Pauline Kael on the lies political movies tell

Crippled as art by a liberal stereotype

The long-time and very influential movie critic, especially in the years (1968 to 1991), she reviewed movies for The New Yorker after making her name in other magazines, Pauline Kael championed new American directors like Martin Scorcese and Robert Altman, and international directors like Bergman, Kurosawa, and Godard. She could be very critical of popular movies and often examined the movies as expressions of the culture. This is taken from her essay “Movies, the Desperate Art,” the introduction to her book The Age of Movies, which she wrote in 1956 and revised in 1959.

Our films are stuffed with good intentions. . . . The themes favored by the serious audience in the thirties and forties — race relations and mob violence — are perfectly good themes, but treatment of them in conformity with the moral and social aims of conscientious people bleached the interest out. The morally awakened audience banished the early subhuman racial stereotypes from the screen; they developed their own stereotypes — which they must know to be lies and yet feel are necessary lies. . . .

It is the enlightened message, e.g., Gentleman’s Agreement, that people must be educated into tolerance; prejudice is wrong. Any motives indicated for the prejudice must be superficial or wrongheaded, so that the prejudiced character can be exposed, if not to himself, at least to the audience.

At the lowest level in Its a Big Country (a bottom-grade big picture) the Jewish soldier was the usual Hollywood boy next door, and the woman’s hostility toward him was the product of sheer ignorance; we left her enlightened by the recognition that he was exactly like the boy next door, only better, and she was about to correspond with his mother.

At a more complex level in Crossfire the Jew-hater was a fanatic who never learned; but what the audience saw was once again the liberal stereotype: the murdered Jew was a decorated war hero. (Suppose the murdered man was a draft dodger, or a conscientious objector, would the audience then feel no sting, would the fanatic have been justified in killing him?)

In John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock (one of the few reasonably good films to come out of Hollywood this year) the pattern is the same: the period is 1945 and the victim of the townspeople is a murdered Japanese farmer — this time it is the victim’s son (killed in action) who is the decorated war hero.

By a quota system, war films admitted carefully selected minority representatives, clean-cut Jewish and Negro soldiers whose participation in the national defense apparently gave them a special claim to equality over and above mere membership in the human species. Can it be that even in liberal thinking there is a stigma which can be rubbed off only if minority characters behave heroically? . . .

How effective, one wonders, are the “necessary” lies of well-meaning people? . . . Behind the pressures that destroy the thematic possibilities in race relations (and similar pressures obtain in sex relations) is the fear that some portions of the public are not intelligent enough to understand that if one Jew is pictured as aggressive, this does not mean that all are aggressive; or if one Negro pulls a knife in a fight, all will; or, for that matter, if one dentist overcharges, all do. . . .

Truth is feared most of all in the visualization of sex relations. The presumption is that romantic models of happiness are less dangerous than truth, that if youngsters saw in films the same kind of problems they experience and see all about them, they would be “misled” into believing that human relations are often difficult, painful and unsatisfactory, that society is unwilling to consider the problems of adolescents, and that the impetus for divorce is not an absurd, unmotivated quarrel which will be patched up in the last reel (Phffft!) but a miserable impasse.

These lies are certainly more dangerous than truth; the split between the romantic glorifications of love, marriage and family life and our actual mores adds to the perplexity and guilt of those whom the films seek to protect.

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