MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > Pauline Kael On "Why Movies Are So Bad"....

Pauline Kael On "Why Movies Are So Bad"....and (Separately) On Psycho


In another thread discussing Pauline Kael, swanstep found this:

@ecarle. I just found Kael incidentally reviewing Alien in her 'Why Movies are So Bad The Numbers' essay:

It would be very convincing to say that there's no hope for movies—that audiences have been so corrupted by television and have become so jaded that all they want are noisy thrills and dumb jokes and images that move along in an undemanding way, so they can sit and react at the simplest motor level.

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I found two books that followed up on Kael's discussion above (with rebuttal from a movie executive) and in the same book, I found Kael's most detailed reaction to Psycho( a movie that came out long before she became a critic; it was a rememberance.

I got these from an anthology of Kael writings (mainly from the New Yorker) called "For Keeps," but the opening salvo is from former United Artists executive Steven Bach, in his book "Final Cut" (1985) about how Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" almost sank that studio and lost Bach(and other execs) their jobs:

From Final Cut by Steven Bach:

"I pulled the shiny green folder from my script bag. Inside (my secretary) had clipped an article two or three weeks old from the New Yorker: Pauline Kael, answering her own question "Why Are the Movies So Bad?" with "The Numbers." Oversimplifying every step of the way, she trashed the conglomerates ..that owned the movie companies. Her sweeping denunciations seemed unlikely to lighten the mood of the meeting(with execs) I was attending. ..unless I was interested in letting Pauline Kael guide corporate policy. The strength of Kael's argument, possibly even in its correctness, precluded my using it."

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Though this writing in some ways attacked Kael ,it in other ways supported it. So when KAEL wrote HER review of this book ("Final Cut" -- and I recommend it), she both smacked Steven Bach around AND praised him a bit. Her final paragraph in the review:

BEGIN:

"I admire the senstitivity and taste that Steven Bach shows in this book, but these are not the qualities that make a studio head. Whether artists have self-discipline or not, executives are supposed to be disciplined people with the strength and the smarts to impose discipline on others when its needed. That's what they draw their astronomical salaries for."

So both Bach and Kael dumped on each other while also showing some respect to them. That's the way it should be.

In her Final Cut review, Kael also writes this: "The book is a short course in the realpolitick of how projects come to be accepted:; it is set in a cutthroat business where betrayal is the rule, not the exception."

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THAT quote makes more sense when you realize that Kael could not get ANY of her projects accepted in her Paramount job, because they brought her out TO reject her.

BTW, the funniest moment in Final Cut is when UA finally sends a tough lawyer out to the Heaven's Gate location to tell "artiste director" Michael Cimino that he will be PERSONALLY responsible for cost overruns. Cimino says he can finish the movie on time "now" -- and yells out "Ask Clint!" He means Clint Eastwood, who let Cimino direct "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot" but told him near the end of production: "there are three days left on the production schedule. But I'm leaving tonight. So you gotta film three days in one." Which Cimino did and could NOW do on Heaven's Gate, sure. The lawyer's response is brutal: "We are sad to see that it took our studio months to convince you to do what Mr. Eastwood got you to do in a day."

CONT

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Kael on Psycho:

(In a long 1978 essay called "Fear of Movies"):

"One film that shocked me in a way that made me feel it was a borderline case of immorality -- Hitchcock's Psycho, which, because of the director's cheerful complicity with the killer, had a sadistic glee I just couldn't quite deal with. It was hard to deal with the joke after having been put in the position of being stabbed to death in the motel shower. The shock stayed with me to the degree that I remember it whenever I'm in a motel shower. Doesn't everybody? It was a good dirty joke, though, even if we in the audience were its butt. I wouldn't have wanted to see Psycho that first time alone in a theater(and I sometimes have a slight queasiness if I'm by myself late at night watching a horror movie on TV). But that's what a theatrical experience is about: sharing this terror , feeling the safety of others around you, being able to laugh and talk together about how frightened you were as you leave."

END

Well, OK. She says a lot in there, but certainly zeroes in on the acknowledged reason for Psycho's fame: everybody takes a shower sometime. And yes -- there USED TO BE great audience involvement, all together, in the great event horror movies like Psycho, The Exorcist, Jaws, and Alien -- but it sure seems like that has gone away modernly.

CONT

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Her key point about "the director's cheerful complicity with the killer" was echoed, (copycatted?) in critic David Thomson's assessment of Frenzy for his book "Have You Seen..."), which I got right here:

"Far from a work of nostalgia, or a fond tribute to England, this is a piece of grotesque cinema, trying to be offensive and leaving us with the idea that Hitch feels uncomfortably close to his killer."

"Cheerful complicity with the killer" AND "uncomfortably close to his killer." What do Kael and Thomson MEAN here? Do they really get it? Hitchcock cast Norman Bates as handsome Anthony Perkins and made sure he was sweet and shy and "nice"(on the surface ONLY) and had his writer and actor create Bob Rusk as a cheery, extroverted "friend of everyone" and ended up putting the audience in an interesting place to be sure: LIKING the killer (on the surface only) but only until the killer was revealed AS the killer(at which point, early in Frenzy, late in Psycho, all identification goes away.)

I think Hitchcock simply knew and liked -- as carried on to Hannibal Lecter today -- that the villain has the best part and attracts us on general principles.

And I think Hitchcock felt QUITE bad for the VICTIMS in his psycho killer movies -- you felt THEIR pain, and the cruelty and arbitrary nature of their violent deaths.

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"Cheerful complicity with the killer" AND "uncomfortably close to his killer." What do Kael and Thomson MEAN here?
This is a cheap-shot/slur urged against almost every horror director at times: that only someone who felt tempted by horrific behavior themselves could be interested in spending money and time simulating such behaviors in detail in a film.

But this is just wrong. People can be interested in horrific topics for all sorts of reasons, including just having what they fear most (about life or people generally, not just about themselves) as a creative lodestar. Of course, just occasionally someone with actual psychopathic tendencies does end up in the movie business just as they can end up anywhere else. One of Chabrol's key collaborators (the writer for 14 of his films, and all the most sensational and cruellest/most merciless ones) was a guy called Paul Gegauff. This link has the background about him:
https://www.a-rabbitsfoot.com/editorial/film/on-paul-gegauff/
Everyone who knew Gegauff knew he was doomed to explode and end in violence and so he did. Anyhow, I love Chabrol's Gegauff films but it is clarifying to know that their cruelty has an authentic magnetic, badboy, sicko as its source. You *feel* like you're walking on the wild side with those films (including Les Bonnes Femmes from the year of Psycho) and so you are. Chabrol+Gegauff is a more apt target of Kael's and Thomson's insinuations than Hitch.

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A well-written essay. I can't boast such writing skills. But I can visit site https://essayusa.com/ and ask for help in writing. Which helps me during my studies.

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Which essay?

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"END", "BEGIN", "END", "BEGIN"

That's what the quotation marks are for. Just let them do their job. They don't need help.

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