Volume 28, Number 1 · February 5, 1981
The Lights Go Down
By Jennifer Dunning
In response to The Perils of Pauline
(August 14, 1980)
To the Editors:
Putting aside the question of how considered, fair, valid, tasteful, or even important the film criticism of Pauline Kael may now be, as it is represented by When the Lights Go Down, Renata Adler's review [NYR, August 14] seems almost as good an example of disingenuousness as any she claims for Kael.
After reeling through pages of phrases ripped—with commendable assiduity—from the context and rhythms of the reviews under discussion, one arrives at summary statements that rival Kael's reported excesses for spite, their tone of disappointed generosity notwithstanding. What else is one to think of Adler's observation that Kael assumes an audience of film-ignorants for her writing. Or that The New Yorker, an "institution of unique civility and patience," never fires staff writers and, besides, no one else [at The New Yorker] want[ed] Kael's job anyway. As to her claim that the unwarranted length of Kael's New Yorker pieces has led to the "overwhelming" of those by "serious intermittent writers," that phenomenon is hardly limited to The New Yorker though Adler has, apparently, escaped it.
Writing of Kael's cruder sorties, Adler can "hardly imagine a reader who would sit through another line." Moral passion aside, it's an easy syntactic switch to turn this into the kind of presumptuous rhetoric for which she attacks Kael. Much of Adler's prose is surprisingly convoluted, considering that she writes of style here. But one may not balk. After surviving the "awful frenzy" of When the Lights Go Down, Adler writes, "it becomes hard—even in reviewing Ms. Kael's work—to write in any other way; or, in the typographic clamor, to detect and follow a genuine critical statement." What a shameless disclaimer!
Adler's bestowing of a benediction on the dance critic Arlene Croce for her "ability to describe" is, by the way, enough of a puzzler to cast doubt on her critical judgment. No one familiar enough with Croce's work and the dances about which she writes to be entitled to such pronouncements, well-deserved though praise may be, could find her essays outstandingly descriptive nor, blessedly, has that ever seemed Croce's intention.
Kael may not be the critic she once was. But the shrill, almost parodic tone of Adler's review is far from the consideration of critical "prose and the relation between writers and readers" hinted at in the review. Too bad Adler's essay did not yield the kind of substantial argument one might have expected given, particularly, its length, the kind of measured reflections that would have provoked more than a literary fracas to liven up the summer.
Jennifer Dunning
New York City
