know how many Republicans would sincerely like to see Limbaugh disappear from the face of the Earth. But I'll bet that the number of professional Democrats who feel the same way is approximately zero. The scandal isn't about something said by a "private citizen", it's about seeing, once again, how far a self-inflating balloon who identifies himself as the voice of the Republican party can go in saying something even more horrible than all the horrible things he's said before, without the leaders of that party denouncing him. It's partly relevant because everyone knows that at some point in the future, he'll go even farther, and the same people will once again fold his latest act of repulsiveness into the big tent of what they consider it acceptable to say.

Even some of the conservatives who've expressed squeamishness about the man's "choice of words" have lamented the flood of advertisers bailing out on Limbaugh's show. The implication seems to be that these advertisers, by exercising their right as members of the free market, to decide that they don't think they want to be associated with Limbaugh any more, are caving in to bullying protesters. As Weigel points out, Limbaugh has a long record of saying things that, to use a Santorum-ism, would make any decent-minded person want to vomit. I guess the idea is that it's like pleading the Fifth, and if you don't pull out the first hundred times he says something grotesque, you can't pull out, ever. I suppose this is going to sound incredibly naive, but is it worth considering that maybe some of these companies, some of which may be headed by people who have daughters, daughters they know have had sex, are pulling out now because they're genuinely appalled by what Limbaugh said? That even people who hung in there after the mockery of Michael J. Fox's medical condition and "Barack the Magic Negro" and a million other things that I missed because I don't listen to the show because I work during the day might finally hear something that makes them say, Okay, that tears it. I'm out of here. Why is it so hard to believe that a corporation might genuinely not want to be associated with this jackass? Hasn't Weigel heard that corporations are people, too?

Back in the days when the mainstream media was driven to think of nice things they could say about Limbaugh to account for his enjoying a degree of popular success that they clearly found baffling, they always congratulated him on his wonderful sense of humor. The death of Andrew Breitbart was also greeted with tributes to his sense of humor, even in obituaries written by people who made no bones about being glad that he's dead. Both Limbaugh and Breitbart expressed their anger about the passing of a lily-white, manly-man, lily-white America with humor that reeked of Hustler magazine--the infamous Hustler ad parody that depicted Jerry Falwell as reminiscing about the time he lost his virginity to his mother in the family outhouse was just the kind of thing either of them would have found hilarious, if it had been directed at someone they considered a deserving target--and this seems to have disarmed, confused, and ultimately impressed a lot of people who otherwise would have had sense enough to detect that these "jokes" aren't funny.

I was shooting the shit with an Internet bro of mine, Daniel Coyle, about Breitbart, and he offered the observation that being right seemed to be the most important thing to the man. This caused me to reflect that I think that Breitbart wouldn't have minded being proven not-quite-right about everything in the world, so long as the dirty liberals were proven wrong, wrong, motherfucking wrong! By all accounts, one thing that Breitbart wasn't was clinically insane, so he must have been able to recognize that, on the facts, he was literally wrong to try to destroy Shirley Sherrod by disseminating videos of her talking about how she'd overcome her instinctive lack of sympathy for poor white Southerners she'd given assistance to, after the videos had been edited to make it appear that Sherrod was actually boasting of having used her position to screw those people over. But after the fraud was exposed, he never gave an inch in insisting that he'd been right, and what I think he must have meant was that, because Sherrod was a black woman who worked in government, of course she was a racist monster bent on destroying salt-of-the-earth white people, whether her actions matched up with that or not. Posting those videos was like framing someone of murder when you know they're guilty anyway but just can't assemble any evidence, because they're so clever.

Back around the time that a "media firestorm" meant Diane Sawyer interrogating the Dixie Chicks on TV, demanding to know where the hell they got off saying that they weren't grateful for President Bush, you read a lot about how all the "fun" in political journalism was being had at right-wing talk radio shows and magazines like The Weekly Standard, and the "humor" of people like Limbaugh and Breitbart was defining what passed for fun. A dat after Breitbart died, Weigel addressed the assassination-conspiracy theories growing out of his surprise passing by writing that it's stupid to think 'that a 43-year-old man with an insane stress level might not die of natural causes." I have to confess, I was very grateful for that "insane stress level", which may be the only suggestion I've seen that the Breitbarts of this world aren't just slipping along, whistling a merry tune, blithely throwing bombs and insults and racial slurs without a care in the world. It would be a relief to imagine that spreading all that shit is as emotionally taxing for them as it for those of us who have to smell it.

Drinking It All In

I really do intend to get the shop open again on semi-regular hours sometime soon, and I hate to pop in again just long enough to leave the impression that all I do now is write about Pauline Kael and those whose ships crossed hers in the night. But this--Sarah Weinman's Slate article about Penelope Gilliatt, which the site is touting with the let's-insult-tjhe-intelligence-of-any-six-year-olds-reading-this teaser headline "Did You Know Pauline Kael Had a Co-Critic? You'll Never Guess What Happened to Her."--is too good to leave alone. As I'm betting anyone who could conceivably give a rat's ass already knows quite well, Gilliatt, who also wrote fiction and the screenplay for John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday, covered movies for The New Yorker six months out of every year from 1968 to 1979, the same period of time that Kael was covering them during the other six. Gilliatt was also one of the wives of the playwright John Osborne, which means that she is fated to be best remembered as a supporting player in the biographies and memoirs of two writers who were justly more famous than herself. Her early talent, which was indeed considerable, came to a full stop in the mid-1970s, when she began dealing with this situation by self-medicating with a bottle, and there's a touching story in Brian Kellow's recent book about Kael describing how a bunch of film critics attending a press screening found themselves in an Exterminating Angel situation when Gilliatt showed up late and passed just before entering the room, so that her fallen body was blocking the door.

Shortly after Kael took her notoriously ill-fated sabbatical to the West Coast, Gilliatt was let go after it came out that she had plagiarized the shit out of another writer in an otherwise inaccuracy-laden profile of Graham Greene. (Greene himself had written in to William Shawn to complain about it, even before the writer whose work she'd pilfered spoke up.) Shawn, who clearly thought that the ordinary rules of basic morality didn't have to apply to his pets, actually tried to guilt-trip the victim into keeping quiet about it, but the story got out, and he was forced to get rid of her. Weinman writes that he "mishandled" the affair--true enough, but I get the feeling that she thinks that he left Gilliatt unprotected by accepting her copy and not assuming that he had a word thief on the payroll, and that she thinks he would have also mishandled things if he had done the only correct thing he could have done, i.e,. spit in her face, kick her down the stairs, and leave orders with the security guards that she was to be shot on sight if she was ever seen skulking around the building again. She does know that what Gilliatt did was not just indefensible but automatically revoked her right to ever appear in print again, right? I never thought I'd say this, but I almost have to wonder if there might have been a downside to Slate's having fired Jack Shafer.

Leaving aside her perhaps too tender feelings towards those who, by their transgresses, make it clear that they have nothing but loathing for their subjects and anyone stupid enough to pay them for their writing or to read it, Weinman thinks that Gilliatt's early, good work deserves to be remembered, which is certainly fair. She also thinks that Kael's work suffered when she returned to the magazine, full-time, without a counterexample, which, you know, to each his own. But she also claims that the drunken, thieving hulk that was all that was left of Gilliatt in her later years had some retrievable writing left in her. The proof? She wrote of Richard Pryor that “his sharpest comedy is based on his certainty that blacks are the only group that any observer could believe to exist." Ho-kay, fine. Now, here's what Pauline Kael wrote about Pryor years earlier: "Pryor's comedy isn't based on suspiciousness about whites, or on anger, either; he's gone way beyond that. Whites are unbelievable to him." I love that Weinman's argument for the valued of Gilliatt's post-plagiarism work is that she was able to take an observation by Pauline Kael and reword it so that it sounds like it came from Queen Victoria.

What I Also Did on My Christmas Break

I got married the day before Thanksgiving, and between that, this, and the other thing, I've been letting stuff pile up around here, even the little things like stray links. My apologies. Anyway, one thing I forgot to do is alert you to the appearance of Burning Ambulance #5, which features an awesome cover package on the awesome Burnt Sugar, Also included is my essay on Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop,, which was adapted from this. It is different from my other writing, in that I kind of like it. Please read it and like it and then submit it to Let's Get Critical, which is my current favorite time-wasting mechanism until the return of Portlandia. If you're pressed for time, you can just skip the part where you read it and like it.

Pretty Much the Tail End of 2011 at The A.V. Club

Hell on Wheels: "Pride, Pomp, and Curcumstance"

Leverage: "The Girls' Night Out Job"

Fear Factor

Raising Hope: "It's a Hopeful Life"

Fear and Desire

Cheers: "Coach Returns to Action"/ "Endless Slumper"

I Learned It at the Movies: How to Celebrate the Holidays [ The Thin Man; The Shop Around the Corner; On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Frozen River ]

Jimmy Kimmel Live

Hell on Wheels: "Revelations"

Leverage: "The Boys' Night Out Job"

Inventory: Every Time a Bell Rings... [ Raising Hope; Married... with Children; Saturday Night Live; The Simpsons; Dallas ]

Lidia Celebrates America

Best TV of 2011 [Enlightened]

Beyond the Top 30: Other 2011 TV Highlights

The TV Club Awards 2011 [ Connie Britton; Downton Abbey; Upstairs, Downstairs; The Playboy Club ]

Cheers: "One for the Book"/ "The Spy Who Came in for a Cold One"

Leverage: "The Lonely Hearts Job"

The 34th Annual Kennedy Center Honors


Best of the Best-Ofs

Leverage: "The Gold Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Derailed"

Too Soon

If you're the kind of person who'd ever felt, for so much as a second, that your lifetime would be the poorer for it without a big, morally clear-cut, global battle between good and evil to decide the fate of the planet, and you were able to convince yourself that invading Iraq as part of the reaction to 9/11 was that conflict, that I can totally see how you'd be the kind of person who thinks that Christopher Hitchens was a great writer and thinker and one of the moral compasses of his generation.

Of Fairly Recent Vintage at The A.V. Club

Leverage: "The Experimental Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Jemais Je Ne T'oublierai"

Pure Sabacc Wins Again [Rollerball and Quintet]

Raising Hope: "Bro-gurt"

Cheers: "Coach's Daughter"/"Any Friend of Diane's"

Starving Secrets with Tracey Gold

Northern Exposure: "Seoul Mates"

Leverage: "The Office Job"

Hell on Wheels: "Bread and Circuses"

Castle: "Cuffed"

Raising Hope: "The Men of New Natesville"

Cheers: "Friends, Romans, Accountants/ Truce or Consequences"

Two Saturday Night Live Christmases: 1975 and 1976

Hoovering It Up

If your idea of a good time is finding reasons to be interested in Clint Eastwood movies, J. Edgar is sort of interesting as the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Clint's efforts to come to terms with the fact of homosexuality. Back in the '70s, the early Dirty Harry movies had a homophobic subtext--Scorpio. the extortionist hippie serial killer of the first one, paid Harry a leering compliment on the size of his gun, and the secret police death squad in motorcycle gear of Magnum Force looked as if they'd stepped out of Scorpio Rising--that went surface text at the end of the third film in the series, The Enforcer, the one where Harry adds insult to injury by calling the chief bad guy a "fucking fruit" as he blows him away. That was back when Eastwood was regarded as an action caveman by most critics. Now that he's a serious auteur in the winter of his career, he has to be more thoughtful about these things, or at least more solemn. Previously, his biggest attempt to reach out came in 1997's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, arguably his worst movie as a director, or at least the most migraine-inducing. Eager to use the story of a man who murders his male lover as a chance to show that he and the gays could just get along, Eastwood cast the drag queen Lady Chablis, who had a minor real-life connection to the events depicted, as herself, then just kept handing her more and more "screen time", a term that, in this context, is synonymous with "rope."

J. Edgar is a long, uninspired slog of a movie built around the recurring image of J. Edgar Hoover (Leonardo DiCaprio) standing on the balcony of his office, acknowledging the inaugural procession of one new President after another, as the years slip by and he remains solidly in place as the head of the FBI. The movie is very impressed with its idea that Hoover was a man trapped inside his own paranoid head, running old newsreels between his ears, while history was moving on somewhere outside his diminishing reach. (He's right to keep his distance; whenever he gets to close to history itself, performances as bad as Jeffrey Donovan's Robert Kennedy, and a cussing Nixon who would embarrass the one in the movie version of Watchmen, keep invading his and the viewers' space. Donovan plays Kennedy the way anyone who's watched him struggle with accents on Burn Notice would expect him to, and the movie's Nixon looks like Norm Macdonald with his hair colored with a black magic marker.) The core emotional relationship in the movie is the one between Hoover and Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), the FBI agent who was Hoover's closest friend and associate throughout his whole working life and who is commonly assumed to have been, in some way or other, the love of his life.

In photos, Tolson looks like the presentably bland Joe Friday prototype of Hoover's dreams, and it's a good joke to imagine them spending their lives together looking like the straightest guys in the world, the perfect products of the closet. But while DiCaprio gives a perfectly creditable performance, Hammer has been encouraged to act like... well, not a screaming queen, exactly, but a beautiful, fluttery Tim Gunn type who teaches J. Edgar how to dress in all the best shops and complains that one female entertainer is "too camp for me." Speculation about Hoover's sexuality didn't really take off until after Hoover and Tolson were both dead. If this guy were at Hoover's side for five minutes, let alone his whole life, people never would have stopped speculating about them. (Hammer's performance gets worse at it goes along, because he has no idea how to act like an old person. The Crypt Keeper makeup job doesn't help.) Maybe this is Eastwood's only idea of how a gay man who's comfortable with who he is might act. If it is, then the movie is of a piece: a portrait of a man whose mind never left the Victorian era, from one who's more of his soul mate than he knows.

Creamed Kael

I was all revved up to check out Brian Kellow's Pauline Kael: A life in the Dark after reading Manhola Dargis and A. O. Scott "discuss" Kael's legacy in The New York Times. (I put the word "discuss" in quotes because it actually reads like Dargis standing on her desk yelling into a bullhorn while Scott wanders around the room trying to find his glasses, occasionally looking up from the sofa cushions to mutter, "Yeah, sure, whatever. The seventies, death of film!") Dargis, who says that Kael's work doesn't do anything for her anymore, joins a long line of people who have detected flaws in Kael's writing and immediately proceeded to the dual insight that her whole career was shit and she was also a very bad person. "Given how badly she comes across in the biography — palling around with filmmakers she reviewed is merely the beginning — she doesn’t set a good example," Dargis writes, before going on to say that whatever influence Kael's name still holds has little to do with her "ideas, pugilistic writing style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews." I got the impression that this was going to be one of those books, such as Ian Hamilton's Robert Lowell or Albert Goldman's Elvis, that reels all around the vomitorium, full of disgust for its own subject, who is revealed to have committed a bevy of gaudy sins against taste and decency. I like Kael, but I like gossip, too. I couldn't wait to get my hands on the thing.

With all due respect to one of the leading critics for the cultural section of our most important national newspaper after USA Today, Dargis needs to trade in her crack dealer. Where's the goods? Kael had a weird relationship with her daughter, who Kellow describes as practically being her mother's indentured servant. (Later, her grandson had her wrapped around his little finger. I confess to recognizing a not-altogether-unfamiliar pattern from families I have known firsthand.) Some of Kael's "cruelties" sound pretty funny from a distance, such as the scene where she greets the announcement that her daughter is getting married with a loud, "Oh, shit!" Others I don't really buy, such as the description of her torturing an ailing and over-the-hill Nicholas Ray by enumerating his films' failings over lunch, until the broken old maverick can barely stand to hold his head. (That story comes from a memoir-essay from reformed "Paulette" David Denby, which itself must be one of the strangest documents that has ever been used to space out the perfume ads in The New Yorker. It begins with Denby going on about how he was encouraged in his career as a movie critic by Kael, but that her malign influence was so great on the sensitive, impressionable writer he was then that he found himself crippled, writing in plain imitation of her voice. Then, he says, she sat him down over lunch--why did people keep accepting her invitations to restaurants?--and told him that she didn't think his movie criticism was cutting it and he should try something else. Denby presents this as both a traumatic moment for him and a gross violation of the proper decencies by Kael, even though, if he means the stuff he'd shoveled at the start of the essay, she was agreeing with him about his own estimation of his work, assuring him that he was right to be concerned about it, and suggesting an alternate route. Instead, Kael's telling him what he claims to have already known apparently strengthened his resolve to become the lamest and most undeservedly successful film critic of his generation, a goal that he has since made good on. In fact, he made it look easy.)

Kael is also said to have had unethical dealings with a fellow from whom she pinched much of the research that went into her book-length essay on Citizen Kane, stealing even the staggering insight that, when the dying Charles Foster Kane says "Rosebud" on his deathbed, there isn't anybody in the room to hear him. That essay, which remains a delight as a piece of writing and as an argument for Kane's place in the line of screwball-comedy newspaper movies, will always be a thorn bush, especially for those who think that it was an attempt to shaft Orson Welles out of his proper due, a broad fraternity that I do not happen to belong to. (It also contains maybe the single weirdest slip of Kael's career, when she insisted that a scene in which Kane has been eating in the newspaper office,a scene which looks carefully prepared and acted and appears in the script, was "clearly" just caught by the camera, and that Welles had to include it in the finished film to show what a sport he was. John Gregory Dunne would use that as proof that, for all the smarty-pants airs Kael put on in print, she didn't know jack shit about how movies were made. Reasons for Kael's worthlessness as a critic and as a human being--she was too "pop", she had a potty mouth, she was a homophobe, she was a self-hating anti-Semite-- kept coming in shifts, disappearing, and then re-emerging--and the "she didn't understand the technical process of moviemaking" one has recently made a comeback, with Clive James citing it in a recent article about the latest edition of David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film to explain why he had once been a Paulette but now wouldn't cross the street to piss on her grave. As someone who has dared to review records even though I can't read music, I am not the best candidate to share James's scorn on this point.

Dargis refers to the big, big thing Kael is supposed to have done wrong (besides write all that stuff, of course) when she mentions that all that "palling around with filmmakers she reviewed", much as the young Barack Obama was bad to pal around with terrorists. Although Kael crossed paths with a number of filmmakers, and was lured out to Hollywood by one of them, Warren Beatty, for a brief and unfruitful stint trying to work as a Hollywood player, the most social contact with a director that Kellow describes is with James Toback, who she scarcely elevated to major status in any way. Dargis isn't the only woman who had problems, in a big way, with Kael's work: Renata Adler wrote probably the best-known attempt to turn her "legacy" to ashes in The New York Review of Books, and the former Village Voice critic Georgia Brown once committed to print a deranged piece, complaining about the witch had sent forth her winged monkeys to taint the results of the 1989 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. (Probably the definitive Kael-haters' unintentional self-parody, it proceeded from the assumption that only racism could cause someone to prefer any movie released that year to Do the Right Thing and fully blasted off when Brown marveled that anyone could be so blind to true artistic greatness to think that Tom Cruise and his prosthetic balding pattern in Born on the Fourth of July had not soundly bested that sorry hack, Daniel Day-Lewis.)

Still, anyone who thinks that Kael's personal connections to filmmakers and time spent away from her writing desk count that much against her, and who would argue that this has nothing to do with her being a woman, had better have a solid explanation for why there's never been much of a movement for driving Edmund Wilson's reputation underground after he rewarded Anais Nin for some time in the sack with an insincerely flattering review, or why it doesn't matter so much that James Agee, who was the first film critic to get his own volume in the Library of America, wrote film scripts, including one for a director, John Huston, he'd praised as practically the only real director in Hollywood, or why nobody much minds Roger Ebert having written scripts for Russ Meyer. Or is it less of a conflict of interest in their cases because they actually got something on the screen, and the credits to go with them? In a crowd of reviewers, an actual credit on a major theatrical release, whether it's The African Queen or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, might do as much to legitimize one's status as possession of a penis.

For those who've read the most overheated denunciations of Kael and her social set, or just who've been impressed by the hedonistic thrust of her writing, the biggest news to come out of the biography is that Kael's sex life seems to have just stopped around the time she had her daughter, when she was about thirty. Not a hundred pages into the book, Kellow has so little to report about her personal life that the prose dries up and the biography turns into an annotated series of capsule descriptions of her reviews of the biggest pictures of the day. This is all right for what it is, though Kellow might have done a better job of keeping his bewilderment towards her admiration of Brian De Palma to himself--he writes that she "inexplicably" included Dressed to Kill as one her NYFCC nominees for Best Picture of 1980--considering that it's almost as if as a biographer of Clement Greenberg just didn't get what his subject ever saw in Jackson Pollack. He also commits a few slips himself--inexplicably, as he might say, considering how far it must be from real work to accurately synopsize movie reviews-- and at one point, whether through sloppy writing or an astonishing act of misreading, makes it seem as if he's reporting that Kael had something approving to say about Love Story. ("This thing is so instinctively, plus manipulatively, engineered to leave 'em crying that it could hardly fail commercially even if the actors were programmed by Terry Southern to make obscene gestures at the audience at ten-second intervals.") I am glad I read it, though, partly because, especially if you read between the lines, it casts Kael's palling around, especially with younger critics, in a much sweeter, less sinister light than we're used to seeing. Kael was in her late forties when she finally got The New Yorker gig and started making a modest living wage from her writing, and most of the years that preceded that lucky break were grimmer and lonelier than anyone reading her high-wattage, laugh-a-minute prose would likely have guessed. Some people will always see her as some combination of Circe and the Wicked Witch of the West, drawing a crowd of shapable young minds around her to corrupt them with her love of Harry Ritz, but she sounds to me like someone who'd waited a long time for the chance to have spending money, and an audience, and some people to hang out with.

A lot of people who'll leave a bigger carbon footprint on the art of writing about film than Manohla Dargis, let alone Georgia Brown, have regarded Kael as a pure menace. (Andrew Sarris, who Kael seems not to have ever mentioned in print again after the legendary takedown "Circles and Squares", often dropped her name in his writing, in a way that implied that he saw her as serving the role in his life and career that Lex Luthor served for Superman.) The arrival of a selection of her work, edited by the art critic Sanford Schwartz, and published as part of the Library of America, is designed to turn people who used to be on the fence into hardcore, frothing haters, and make long-term haters' heads explode. Personally, I think that David Ansen summed up the real reason that Kael pissed off so many people in ways they find unforgivable when he said that she had the unique gift of making you "feel like an asshole" for disagreeing with her." Another critic, Richard T. Jameson, once wrote that Kael "demonstrated the viability of a kick-him-in-the-nuts style of argumentation that continues to pass as the bottom line in truth telling, for many readers and not a few emulators," and the concept of a "truth teller" is based on the idea that a lot of people are wolfing down bullshit and asking for seconds. Some of the standard knocks against Kael as something other than an honest critic--her reputation as someone who based her reviews on a single viewing of a movie and wasn't constantly rushing in with freshly "revised" opinions used to be two big ones--amount to disapproval that a critic might have enough confidence in her own way of seeing to reject received opinion and not even pretend to feel apologetic about it. (Maybe the closest Kael ever came to apologizing for her opinion was with the preface to her pan of Shoah, a plea for the readers' forbearance which William Shawn demanded as a precondition for even running the review. Kellow performs a long-overdue public service by printing the dry-edged judgment of The New Yorker's crack European correspondent Jane Kramer--"[Claude] Lanzmann was such a sanctimonious presence--kind of like the Elie Wisel of filmmakers. He sure as hell wasn't the Primo Levi"--alongside the objections of a raft of critics, most of whom can't seem to offer up anything more thoughtful than the embarrassing notion that, if someone spends years of his life making an epic-length documentary about the Holocaust, then it's just basic math that the resulting work cannot be criticized.)

If Kael was a polarizing writer, that's partly because she was so passionate about the arts that she was inspiring. The strangest crack in the Dargis/Scott piece is Dargis's remark that she didn't seem to care much about life outside the movies. One of the biggest things that sets Kael's work apart from most of what passes for film criticism now is that Kael was interested in so much besides movies and brought her insights about painting, music, opera, theater, and books to bear on movies, whereas most movie writers today really don't have demonstrate much of a reference field outside movies, and maybe TV. (When A. O. Scott was first hired by the Times as a movie critic, Roger Ebert complained that Scott wasn't qualified to write about movies, because he'd mostly worked published literary criticism.) It was precisely because Kael knew of traditions and developments in the arts outside the multiplex that she often failed to be impressed by ideas and attitudes that seemed dazzling to people who'd just seen them, for the first time in their lives, in a movie. Maybe it was because she had other things to do that she concentrated on what was on the screen and was never one for indulging a conceptual experiment or misfire that seemed "interesting" if you held it up the light and read something into it. In one of their previous thought-experiment duets with Scott, their defense of the "boring" qualities of work produced by, say, Kelly Reichardt, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jia Zhangke, and A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis, Dargis wrote that "[Andy] Warhol’s own films are almost always called boring, usually by people who have never seen or sampled one, including minimalist epics like Empire, eight hours of the Empire State Building that subverts the definition of what a film is (entertaining, for one)." My definition of someone who needs to get more of a life outside movies would begin with anyone who would sit through all eight hours of Empire and then emerge with the news that the experience was worthwhile because not being entertained for eight hours served to challenge the notion that art should be entertaining. (I tend to agree with the idea, promulgated by Dwight Macdonald, who called Warhol's movies "boring mystifications", that art is entertaining or it's nothing. Of course, some people--for all I know, Dargis might be one of them--are silly enough to associate the word "entertaining" only with shallow pleasures. A Monet's water lilies occupy the mind and eye in a pleasurable and interesting way, and so are entertaining. A Transformers movie does not, and so isn't. A J. Hoberman dissertation of a Clint Eastwood movie like Heartbreak Ridge is entertaining, though it doesn't make the movie any better. A Manohla Dargis explication of a dull but ambitious Eastwood movie such as Gran Torino or J. Edgar achieves an exquisite match between the value of the thing itself and its subject matter, but you still can't get back the five minutes you wasted while reading it.)

The Library of America book doesn't include either "Circles or Squares" or the review of Love Story. Like For Keeps, the best-of anthology that Kael helped assemble in the '90s, it focuses on raves, and seriously limits the number of pans. This is nice in theory, but regrettable in action, because even though Kael was one of the few movie critics who was as much fun to read when she was breaking out the champagne as she was when she had her cutlas at the ready, many of her most vicious reviews contain her clearest statements of aesthetic preference. Kael scattered a lot of opinions over the years, and some of them, God help us, may have been "wrong". (Manny Farber, the other critic who preceded Kael to his own volume in the Library of America, was "wrong" at least as often, and was a fair match for it when it came to brazenly telling people they, and their favorite films, were full of shit. Maybe he never inspired anything remotely like as much vitriol as Kael because he never had as respectable a perch as The New Yorker. Then again, I'm betting that the fact that he had a penis made him seem more reasonable to a great many people.) What can her writing, or Farber's, mean to people who are perfectly comfortable with the state of film criticism these days, when a strong writer with an unusual point of view (and, to be fair, a habit of praising movies I find atrocious and dumping on others that I think are the berries) like Armond White is regularly dismissed as a deliberate troublemaker who's just pretending to deviate from the pack to "call attention to himself"? One of the comic high points of the Dargis/Scott exchange comes when Dargis writes that Kael thought that movies and movie criticism had lost something in the early 1980s and, rolling her eyes in print, notes that at the same time Kael was expressing this opinion, Siskel and Ebert had become a very hot act on TV! (Another comes when she rejects the idea that there's anything wrong with movie criticism these days, when "there’s an astonishing amount of exciting work coming out of academia.") Roger Ebert has become a universally beloved nice guy, but he and his late co-host also defined a colorless, juiceless alternative to real criticism where any film that sets out to satisfy certain predigested requirements for "entertainment", based on one's expectations set by previous films and promises made in the advertising, is objectively "good" and gets a thumbs-up, and any film that wanders into unfamiliar terrain, whether it's a Blue Velvet or The Brood, stands accused of being too smarty-pants big for its britches and gets a thumbs-down. Even if you don't mind the good or great films that get the short end of the stick by this method, that still makes up for a hell of a lot of pointless, unnecessary, hacky-ass movies that are automatically given their thumbs-up. It's helped land us in a world where people are less interested in reading a review by someone who's seen a movie and gotten something different out of it than they might have than in making sure all the ducks are in a row when their latest favorite is assigned its rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

Ebert was always predictable, and he helped midwife a safely predictable media landscape where everybody knew what everyone else was going to think and the crazies like Armond White are not only denigrated for being out of step with received opinion but scolded for being "wrong" in bad faith; how can anybody hate a Pixar movie and mean it? In that Times piece, Scott does bestir himself at the end when he wonders why Sarris and Kael ever had a feud. After all, Sarris was advocating the "auteur" theory, which proposed that movie directors are artists, and Kael thought they were artists too, so what's the beef? His confusion here is based on an increasingly common problem among people who, I guess, haven't actually read either "Circles and Squares" or the Sarris essay that Kael was responding to. Sarris, in his less-than-proudest moments, seemed to be trying to sell the idea that if a given director was worthy of consideration as an artist, then that meant that all his work, even the hackiest stuff that he did on his off days, was worthy of deep consideration, and that seemingly lesser films by someone like Otto Preminger or Raoul Walsh gained in interest if you could detect thematic "links" between them and, say, Laura or High Sierra. In retrospect, he seems to have been trying to elevate movies to the status of literature by showing that you could make the same mistakes in studying them that had traditionally been made by the dullest and most bone-headed literary critics of their day. Kael wasn't having this, partly because she didn't think that the secret to finding art in movies lay in talking as if you were talking about something more culturally respectable, and partly because she insisted on taking every new encounter with a movie as its own unique experience. This meant that, for all her reputation for playing favorites, Kael panned a lot of movies that happened to be the work of directors she officially championed--movies by Altman, Peckinpah, De Palma, even Jean Renoir--and praised many movies by directors who she had most often derided (Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, James Bridges's Mike's Murder, Herbert Ross's Pennies from Heaven). Meanwhile, Sarris was stuck, having once detected some trace of artistry in the work of Blake Edwards, with having to re-watch Darling Lili over and over until he could finally report to his breathless readers that it didn't look that bad on the thirty-second go.

The conventional image of a writer who loves Pauline Kael is someone who, well, grew up wanting to be Pauline Kael. Me, I grew up wanting to be James Wolcott. It was Wolcott I first discovered, when I was still an obnoxious little blot on the Mississippi landscape, reading his TV column in The Village Voice in the early '80s. I had gotten the subscription through the mail, thanks to one of those little cardboard flyers that used to littler the hallways of public schools, and as I first perused the confusing jumble of that paper, I zeroed in on Wolcott partly because, writing about TV, he was the critic who was most likely to be writing about something I'd actually seen. He was effortlessly sharp and funny in those days, and seemed to know everything about everything, and I pictured him as looking like Sami Frey in The Little Drummer Girl, a world-weary, sardonic grin in black leather. I finally got to see him when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, and it was a rude shock to see that he looked pudgy and pasty, with limp hair that was too long for the shape of his head--that is to say, an older version of myself. Reading his own new memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,a good chunk of which is devoted to his relationship with Kael, iI got a sick rush from discovering how shambling and unsure of himself Wolcott really was at the time that my pimply-faced ignorant ass was venerating his image, back in the sticks.

Of all these books, I did get my biggest laugh out of Wolcott's, when he describes hanging out at Kael's office at The New Yorker, doing an impression of Redd Foxx staggering around clutching his chest whenever William Shawn tried using his legendary heart condition to try to talk Kael out of threatening to review Deep Throat or saying mean things about li'l Terry Malick. (Wolcott assures us that he was careful not to do it when there were other people around.) I can't say I enjoyed his memoir as much as I would a collection of his old Voice columns--is there really no market in the publishing industry for thirty-year-old thoughts on The Good Neighbors?--but it does convey a melancholy sense of a lost New York world where people could care about punk rock and the ballet and even find other mad dreamers to hang out with and shoot the shit about said obsessions. How much of that world is really lost, even with Ballanchine dead and CBGB's shuttered, and how much of it was simply pissed away by Wolcott is another thing: Given how important Kael's role is in his book, there's no getting around the fact that Wolcott dynamited their friendship in 1997, when he wrote a Vanity Fair piece about the Paulettes and the torch he felt that they'd taken to film criticism. Now he says that he never meant any of the shrapnel from that piece to hit Kael herself, but I wonder.

I suspect that the best way to drive a shiv into Kael's heart would have been for a friend to unexpectedly start bad-mouthing her favorite movies, and Wolcott kick-started his article with the announcement that neither The Godfather, Part II nor Mean Streets (which, seen today, seems to be "all attitude") had held up for shit! Bewilderingly, in his memoir, Wolcott tells a story about Kael meeting another critic leaving a screening as she was going in. The critic told Kael that the movie he'd just seen was nothing much and probably not worth bothering with, and Kael, saying, Oh, well, as long as I'm here, went in anyway. That movie, Wolcott then reveals triumphantly, was Mean Streets! I waited for the punch line, for Wolcott to write something to the effect that the other critic was right, since Wolcott is on record as thinking that Mean Streets is a piece of crap, but the point seems to be that Kael never took anyone's word for anything, and was right to do so. Is there any chance at all that, having once claimed to like Mean Streets when he was a Paulette-in-good-standing, and then turned against it when he tore up his membership card, he's changed his fucking mind again, and now thinks it's brilliant again? Maybe not constantly revising your opinions about movies isn't the terrible thing that Kael-haters think it is. After awhile, your head might be in danger of coming unscrewed.

Incidentally, in Kellow's book, the critic Charles Taylor describes Wolcott as "a careerist creep." One of the funny details in Kellow's book is that Kael, whose biggest career breakthrough, being hired by The New Yorker, looks like a classic fluke--a case of the exact right editor discovering the exact right writer to cover the exact right subject at the exact right time--apparently always thought that it was proof that good work would be rewarded. One of her younger writer friends, Ray Sawhill, reports that Kael was always bugging him to write long critical pieces and send them to magazines on spec, and that when nothing ever came of it, she bugged him even harder; she couldn't believe that he was really beavering away and nothing was coming of it. Wolcott, by contrast, dropped out of college to hit New York after he'd sent Norman Mailer something he'd written --something about Norman Mailer--and Mailer offered to put in a good word for him with Dan Wolf, then the editor of the Voice. Wolcott proceeded to lay siege to the Voice until Wolf gave him a job, and within half a dozen years, he had worked, or was doing work, for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Creem, Esquire, The Texas Monthly and other high-profile venues. Whatever sweat and politicking must have gone into his success, Wolcott, true to his book's title, sticks to his story that it was all luck, just dumb luck, that led to every break he got. I can't help thinking there's a comedy in there somewhere, and that in its ideal form it would be written by Preston Sturges and star Thelma Ritter and the young Robert Morse.

O Stuporman!

Abraham Lincoln was ugly. He had other qualities, but he was ugly. That's part of what's come to define him--in a good way, since his homeliness serves his image as a man of suffering integrity, who must have been deep, since nobody was going to hand him the keys to the car based on his looks. (One of the more durable political wisecracks of the nineteenth century is Lincoln's response to being called "two-faced": "If I had another face, do you think I'd wear this one?") George W. Bush is stupid. When Bush was president, a lot of people on the "reasonable" left or in the middle used to scold people who complained that he was stupid that they were failing to appreciate a mind that must have had something going for it for its possessor to be so successful, and in the process, cutting themselves off from the greater public that would see no point in working with people making such hurtful personal assumptions, which reflected badly on Bush's supporters. And now that the important thing about Bush, for his diehard supporters, is not that he win re-election but that his "legacy" be a good one, many have started being very abusive about all the people who have been proven "wrong" about the former once-elected two-term president's smarts. But Bush sold himself as stupid, while maligning his opponents, especially Al Gore and John Kerry, as being so smart that they must be pretty lame, the boring good kids who actually went to college to get a dumb ol' education, and his most literate supporters were on board with this, and the media professed to love it, presumably because they believed that the great unwashed loved it. Forget all that; the man's a genius, write it down. People have every right to think that stupidity is linked to solid, simple values and moral rectitude, just as people have a right to think that physical homeliness is linked to rectitude and depth of character. But the day after Lincoln died, nobody was going around getting up in people's faces and insisting that he'd looked like Zac Efron.

The case that Bush is brilliant boils down to the charge that it's mean to say he isn't, plus, he reads history books. The case that he's stupid can perhaps best be made by means of a thought experiment. Imagine it's 2000, and at one of the presidential debates, someone asks Bush the following question: "Sir, imagine that it's the first year of your first term, and you've told your intelligence agencies to stop focusing on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, because, you've said, Bill Clinton told you they were a real danger and you'd already decided that the secret to a successful presidency would be to do the opposite of anything that Bill Clinton thought was a good idea, and your economic policies have already turned the surplus you inherited into a black hole that, because of your tax plan, is only going to get deeper and blacker. At this moment, al-Qaeda strikes on American soil. Is there any chance that part of your response would be to wage a war of choice against a country with no connection to al-Qaeda, based on arguments that make a joke of your father and your vice-president's claims to have effectively isolated and neutered that country, while maintaining your tax cuts, so that there's no way to pay for your war?" The next morning, the headlines would read, "ELITIST MEDIA INSULTS REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WITH TRICK QUESTION DESIGNED TO GET HIM TO SAY THAT HE MIGHT CONSIDER POLICY THAT ONLY BE CONCEIVED BY A DROOLING IMBECILE!" Certainly no one would have voted for Bush, before 9/11, if they thought he had the capacity to think of something like that. But once he was President, the fact that he did think like that had to be taken as proof that he, well, he had a certain swagger, God love him. Rick Perry's supporters were very angry with Politico a while back, because the site had the audacity wonder if he was "dumb." At the same time, Perry's every word and gesture were designed to woo the "We like 'em big and stupid" crowd, and when Perry's unmistakable, undeniable stupidity did get him in serious trouble, it was because he came across as stupid in the wrong way, less Fred Flinstone with nukes than sad, senile old thing. (Earlier, Perry had fought off complaints about his debate performance by saying that the alternative to not being able to string three words together is being articulate, and he'd hate to be that, because then he'd be like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Incidentally, is there any clearer evidence of Republican mass stupidity than their conviction, as a group, that however things were under George Bush, things were obviously just terrible as could be when Clinton was president?)

Right now, Herman Cain's belligerent pride in his own stupidity may be the only thing helping his career stay afloat; lots of people clearly love it, especially since they see it as a way of telling the media they can take their concerns about not electing a complete moron to the highest office in the land and stick them where the sun don't shine.Daniel Drezner recently wrote a post in which, following Cain's performance before the editorial board of the Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal, which in turn came after Cain's mocking the idea that he should know anything at all about who's running things in the part of the world where we have two wars going, he wouldn't be writing anything more about Cain, because it's just too fucking awful. (Of course, make no mistake, just because Cain has never made a public utterance that wasn't proudly butt-ignorant, Drezner wants you to know that " I don't think Herman Cain is stupid.") But, as David Weigel points out, "Cain hasn't changed. His position when he got into the race was that advisers would be called on to guide his foreign policy. His position now is that he's not a foreign policy guy, and in a Cain White House, he'd call on his advisers to guide foreign policy. Cain was doing perfectly fine in the polls for a very long time with exactly this position. He's fading now not because of his flubs, but because a sexual harassment scandal makes voters doubt his morals. Foreign policy isn't a driving issue in 2012. The deal Cain was always making with voters was that he didn't sweat details. This is the businessman theory of politics: People who succeed at business are, naturally, prone to succeed at anything else. Give them a government to run and they'll do it better than the bureaucrat class." This is a stupid attitude Weigel is describing, but it's no stupider than the idea that Bush, who was also going to farm out his decisions to a gang of wise motherfuckers, ought to be president because his daddy used to have the job and he already knew where the light switches were in the bathrooms. For Republicans, at this stage of the game, picking a candidate is all about the personalities involved, and what they most want is somebody whose personality is calculated to piss off or appall the people they hate. Whatever motivates Cain's solid history of dumbass pronouncements, they weld him closer and closer to the hearts of many Republicans because he's so angry about being called on them, asked about them, and just being held to any standard at all. He came down from the CEO's penthouse office with a ghosted advice manual under each arm; why shouldn't he just be given the presidency? He says he'd be great; where does some elitist fact checker get off, calling a job provider a liar!?

In related news, Daniel B. Klein, the "libertarian economist" who made news last year with an op-ed piece that, based on "a set of survey questions that tested people’s real-world understanding of basic economic principles," argued that "he American left was unenlightened, by and large, as to economic matters," or to put it in the blunter terms favored by Fox News stories on the piece, that liberals are stupid. Fox News will not be doing any stories on his follow-up piece in The Atlantic, in which he points out the flaws in his own methodology and concedes that, based on a later surbey, "under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that 'myside bias'—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups." In other words, although many liberals are indeed pretty stupid, in terms of their tendency to think past the assumptions they base on their preconceptions and biases, this is something they share with a more or less equal number of non-liberals. I didn't do any surveys myself, but I could have told Klein this was the case and saved him some work, because I already knew it as a result of not having spent the last forty years of my life trapped at the bottom of a coal mine.

But to say that most people, whatever their political persuasion, thinks with their glands and not the evidence of their eyes and ears as filtered through their brains, still cannot fully account for the Republican party's embrace of stupidity as a precondition for leadership. For a start, it is wrong to classify the contemporary Republican party as "conservative". because true conservatism, whatever its lapses, is a reality-based school of thought that respects learning, scorns flattering appeals to the stupid, and seeks to actually conserve some things besides low tax rates for millionaires and the right to call anyone who doesn't agree with you a "class warrior" if your opponent is wearing a tie and a "smelly hippie" if he is not. Towards the end of his life, William F. Buckley appeared genuinely troubled by the fact that the party claiming to represent his ideology had, out of political expediency, turned itself into the anti-brain contingent; onetime pretenders to the throne of the Smart Conservative, such as George Will, don't seem, to have a problem with it. I guess they know their audience. In the meantime, the man seen as the most rational and in-touch of the Republican presidential candidates, Jon Huntsman, is seen as unelectable within his own party because he's not stupid, while the other one who has been known to claim to believe sensible things is regarded as a contender because he's now willing to claim to have repudiated all those sensible beliefs. Mitt Romney is supposed to be the responsible Republican front-runner, because he says enough crazy, stupid things to be acceptable to voters within his party, and also because the media and the party professionals believe he's actually a smart guy who's just pretending to be stupid until he has his hand on the Bible and is reciting the oath of office. They're openly signaling to people on the fence that it's okay to vote for Romney, because everything he says between now and Election Day is a bald-faced lie: he really knows better! This can't be good for the children.