“There is so much talk now about the art of the film,” Pauline wrote, “that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art.” Again, she encouraged audiences to respond to what they genuinely enjoyed—not to second-guess themselves as they might have been taught to do in school. And if what they enjoyed was a cheap youth exploitation picture like Wild in the Streets, that was fine, “because it’s smart in a lot of ways that better-made pictures aren’t.” Movies like Planet of the Apes and The Thomas Crown Affair couldn’t possibly be defended as works of art, she wrote.
But they are almost the maximum of what we’re now getting from American movies, and not only these but much worse movies are talked about as “art”—and are beginning to be taken seriously in our schools.
It’s preposterously egocentric to call anything we enjoy art—as if we could not be entertained by it if it were not; it’s just as preposterous to let prestigious, expensive advertising snow us into thinking we’re getting art for our money when we haven’t even had a good time.
The genuine movie-lover knew in his gut that what movies had to offer was not an academic study in perfect artistic unity. “At the movies we want a different kind of truth,” Pauline wrote, “something that surprises us and registers with us as funny or accurate or maybe amazing, maybe even amazingly beautiful,” whether that was a line, a scene, a performance that somehow had resonance. Audiences needed to understand that a low-grade picture like Wild in the Streets “connects with their lives in an immediate, even if a grossly frivolous way, and if we don’t go to movies for excitement, if, even as children, we accept the cultural standards of refined adults, if we have so little drive that we accept ‘good taste,’ then we will probably never really begin to care about movies at all.”
Pauline’s championing of the lowbrow—the good, vital lowbrow—was really a plea for some degree of emotional honesty on the part of the audience. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies,” she confessed. “I don’t trust any of the tastes of people who were born with such good taste that they didn’t need to find their way through trash.”
This was not a unique point of view among movie critics. Joseph Morgenstern shared it, as did Judith Crist, who often used the phrase “trash—but delicious,” to get through to her students at Columbia University. But Pauline took it in a new direction by pointing to the folly of the reverse perspective: the attempt to identify “art” in movies that were merely a smokescreen of directorial manipulation. She focused on some notable recent examples: Petulia , The Graduate, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—all critically acclaimed box-office hits. She regarded Petulia as a pitiful attempt to take advantage of the pessimism and alienation that Americans had come to feel in the turmoil of the 1960s, and dismissed it as “obscenely self-important.” Kubrick’s 2001, with its view of the blissful potential of space, where anything was possible, rendering the petty existence of life on Earth irrelevant, was “a celebration of cop-out” and fundamentally an expression of the oversize ego of its creator. She felt that, like many directors, Kubrick had fallen into the trap of the Big Idea, and along the way, he had abandoned his early promise (The Killing, Paths of Glory) and had come “to think of himself as a myth-maker.” The ultimate, redeeming value of trash, she argued in her summing up, was that it leaves us wanting, hoping for more—“Trash has given us an appetite for art.”
In October 1968 she had had an opportunity to test these theories when Twentieth Century–Fox sneaked into release a little movie called Pretty Poison , a psychological thriller about a bizarre loner (Anthony Perkins) who impresses a young girl (Tuesday Weld) by telling her that he’s a CIA agent; the twist is that the girl is much more disturbed than he is. Pretty Poison showed some of the influence of Bonnie and Clyde. (The tag line for the movie was “She’s such a sweet girl. He’s such a nice boy. They’ll scare the hell out of you.”) Fox hated the film and wanted to cut it drastically. But Richard Zanuck, who had taken over from his father as head of the studio, pointed out that