'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[beamish14]

Cancel Kael!

Nicely sums up where cultural discourse is today.

You know, there's a little old-fashioned transphobia in her review of The World According to Garp ("he thinks surgery can turn him into a woman")... and LOL I distinctly remember, no really, that she actually invoked James Agee to indirectly call Eddie Murphy the n-word in her review of 48 Hrs. (I've never enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy do anything). Off with her head!!

This reminds me of Renata Adler’s incredibly homophobic review of The Killing of Sister George

[Randall Maysin Again]

Yeah, Renata Adler has actually long identified as a Republican. Her political identity is kind of hard to fathom. I'm mostly just amused by Pauline's little peccadilloes though

[The Curious Sofa]

Cancel Kael!

Nicely sums up where cultural discourse is today.

You know, there's a little old-fashioned transphobia in her review of The World According to Garp ("he thinks surgery can turn him into a woman")... and LOL I distinctly remember, no really, that she actually invoked James Agee to indirectly call Eddie Murphy the n-word in her review of 48 Hrs. (I've never enjoyed watching Eddie Murphy do anything). Off with her head!!

My point was that (within reason) I'm no fan of applying the values and language of current political discourse to the past, because then you need to cancel a lot of great films and writing, especially from the 70s and 80s, when the era grappled with civil rights issues in a way that requires never ending "trigger warnings" for a generation who learned about activism via social media outrage bait.

You present a good example of the current fixation on "they once used the wrong word" by removing the context, which renders your argument dishonest. Kael's understanding of transgender issues is no different from that of most of her contemporaries. While she may not be aware of the concept of gender dysphoria, her interpretation of what makes someone transgender is similar to the motivations that drove the title character of Hedwig and the Angry Inch a couple of decades later (no doubt also problematic by now). To make your point, you fail to mention that she praises the character of Roberta and Lithgow's performance as the best thing about The World According to Garp, describing her as "pretty" and "level-headed and stable - in fact, the only normal character on screen". So by taking Kael's terminology out of context, you are misrepresenting the spirit in which it was made.

In the early 80s, it was still acceptable to use the n-word in the discourse around racism (not as a slur, of course), and by quoting a term used by Agee (not about Murphy), Kael is condemning his racist language. Although she quotes racial slurs used by black characters in her review of 48 Hours, she does so to show how they are reclaiming the language, similar to the way queer is used by the LGBTQ community today.

I don't like Kael's writing because I agree with everything she says, in fact, I disagree with her at least half of the time and understand that much of it presents dated views, but I like the way she thinks about film as an art form and I have always liked the way she writes about screen acting, something most film critics neglect.

One exception of a critic who also focuses on-screen acting is David Thompson, whose writing on women's bodies, agency, and aging I find so unbearably sexist that I once wrote a (published) letter to Sight & Sound, to call him out for it. But in the current hierarchy of oppression, sexism and misogyny come well below all forms of racism and the many *phobias, which is a double standard that also applies to these two critics. Kael at least made her mistakes nearly half a century ago, while Thompson is still writing and gets to denigrate actresses for the crime of growing old and therefore less sexually appealing to him. I see a lot of outrage about a few remarks Kael made here and there (some are indeed offensive now, but most are taken out of their context) but I see few people complaining about Thompson.

I find the current bad-faith arguments around those in the public eye)having said the "wrong thing" or used the "wrong word" in a different cultural context, and therefore the insightful things they had to say must be canceled in the battle for the moral high ground, disheartening.

[MichaelB]

I'm mostly just amused by Pauline's little peccadilloes though

They're not really "peccadilloes", though, are they? Or at least not in terms of individual eccentricity; as The Curious Sofa rightly says, her views on transgender issues were squarely within the bounds of mainstream feminism at the time (Germaine Greer expressed very similar views). Put it like this: who back in 1983 was writing about trans subjects from a similar perspective to that which we'd routinely encounter today?

This is someone who was born in 1919; obviously (and unavoidably) her worldview is going to differ substantially from that of someone born eighty years later. Hell, she was already in her fifties when she was writing about the groundbreaking American films of the seventies, although she was often much more in tune with them than were many of her contemporaries.

And The Curious Sofa is absolutely right that the context needs to be checked every single time when it comes to Kael, because I've lost count of the number of times I've seen her misrepresented - either in cynical bad faith by someone who knows the original context but opted not to reveal it, or lazily by someone who didn't bother to check it before recycling it. Or an equally lazy catch-all dismissal along the lines that "she basically hated movies", which is so 180º removed from the truth that it's hilarious. (I remember sending a copy of her breathless rave of ReAnimator to someone who'd convinced himself that she despised genre films; he did at least have the good grace to admit his ignorance on that score.)

[Randall Maysin Again]

In the early 80s, it was still acceptable to use the n-word in the discourse around racism (not as a slur, of course), and by quoting a term used by Agee (not about Murphy), Kael is condemning his racist language.

Are you...quite sure about this? That's not how I remember her review at all, although I can't confirm it. Don't quote me on it, but I remember her specifically using, without actually using the term "in her own voice", as it were, the particular word she attributed to Agee, to express her dislike of Murphy's synthetic, over-eager, primed-for-success personality (a sentiment which I agree with, nevermind the unfortunate term). I'm a little aghast to think that you both think I'm misrepresenting Kael, although I may well be in the case of the Agee thing, I guess I should have done my homework on that.

To make your point, you fail to mention that she praises the character of Roberta and Lithgow's performance as the best thing about The World According to Garp, describing her as "pretty" and "level-headed and stable - in fact, the only normal character on screen".

Yeah, I know she wrote all that. Does providing the additional context in which she wrote the part of her review I quoted, as you did, somehow make the Kael quote I made not still (a little) transphobic of her?

So by taking Kael's larger point out of context, you are misrepresenting the spirit in which it was made.

No I'm not, the Kael quote I made is still a little transphobic, which is all I was saying. And I know lots of other people and writers in the culture around her at the time were doing the same thing as Kael. I don't really want to castigate her, and I was joking when I said off with her head.

[The Curious Sofa]

Kael doesn't use the variation of the n-word in Agee's quote to describe Murphy, she appropriates it to accuse 48 Hours of trafficking in the racial stereotypes of the Jazz Age (which is why she uses Agee). The appropriation of the terminology to characters in the film is now problematic, but it is used to denounce what she saw as a superficial Hollywood film trading in racism. She has high praise for Murphy as a comedian and performer, but writes that the film sanded off his "rough edges".

Is Kael still "a little transphobic"? She is by modern standards but would have been far less so than most of her contemporaries, many of whom would have seen Roberta at best as comical and at worst as grotesque. This was a time when most people would not have known that transgender people even existed. She's also often seen as homophobic today, but she didn't see herself that way, and in that regard, she was progressive compared to many critics of the time.

As someone who grew up gay and obsessed with films in the 70s and 80s, I can attest that mainstream film reviews were rather cavalier about their often vile homophobia. Kael always saw herself on the side of the disenfranchised, and perhaps sometimes overestimated her place and voice in speaking for communities she didn't always know enough about. I'd say that was the case for most liberals then and still is true for many. What she wrote may have been catty at times, but (having read almost everything she wrote and has been written about her) I think she genuinely thought she was speaking from a place of solidarity.

Political progress constantly evolves and what may have been enlightened then, can look offensive now. Therefore I think it's better to look at the historical context and the intention with which something was said, rather than get hung up on bad-faith arguments around dated views and terminology.

[bottlesofsmoke]

One exception of a critic who also focuses on-screen acting is David Thompson, whose writing on women's bodies, agency, and aging I find so unbearably sexist that I once wrote a (published) letter to Sight & Sound, to call him out for it. But in the current hierarchy of oppression, sexism and misogyny come well below all forms of racism and the many *phobias, which is a double standard that also applies to these two critics. Kael at least made her mistakes nearly half a century ago, while Thompson is still writing and gets to denigrate actresses for the crime of growing old and therefore less sexually appealing to him. I see a lot of outrage about a few remarks Kael made here and there (some are indeed offensive now, but most are taken out of their context) but I see few people complaining about Thompson.

You mean David Thomson, correct? I only say this because David Thompson is a different person, also a film critic and I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about who you are talking about. (I agree with you by the way, Thomson sometimes offers a refreshing contrarian voice on some subjects but yeah, you nailed it on his writing about women. The less said about his Nicole Kidman book the better.)

[The Curious Sofa]

SpoilerShow

One exception of a critic who also focuses on-screen acting is David Thompson, whose writing on women's bodies, agency, and aging I find so unbearably sexist that I once wrote a (published) letter to Sight & Sound, to call him out for it. But in the current hierarchy of oppression, sexism and misogyny come well below all forms of racism and the many *phobias, which is a double standard that also applies to these two critics. Kael at least made her mistakes nearly half a century ago, while Thompson is still writing and gets to denigrate actresses for the crime of growing old and therefore less sexually appealing to him. I see a lot of outrage about a few remarks Kael made here and there (some are indeed offensive now, but most are taken out of their context) but I see few people complaining about Thompson.

You mean David Thomson, correct? I only say this because David Thompson is a different person, also a film critic and I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about who you are talking about. (I agree with you by the way, Thomson sometimes offers a refreshing contrarian voice on some subjects but yeah, you nailed it on his writing about women. The less said about his Nicole Kidman book the better.)

Yes, I meant David Thomson, my mistake and probably something Freudian. He wrote a book on the Alien films and devoted a whole chapter to an imagined Alien sequel, which is some grotesque sex fantasy about Ripley/Sigourney Weaver that has to be read (or not) to be believed. His disparaging comments on the looks of an aging Jessica Lange in his Biographical Dictionary of Film was just one sexist comment that made me leave the book behind during a house move and my Sight & Sound letter was in response to a truly vicious attack on Lauren Bacall after her death.

[domino harvey]

Interestingly though, his book on the Big Sleep devotes a lot of space to critiquing the Dorothy Malone bookseller pick-up from a feminist perspective. I remember being quite struck by his objections, because I’d say that (broadly) everyone seems to love that scene. So maybe he has complexities in his world view

[The Curious Sofa]

I don't doubt it and he is acclaimed for a reason but he is a film writer I could never get on board with.