lost was her taste.” Now, many were wondering if he might not have had a point. What her readers had no way of knowing—perhaps even she did not know—was that she was attempting to shed a layer of skin. Her passion for the movies had reached another level, one that would take her in another direction entirely.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Several of the big studio films released in the summer of 1978 crystallized for Pauline a trend she had seen building in recent years: People she talked with suddenly seemed wary of the visceral side of films. The edginess, the eruptions of violence and volatile emotions that had made the Godfather films, Straw Dogs, Taxi Driver, and Carrie among the most-talked-about movies of the decade now seemed anathema to many in the audience. The counterculture spirit that had once fed some of the best moviemaking was all but drying up. Ever since the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975, Vietnam had been rapidly fading in the public memory as a meaningless mistake that was best forgotten; to many, those who had served in the war were now viewed less as tragic victims than as unfortunate losers. College campuses were no longer a center of any kind of organized dissent; instead, membership in fraternities and sororities—the essence of comfort-seeking conformity—had spiked; the soft-edged Bee Gees songs from Saturday Night Fever could be heard blasting from the upstairs windows of every Sigma Chi house in the country. A wave of complacency had swept over American life, making its presence felt on the screen, both large and small: On television, the new “adult” era ushered in by Room 222, All in the Family, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been dwarfed by feel-good nostalgia comedies such as Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and bubble-headed farces such as Three’s Company.
In terms of her own writing life, Pauline felt that the recent social changes in America had helped to create an unhealthy moviegoing climate in which audiences flocked to tame, tidy films and avoided messy, provocative ones. She expressed her concerns in her opening essay of the fall of 1978, “Fear of Movies,” in which she posited her theory that “Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art—of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theatre.” Among the biggest offenders were Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, which earned some of the year’s best reviews but which she described as having “no desire but to please, and that it’s only compulsiveness; it’s so timed and pleated and smoothed that it’s sliding right off the screen.” She was stunned that the summer-movie audience turned up in relatively small numbers for three of her favorites, Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, and Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars. Pauline’s defense of Convoy, however, made her an easy target for her critics:The trucks give the performances in this movie, and they go through changes: when the dust rises around them on rough backcountry roads, they’re like sea beasts splashing spume; when two of them squeeze a little police car between their tanklike armored bodies, they’re insect titans. The whole movie is a prankish road dance, and the convoy itself is a protest without a cause: the drivers are just griped in general and blowing off steam. They want the recreation of a protest.
But Pauline was unrepentant. She thought that both Convoy and Eyes of Laura Mars, a thriller about a murderer who stabs the eyes of his victims, displayed what to her was the most important quality a filmmaker could have: moviemaking fever. Unlike some of her colleagues, Pauline refused to see Laura Mars as any kind of feminist commentary; in fact, it was her refusal to take a “topical” view of movies of the time—such as hailing Looking for Mr. Goodbar and An Unmarried Woman as major advances for women’s films simply because they dealt with issues of contemporary concern—that was partly the reason that so many of those connected with The Village Voice despised her writing. Her enthusiasm for Convoy and Laura Mars fueled the mounting criticism that she was an advocate of sensationalism in the movies: that being turned on as an audience member was more important to her than any real cogency in the writing or direction—the very thing she had been railing about back in the sixties in essays such as “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” However unfair that disparagement may have