Lucy Sante on Pauline Kael, Film Criticism, and Pop Culture

Yeah.

I kind of want to circle around that in this conversation because it's something I've thought a lot about in reading.

I love nonfiction.

I love criticism.

And I deeply believe in it.

And there is something that happens when you read someone's work, especially this kind of criticism altogether, like in a book or read it for years, that sometimes it's really fabulous and sometimes it's like kind of...

And so this is ostensibly a review of a collection of Pauline Kael's criticism that came out at this time, which is I think she refers to being nearly 600 pages long.

Yes, I used to own a copy.

And so the opening gambit, just to give people a sense of it, the job of the regular daily, weekly, or even monthly critic resembles the work of the serious intermittent critic who writes only when he has asked to or genuinely moved to in limited ways and only for a limited period of time.

So already there's like a pretty tough, I would say, judgment in terms of what we're going to be dealing with.

How does that strike you as a...

As somebody who has functioned, as you just said, in a kind of weekly way, but also as an intermittent freelance critic.

I think it's completely

fair.

Yeah, I mean, I actually remember one time, 90s, probably 90s, when the New York Times had a vacancy and they made an open call for a film critic.

And I thought about it for about three seconds.

I thought, wow, great job.

And, you know, I could probably move to a better apartment.

But then, you know, no better way to kill your soul, you know.

Yeah.

So going forward, she kind of does this.

I mean, it's a very subtle and it's actually interesting the way you talked about it in relationship to her legal education story.

It's a very subtle setup because it's like establishing why Pauline Kael is important and how important she has been and all the things...

And she says, you know, I myself was like a fan and I would read it.

And it's all this kind of...