It was an ordinary Sunday morning and I was getting ready for church when my dad announced that “some woman named Aaliyah” had died in a plane crash. About a week later, I had just arrived home from an arduous school day and my dad called me from work to tell me that “your favorite person just died. Pauline Kael.” Even when the great actor Jack Lemmon passed away a few months ago, I wasn’t burdened by the same sense of loss.
I remember first hearing of this talented young star, Aaliyah, when I was living overseas. A friend of mine lent me the album One in a Million, which the singer released when she was in her late teens, and it was different from the kind of R&B I was hearing on Asian MTV. It wasn’t soft; the title track kind of disturbed me because the dark and overcast production, which reminded me of a horror flick or film noir, was rubbing up against the devotional, unexceptional lyrics. Aaliyah’s voice wasn’t impressive; it was correct. Celine Dion was bombarding radio and television and here was a performer who held back, and this ice princess was a sexy vocalist. Even better than “One in a Million” were the equally cool and ominous reprimand “If Your Girl Only Knew” and the swoony, shimmering “4 Page Letter,” all of which were written by Missy Elliot and Timbaland - Aaliyah’s Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and today’s imaginative hip-hop saviors.
I don’t own the album now but I remember it falling to a sickening low unworthy of the girl coming out of the speaker. At track sixteen, someone decided to stick in a Diane Warren song for good measure, one that makes “If I Could Turn Back Time” and “Because You Loved Me” sound like classics. The one thing “The One I Gave My Heart To” did was illuminate Aaliyah’s strengths and her uniqueness by showing how bad she was at the ordinary; she wasn’t good enough, or, I think, was too good to sing what the well-endowed pop divas were singing. She and her producers had already developed a style, and she was showing more maturity than even Janet Jackson did with the fabulous Control, and certainly more wisdom and intelligence than drama queens like Celine or Mariah.
She wasn’t a tremendous artist, admittedly, and her movie soundtrack singles – “Journey to the Past” from Anastasia, “Are You That Somebody?” from Dr. Doolittle, and “Try Again” from Romeo Must Die (her acting debut) – generally bored me, save for the latter film’s rarely-heard “Come Back in One Piece.” She died before I could buy her self-titled album, released in July 2001 to rave reviews and entering at the second slot on the Billboard charts, but my friend burned it for me the other day and I can’t get it out of my CD player. It has no intros or little dialogue interruptions and, for an urban record, that’s refreshing. The songs are experiment-happy, indirect, and usually very successful in what they ambitiously attempt. You could argue that Aaliyah, the album, is completely the work of producers, and you would be wrong because I can’t imagine anyone else interpreting the material as precisely as this singer does, and she seems very involved with the people she has chosen to work with. I’m not sure when contemporary R&B albums started trying for the cinematic feel but I’m guessing, for the past decade, it began with Janet Jackson’s ambitious dance epics like Rhythm Nation 1814 and janet., and continuing with The Velvet Rope and her new All For You, all of which have their own individual atmospheres and popularized those annoying interludes between songs. The thing is, Janet’s concept albums were based on self-righteous conceits like the state of the world, sexual blossoming, and soul-searching, which never held up as well as the best of her songs.
And the return of focus to songs, as opposed to concept album flourishes, is what I enjoyed in Aaliyah’s last album. At 22, she was equaling, and sometimes surpassing, the usually reliable Janet’s new material, like the likable and formulaic godsend “Someone to Call My Lover,” even though Aaliyah’s tangential tracks have none of the same lean meanness. Neither Janet nor Aaliyah has a very strong voice but both have sultry capabilities that work in uptempo environments better than a powerhouse like Mary J. Blige, perhaps because the energy of the beat and the energy of the singer are just too much. “We Need a Resolution,” the lead single off of Aaliyah’s album, doesn’t even begin to encompass what she has to offer this time around. On that semi-stellar cut, her thin and very effective delivery is staccato on the verses, as if the words were punctuation marks, and her overdubs ebb and flow all over the album. On “Rock the Boat,” what was supposed to be her next video and single, her voice turns into liquid, its simplicity becoming sensual and steamy through a chorus of harmonizing, multi-tracked Aaliyahs. It’s a hotter statement than anything Britney Spears has done, visually or musically. (I still had some hope for Britney while I watched the miserable MTV Video Music Awards. She moans over the refrain to her best song yet, “I’m a Slave 4 U,” which is titled like a Prince number and sort of sounds like a lackluster impersonation. However, Spears’ work is so forced. Taking a cue from Madonna, who urged the teeny boppers to get more provocative, and Aaliyah herself, who fondled snakes in the “We Need a Resolution” video, she ends up going through a cold, limb-thrusting dance routine and bad lip-synching in an unbelievably tacky jungle setting.)
Aaliyah’s ballads here are better and less conventional than before. “Never No More,” which is in Janet’s “This Time”-and-“What About”-domestic-abuse vein almost seamlessly segues into the only Elliot-Timbaland collaboration on the album, “I Care 4 U.” Both songs gradually build to numerous little climaxes, and the singer never stoops to belting, instead aiming for something like the old school slow jam workouts and jazz chanteuserie. Aaliyah has grown immeasurably since 1996 but has kept her sophisticated tone, and her material has harder edges, saltier atmospheres, and more opportunities for her to play around with her talents. For closure, she delivers a noisy homage to The Velvet Rope’s obsession with technological sounds, clicks, and chimes; Madonna’s chilly, driving, and cluttered Erotica productions; and, being a fan of Nine Inch Nails, she incorporates imitations of the bleak industrial genre and Trent Reznor’s furious lyrics. “What If” turns out to be intensely exciting and, perhaps, the most fun track of the album’s fifteen. (When I was in New York City this past spring, I bought Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and felt it evoked the loneliness of city streets more than anything I’d ever heard; Aaliyah’s album reminded me, for some strange reason, of that tough, potty-mouthed indie rocker. “What If” is the excess of Times Square coupled with sexual-political complaining and a really bizarre bridge.) Reveling in jagged, fascinating sonic wonderworlds, Aaliyah sounds like she could play her role as a vampire in Queen of the Damned beautifully, like she would borrow from the personas of Hedy Lamarr and Chrissie Hynde because she’s cool like that (from what I’ve heard, she did complete that film before she died).
Perhaps the best song is the bitter break-up one, “Those Were the Days,” which distills all the anger and frustration and sadness of an affair’s end into two melodically perfect lines: “this is the end of the road/but I still remember…” (Erykah Badu opted for the suite effect, which would have been amazingly moving if it had been trimmed down to the intro’s stunning Billie Holiday mimicry.) The sound of her music is somewhere in the middle of psychedelia and The Matrix, but Aaliyah’s voice is pure and free of artifice, and maybe that’s why she’s hardly ever gotten flak for the sexual lyrics she sings, or the salacious way in which she sings them. Beneath all of it we heard a genuine young woman with knowledge and virtues, and her sexiness was never cheap or kiddish. Aaliyah seems like she could appeal to adults just as much as, if not more than, she does to young listeners. More than even the most gifted neo-soul artists, I think she channeled the erotic spirits of Marvin Gaye and Al Green, a smarter version of Diana Ross’ innocent chirp, and Karen Carpenter’s unadulterated ease, and the emotional immediacy of their music. And unlike the brilliant earth-mother Badu, or crooners like D’Angelo and Maxwell, or, God forbid, India.Arie, she never sounded derivative; she was steering R&B into a direction so far away from classic soul while still keeping the heart of soul music at the heart of hers. For us, losing her is, probably, like music lovers losing Buddy Holly in the late ‘50s.
Pauline Kael, the iconic critic of The New Yorker from the late ‘60s to the early ‘90s, always kept the visceral heart of the movies absolutely clear in her writing. But, when she died, NBC and CBS and ABC and CNN and all the newspapers never mourned her the way they did for Aaliyah. But she once said she believed criticism was an art, and I disagreed with her because I never thought it was an art to have an opinion. I can’t accept that things as inherent in human beings as feeling and thinking can be raised, or lowered, to that level (though, I suppose, art could be called intrinsic in human life). But she majored in philosophy, and, in her case, and in the case of other great critics like James Agee and Jonathan Rosenbaum, things are different because writing is most certainly an art, and she’s one of the greatest writers I know of. And like all great artists, she was reacting to the world around her and giving birth to something else out of that encounter. I think she’s an American legend. She retired in a nice home in Massachusetts and passed at the ripe old age of 82, and even though she’s gone, it feels like she’s still a living force in movies. Maybe this is because her reviews are still so vital, or maybe it’s because no one cares about movie critics enough to feel sad for them or find out about the most influential and, for me, the most incredible one who ever lived. Today, people’s idea of a review is a wimpy little sentence in a Leonard Maltin guide, currently the most famous representation of all that is bad and objective in criticism. We have books that are written by staffs, not by people, as if movies affected everyone in the same way and as if feeling were unbiased, not individual.
The media coverage is expectedly light on this event, but I feel like screaming out to the world that this woman deserves to be a household name. Whenever people talk about Aaliyah and how wonderful she was, there’s a healing power about that kind of sensationalism. Misery loves company. But fake grieving wouldn’t do Miss Kael any justice and would be the antithesis of the kind of journalism she wrote. Her critiques were unprofessional; she said what she felt because she understood that movies were all about feeling. To my knowledge, we don’t have a critic like her today. So many of them are summarizers with no food for thought. Most people despise critics and, considering the kind of worthless, indistinctive examples they’re exposed to, who could blame them? I read Pauline Kael for both her insights and her style; only a few of the hundreds of workers in the field have either. She wasn’t writing reports for the New York Times, and she didn’t use dull, prim prose like Bosley Crowther or Vincent Canby. For her many admirers (and probably her detractors too), her reviews never put you to sleep. They expressed the excitement of the best films or scolded the dull or stupid ones to pieces. It was as if, through her style, she was telling us that the movie experience was the most awake one out there.
The thing I fear is that I will become one of the infamous Paulettes, reviewers devoted to imitating her use of slang (I still don’t know who these people are). I adore the way she described actors, and explored a movie entirely through the cast, and bits and pieces in my Moulin Rouge review reflected my love for this effective antidote to the auteur theory. I described Nicole Kidman’s face as “sickly and drugged-up but in her love scenes with McGregor, she’s raging against the dying of the light…” Kael gave me a new eye for what actors do and I’m still trying to develop it. In her review of Moonstruck, she wrote of Cher: “When she lets her hair down a huge dark mass of crinkly tendrils floats about her tiny face. (What a prop!)” While some shy away from describing an actor’s beauty, Pauline enjoyed it. She loved interesting faces, beautiful bodies, illuminating expressions, good hair, nice cheekbones, glamorous eyes. Of Steve Martin’s comic abilities, she wrote that he “doesn’t feed off the audience’s energy–he instills energy in the audience. And he does it by drawing us into a conspiratorial relationship with him.” Her lovely love-letter essay on Cary Grant, “The Man from Dream City,” is nearly thirty pages as collected in her For Keeps anthology, and she turns all those romantic movies of his into flirtatious sexual interplay between him and his costars. She contrasts him with a more macho movie star hunk, calling Clark Gable an “intensely realistic sexual presence” you don’t fool around with, and proclaiming Grant a woman’s “dream date,” a man who probably had “sex with civilized grace.”
When Andrew Sarris wrote The American Cinema and brought the auteur theory to this side of the Atlantic, Kael responded with “Circles and Squares,” a rather vicious dissection of Sarris’ explanation. She examines it premise by premise, making a fool of the man and even criticizing his writing skill (Sarris wrote “élan of the soul” and she hissed “Where else should élan come from? It’s like saying ‘a digestion of the stomach.’”) Often she’s hilarious; at other times she’s unfair. She suggests that auteurists prefer trash to art films, or that they morph trash into art; maybe I’m wrong, but I think today’s critical climate has changed and the auteurists go for the foreign flicks and the polar opposites go for American Beauty. But she so frequently hits the mark; perhaps these people really love movies but they feel the need to understand them on refined terms. She’s a riot when she’s derisive; she debunked intellectuals like Kracauer, smartly suggested that “the educated audience often uses ‘art’ films in much the same self-indulgent way as the mass audience uses the Hollywood ‘product,’” didn’t seem to care very much for the thea-tuh, panned arthouse classics like Last Year at Marienbad and Blow-Up and pretty much all of Stanley Kubrick’s post-Lolita films, and labeled The Sound of Music “The Sound of Money” and was soon thereafter let go from McCall’s. My personal favorite is the absolutely nasty “Replying to Listeners,” back from the days when she was reviewing for the radio station KPFA. She goes through a number of funny letters and attacks the pomposity of their writers. “Dear Miss Kael,” some manly man wrote, “Since you know so much about the art of the film, why don’t you spend your time making it? But first you will need a pair of balls.” Pauline then goes on to name him Mr. Dodo (for his two attributes), tells him to stop thinking with his genital jewels, and answers back to his age old question with the classic “If you think it so easy to be a critic, so difficult to be a poet or a painter or film experimenter, may I suggest you try both? You may discover why there are so few critics, so many poets.”
It is this kind of excitement that you rarely find in today’s periodicals. Shoeshine, arguably her most heartrending review, is a thing of beauty, a passionate reaction, the kind of reaction movies are supposed to provoke in you when they’re made the right way. She links the movie experience to personal experience the way Rosenbaum often links it to politics and culture. You know who she is through the way she reacts to art. She writes of ducking into a movie theater after a lover’s quarrel “in a state of incomprehensible despair.” In this piece she captures the satisfying masochism of watching sad movies, and the romance and comfort a movie can supply. She recalls overhearing a girl telling her date, “Well I don’t see what was so special about that movie.” Kael asks in alienated movie-love misery, “If people cannot feel Shoeshine, what can they feel?” She was about feeling first, thinking afterward, and she gave this to her readers; she could be swept up by a trashy movie, and she wouldn’t deny it, and she would explore those emotions. She believed so much in the visceral, immediate effect of movies, and the importance of that effect, that she claims she never saw a movie more than once. In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” it seemed like she was drawing a line between the dignified and the thoughtless, but throughout her career, she was really reconciling their differences, putting them on a level plain, and finding pleasure, greatness, and emotion in both. The New York Times writers churned out reviews as if they were programmed to do so, as if they never responded to movies. You get her exhilaration at discovering new talent and new waves, like Coppola or Spielberg or Scorsese or Bonnie and Clyde or Nashville or Last Tango in Paris. Her vast knowledge was on display, couched in long, wordy, exuberant paragraphs; she loved to show it off, but never at the expense of honesty.
I discovered Pauline Kael at around the same time I discovered Ingmar Bergman; it was a coming-of-age stage for me, learning about this whole other world of filmmaking that I never knew existed. It only strengthened my love for the movies and I began to look around in the Film Books section at Borders. These two gigantic volumes, For Keeps and 5001 Nights at the Movies, caught my eye. I bought the first because it had a lengthy review of Cries and Whispers, one of the Bergmans that changed my life and perspective. A few months later, I was reading an interview of her done for Newsweek’s special issue on the AFI’s list of the best films ever made. Pauline Kael will always end up in the hands of a movie lover at some point or another.
I always imagined her in old age as some really hip grandma, like Estelle Getty getting her groove on to Prince. In Lady Sings the Blues, she shows her knowledge of Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith and Aretha Franklin. In Stop Making Sense, she is able to talk about the progressive new-wave band Talking Heads. In a moving tribute, critic Stephanie Zacharek, a friend of Pauline’s, informs us that she had a thing for Elvis Costello, and I heard somewhere that she listened to Salt-N-Pepa. You never imagine an elderly person would know what’s currently going on in the arts, but she was stuck to her love for it, not to her age. Reading For Keeps (her original collections, titled with sexual double-entendres like I Lost it at the Movies and Taking It All In, have been mostly out-of-print), we get to travel with her through the ‘60s; then the ‘70s, which she calls the “golden age” of moviemaking; all the way to the commercialism of the ‘80s and early ‘90s. She never seems out-of-touch with the times. She never allowed herself to sound jaded, though she was frequently annoyed. This must be the hardest thing for a movie critic to accomplish: the ability to keep that “movie love.” She kept it till the very end; critic Michael Sragow said he talked to her a few hours before she died about director Lamont Johnson and she commented, “Isn’t he amazing?”
I think of her as a rock star; she wrote as if she were venting, using her pen like Hendrix did his guitar, with all the heart and brain and energy within her. During that fruitful time of American popular art in the ‘60s and ‘70s, she either fueled or fed off of the rebellious voices of rock critics Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer. She showed us that she loved writing just as much as the movies, and you knew she loved to talk by her witty conversational style. Though she has her enemies and haters, I’ve always thought she would be popular with the masses because she’s so fun to read, so vibrant and alive. When I heard that she died, it was a sad finality for a fan’s fantasy: I would never get to meet her, or know what she thought of recent movies, or find out what her voice sounded like. The dual passion for her own craft and also the craft of filmmakers made her a creator dependent on other artists’ creations. But she was a creator; her reviews immediately taught me the possibilities of a field I hadn’t even begun to explore. She was as much of an artist as the filmmakers she wrote about. I cherish her work the way I do my most beloved movies.
By Andrew Chan [SEPTEMBER 9, 2001]