Renata Adler was an inspired choice to write it. She was a well-known contributor to the publication, a sometime film critic with impressive credentials (The New York Times and, most recently, The New Yorker). and an acclaimed fiction writer. The passionate, emotional, argumentative Pauline confronted with the dispassionate, chiseled-prose Adler—two more temperamentally opposed writers would have been difficult to imagine.
Pauline had been annoyed by many of Adler’s recent reviews for The New Yorker; in particular, she was incensed by Adler’s dismissal of Carroll Ballard’s The Black Stallion, which Pauline considered one of the best films of a bad year. And with her tony educational background (Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, a law degree from Yale) and frequently reported-on social connections, Adler was the sort of darling of the East Coast intellectual establishment that Pauline had for so long viewed with contempt.
An advance copy of The New York Review of Books issue that featured “The Perils of Pauline” was sent to Pauline with a note from the publication’s editor, Robert Silvers, in the event that Pauline wanted to reply.
Adler’s essay began with a lengthy two columns in which she outlined her thoughts on what made a good critic in the arts, and why the best ones inevitably found themselves played out after a certain period and moved on to write about other topics. For another two and a half columns she expressed her qualified admiration for Pauline’s work from the 1950s up through her first few years at The New Yorker, stating that she had “continued to believe that movie criticism was probably in quite good hands with Pauline Kael.”
The bomb was dropped midway through the fifth column, when Adler stated that When the Lights Go Down was “jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.” She went on to detail her complaints—that Pauline’s work had taken on “an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.”
In 1976, when Reeling was published, John Simon had, while expressing his admiration for Pauline as a stylist, objected to her coarseness of spirit and taste, in terms of both language and her championing of certain movies he considered lowbrow: “She is a lively writer with a lot of common sense, but also one who, in a very disturbing sense, is common.” Adler echoed this theme in her review, complaining that Pauline had “lost any notion of the legitimate borders of polemic. Mistaking lack of civility for vitality, she now substitutes for argument a protracted, obsessional invective—what amounts to a staff cinema critics’ branch of est.” Adler—not coincidentally, perhaps, an ardent admirer of William Shawn’s editing style—lamented Pauline’s use of images of “sexual conduct, deviance, impotence, masturbation; also of indigestion, elimination, excrement. I do not mean to imply that these images are frequent, or that one has to look for them. They are relentless, inexorable.” Among the words and phrases that bothered her: “just a belch from the Nixon era”; “you can’t cut through the crap in her”; “plastic turds”; and “tumescent filmmaking.”
Adler also attacked Pauline for her repeated use of “the mock rhetorical question,” such as “Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer?” “Where was the director?” and “How can you have any feelings for a man who doesn’t enjoy being in bed with Sophia Loren?” These questions, she felt, were “rarely saying anything; they are simply doing something. Bullying, presuming, insulting, frightening, enlisting, intruding, dunning, rallying.”
There was more: Adler took issue with Pauline’s use of “you” to indicate what the audience was feeling, when she would have more civilly, in Adler’s view, said “I.” Like Robert Brustein, Andrew Sarris, and even Pauline’s friend Greil Marcus, she found fault with the surfeit of hyperbole, and she objected, seemingly on moral grounds, to comments such as the one Pauline wrote about Paul Schrader, in Hardcore—not knowing how to turn a trick—which Adler felt represented “a new breakthrough in vulgarity and unfairness.” She also theorized that Pauline had taken advantage of The New Yorker’s famously genteel editing process, in which writers are “free to write what, and at what length, they choose.” While disagreements with writers of feature articles could be dealt with simply by postponing the running of the piece, movie reviews demanded constant currency; Pauline’s work had to be run,