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

In the second season premiere of Private Life, host Jarrett Earnest is joined by the writer and critic Lucy Sante to discuss Pauline Kael’s career, pop culture writing, and Sante’s writing for the Review, where she has been a frequent contributor since the 1980s. The conversation focuses on “The Perils of Pauline” (published in the magazine’s August 14, 1980, issue), Renata Adler’s blistering assessment of Kael’s film criticism; the legacy of staff film critics; and Sante’s relationship with popular music from Elvis to The Velvet Underground.  

Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (1991), Six Sermons for Bob Dylan (2024), and the memoir I Heard Her Call My Name (2024). Her first essay for the Review, “Relic” (published in the December 17, 1981, issue), reviewed Albert Goldman’s controversial 1981 biography, Elvis. Sante taught writing and the history of photography at Bard College for twenty-four years. 

Next week’s episode will be a recording of Adler’s “The Perils of Pauline” read by the actress Holland Taylor. You can read the essays discussed in this episode with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty print issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963. 

 

 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm your host, Jarrett Earnest, and today I'm speaking with Lucy Sante. Sante is a long-time contributor to The Review, beginning with her essay, Relic, published in the December 17th, 1981 issue, which takes on an unscrupulous biography of Elvis by Albert Goldman, and which we talk about in this conversation. But our primary focus is an incendiary essay that came out the year before. Called The Perils of Pauline by Renata Adler, which takes to task the beloved and long-standing film critic Pauline Kael analyzing her collection, When the Lights Go Out, of her film criticism from 1975 to 1980. The Peril of Paulin was published in the August 14th 1980 issue of The Review, and I'm happy to say that next week's episode will be a reading of it in its entirety by the actor Holland Taylor. Before we dive into this kind of vivisection that Renata Adler does of Pauline Kael, maybe it would be helpful if you could lay out the cultural position that Pauline Kael occupied because I don't think there's anyone quite like that now.

Lucy Sante: Yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: And for people who don't know, how did you relate to her criticism and how would you understand what she represented at this moment?

Lucy Sante: Okay, so she came into view in, I mean, she started in the West Coast in the early 60s, but by the time she came to New York, I don't have the exact date, but it was like mid to late 60s. And it was a movie time and New York was a movey town and there were all these critics. You know, there was Vincent Canby at the New York Times who was reliably sober-sighted and pretty good in general. There was Andrew Saris at the Village Voice, who was an acolyte of the New Wave and the Politique des Outreurs and all that stuff. He knew his business, absolutely. I took his class at Columbia on silent movies. He was great. He was a little doctrinaire, and he kind of stiff in the writing. You really saw that by contrast when he got married to Molly Haskell and compared her writing to his. Arthur Winston had been there since the dawn of time. The New York Post, John Simon, I think, did some film reviewing at the time. There were all these critics. And back in the day when there were house critics, which there barely are anymore, there's people at the Times, I like Manolo Dargis, and I really like Richard Brody. Richard Broddy, of course, he's holding it down. And he's much better than the two critics before him. Anyway, so, you know, we do have some critics, but not like there used to be. It was this constant chatter. It was just constant, like, almost like, you know, it was almost like a sitcom. There were the movies, and then there were what the critics were saying about the movies. And I forgot, of course, my most, for me, most important critic of the period, who was Manny Farber, who by that point, by the time Pauline comes in, I think he's writing for, like Art Forum or something like that. So he's not exactly part of the conversation because he is writing for a much smaller sliver than these other critics. But I think he's got the best eye, the best sense of history, all that stuff. And Pauline Kael quickly established herself not only as a critical voice, but as a critical like voice with a capital V. She had her style, which was what the British call matey m-a-t-e-y that's how she was she was like on the next bar stool. And Rana Adler talks about the shrinkage in her vocabulary and her bag of ideas. And, you know, she came in with all these fresh new things and this fresh new voice, and the arteries quickly hardened and became cement. So after a while, you now, the Pauline Kael was lively in conversations of the 1960s by the 1970s. It was like. I mean, I don't want to make the wrong kind of metaphor here, but, you know, but it was something Republican about her, you know, that was the opinion and it does not budge. Anyway, whatever you thought of Pauline Kael, she was carved into the cultural Mount Rushmore of New York City at the time. You know, you did. She was just there. She was a major presence. She wasn't providing any surprises anymore, but You couldn't talk about a movie without referring to Pauline Kael's opinion.

Jarrett Earnest: So you enter New York Review of Books world in 1980, and your first piece is the piece on Elvis, which I wanna talk about. But could you maybe lay out a little bit the context for your relationship to this Renata Adler piece on Pauline Kael and what its appearance at the New York review at that time was like.

Lucy Sante: Well, I had just come in to, I don't know what, I don't know exactly when it came out, but I noticed it was published on August 14th, 1980. I started at the review in the mailroom in May. So I was in the mailbox when it come in, and I remember, you know, it was like a bomb going off. I was not like working for Barbara at the time, so I was a little more removed than I would have been a year later. So I didn't get to hear the scuttlebutt really, But I remember, like, everybody was like... Just stupefied by the piece you know and now i can remember maybe you can tell me i remember that around this time ronada was at yale law school getting her jd is this as is that before or after or during.

Jarrett Earnest: I don't know the timeline on that.

Lucy Sante: Yeah, because I remember, I don't know if it was my thought or I heard it from Barbara, the idea that she had sharpened her legal attack. This is a legal brief that she's written about polling Kael. You see the legal mind in there covering every topic one by one. Of course, I drank this in.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, let's get into it. Let's start. I mean, so a little bit of the background on Renata Adler, which makes this so weird. I don't know what her personal relationship is like with anyone involved, but I do know that she worked as of a daily film critic for the New York Times in the late 60s for about a year and a half or 14 months. And so has the experience of being under that kind of deadline pressure. And that's. Sort of the way that this piece opens, which is to say like the predicament of the critic who is churning something out every week and the kind of impossibility of doing that for a long period of time without basically what she says is becoming a hack.

Lucy Sante: Becoming a robot. She mentions John Simon who's a really like deeply learned guy who like knew everything and he started becoming a you know maybe a weekly critic for New York magazine maybe and he just turned into a um a pan monster you know that's that's what he was famous for is just putting everything down it just it was a reflex you know he didn't need to think about anymore. I mean, I've never been a daily critic or even a weekly one, but I was a monthly critic. And you know, I get it. Different set of pressures there because I had, you know I'd see 30 or 40 movies and then have to pick one or two to write about. And it's a different, very different sort of pressure. But even so, once you get used to the sound of your own voice doing a certain kind of thing, either you have to move away or find some other solution.

Jarrett Earnest: 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 all together in a book or read it for years, that sometimes it's really fabulous and sometimes it's like kind of disturbing.

Lucy Sante: And

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

Lucy Sante: Yes, I used to own a car paint.

Jarrett Earnest: 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 gonna be dealing with. How does that strike you as a? As someone who has functioned, as you just said, in a kind of weekly way, but also as an intermended.

Lucy Sante: I think it's completely fair, you know, 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

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah Um, so going forward, she kind of does this, I mean, it's a very subtle and I, it's actually interesting the way you talked about it in relationship to her legal education, it a very subtile setup because it's like establishing why Pauline Kael is important and how important she has been and all the things and she just says, you know, I myself was like a fan and I would read it and it's all this kind of. I wouldn't say sneaky, but very subtle setup for a thorough dissection. And so I would love to hear like, what strikes you particularly about the kind of analysis and the way in which the analysis is enacted on Kael as a critic here.

Lucy Sante: Well, let me refer to my notes. Indeed. But this is a good one.

Jarrett Earnest: But this is exactly the kind of talk we have notes for.

Lucy Sante: You know, I mean, most interesting to me is when she goes after the rhetorical stuff, the language. I mean if there's any place where I think she goes overboard is maybe this we could do without a page of those rhetoric questions.

Jarrett Earnest: Oh, I definitely want to talk to you about that, yeah.

Lucy Sante: You know, she quickly establishes, you know, the major thing that, oh yeah, her fascinations, horror, violence, sex, and like alien invasion and the scatology, the violence, the implied violence and that rhetorical we use a thing which I mean, I, this was such an education. I never did that, especially I mean it crawls under my skin and bites whenever for watching. A critic talks about we, our response, we, you just want to shoot them, really. Oh, and then this, her slang, which isn't even really slang, it's just like really sloppy talk. And she doesn't, this is 1980, so it doesn't come up, but the fact that Pauline Kael is misogynist, really, you know. I mean, one of her big words is, horrish. Whoredom, or whore-like, or whatever, or sadism, and then these rhetorical questions, of which there are many. And, you know, the thing about them is that they're all kinds of rhetorically questions. You know, they don't just like hit one note, they're all over the spectrum, but they're usually in the interest of like, not having to say something outright, but kind of gift wrapping it.

Jarrett Earnest: In all of her very close reading of the language, like you said, she talks about the kinds of descriptions that she used, metaphorical descriptions, figurative language that she uses that all have to deal with objection and bodies and violence. And then the thing about this entire page of like 20 some rhetorical questions that she's pulled out of the review, it's like, have you ever bought a statue of a pissing cupid? Were these 435 prints processed in a sewer? Where was the director? Does the cavalry return? Who? Him? And after she does this extremely effective, even because it is annoying, you're annoyed by it continuing and it's giving you the experience of reading it, the 600 pages. And she draws at home when she returns to her own writing and says, and so on. It is difficult to convey the effect of hundreds of pages of these questions. Those which have answers, yes, no, what? I don't know, sweetie, you're the one who saw the movie. Badger the reader, who is courteously inclined to think when addressed with question marks into mindless degrading travesty of colloquy or dialectic. So first of all, I love that passage because that aside, it's like, I donno, sweetie. You're the who saw that movie is hilarious. But also it is pinpointing this thing, which is that they're geared toward a kind of coercion. And instead of generating thought of shutting down thought because it's presuming of course you agree, you know the answer to this and we agree because it is the same answer that I'm implying.

Lucy Sante: It's the discourse of power. And it makes me wonder at what point she first went to Hollywood and, you know, talked to big wigs and maybe sat in on story conferences because it's that kind of authoritarian, you, know, iron hand and velvet glove kind of stuff, but also kvetching, you now, where was the director? You can hear somebody in a screening room saying that, you know, she's just asserting her own power by this point. Seems to get an, I, I promised myself I wouldn't use this term, but Nevertheless, I can't help myself there's she takes a kind of Trumpian glee in this assertion of power

Jarrett Earnest: Pauline Kael uniquely among critics was really associated with creating a kind of extremely passionate advocacy.

Lucy Sante: For a

Jarrett Earnest: for a number of young directors that were her favorites and whose careers she really built up. And one of them being Brian De Palma.

Lucy Sante: I will never forgive her, Rita Brian De Palma.

Jarrett Earnest: Lay it on. I went back to read some of her writing on De Palma and actually after reading Adler's analysis, the idea that De Palme almost seems like it was invented for her, you know, for her particular interest.

Lucy Sante: Yeah, but

Jarrett Earnest: But what do you, you know, she was this huge supporter of De Palma until body double, actually until just when this comes out in 1980 and when she says like body double is terrible and whatever, whatever. And they have this huge falling out. But

Lucy Sante: Did he make dress to kill before or after that? Uh-huh.

Jarrett Earnest: She loved that.

Lucy Sante: I mean, every trans person in the world should burn Brian De Palma in effigy. And then so much of his... I've never been impressed by Brian De Palma. And the idea of putting him up with Scorsese, how could people have thought that? De Palme reuses Hitchcockian tropes over and over again. He's like a well-educated hack, And it's all ins- I mean he is an auteur because it's all in service of his own disturbed personality.

Jarrett Earnest: Well, in a way that that's basically what Adler is saying about Kael, but without putting too fine a point on it, it's very sophisticated where she's not saying like, she gets right to the edge of saying like this is this person's pathology where they have this deeply fucked up relationship to sex and violence and they're projecting it out on everyone else. She doesn't quite say that, but she lets us, she just lays it out and lets us. It's the same thing with the Palma. Although I, who never was interested in De Palma because it always seemed super trashy and maybe even like just actively bad, I think I've been rewatching them recently. Partly, I think the state of film and the culture is so bad that he now really does look like an artist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you're like, oh, okay.

Lucy Sante: All right, oh, what a what a pass we have come to.

Jarrett Earnest: Another thought that I had about this is I wanted to know, this particular piece is very interesting because Adler sets up film criticism as occupying a special place within the culture that doesn't presume a kind of specialized audience or vocabulary that you might have with like serious literature or art because everybody feels equally empowered and invested in films like it's a popular medium. And everybody is equal consumer of it. And I think that that actually positions criticism and the critic in a slightly different place than other forms of criticism. And because your own writing has had so much to do with popular culture or low forms, quote unquote, low forms of culture, I wonder how you related to Adler's argument and how it related to some of your own criticism when you started writing about things like, really trashy biographies of Elvis or John Lennon for the review.

Lucy Sante: Well, I mean, first of all, beyond popular culture or whatever, I've got to say that the two reviews I wrote for the review of Albert Goldman, the Elvis piece that was my very first piece in the magazine, and then a few years later, the one on John Lennon, but the Lennan especially, I was deeply, deeply instructed by Renaud Adler's. Argument and you know was like trying to break down every single way in which this book is a piece of shit

Jarrett Earnest: so that you can't escape it. Right, right. I mean, I actually found after reading this closely and going back and trying to read Kael, it's almost impossible. Because every single word, every gambit, every construction that she identifies is in every review. And in a way, it is like an ultimate work of criticism because it just demolishes or it completely transforms your ability to engage with its object ever again.

Lucy Sante: Outside of it.

Jarrett Earnest: So could we talk about the piece on Elvis? Cause that was your first piece for the review. And I'd love to know the story about how it came about. I mean, it seems like a thoroughly disreputable book, which feels like weird that it would even get the kind of serious attention that you gave it.

Lucy Sante: Okay, so I took my ex-girlfriend to the airport. She was going, she was moving to San Francisco and I was very, very depressed by this. And I was at Newark Airport and before getting on the bus, I bought a copy of Rolling Stone to try to just distract myself on the way home. And they had an excerpt from the Elvis biography. I wasn't expecting too much, But I was just. Outraged by what I read. I mean, it was just like so deeply unfair. I wasn't the world's biggest Elvis fan at any point, but I mean this was slander. And I knew, I was waiting for Barbara by this time, I knew that they'd send it out to three people. I know one of them was James Wolcott. I don't remember who the other two were. And they'd all it down and it was sitting there on the new arrivals cart and on a Friday I swiped it, took it home and wrote a review over the weekend and then put it on Barbara's desk on Monday morning. Whoa! And before that, I'd spent a couple of weeks reading back issues and trying to get the language into my bloodstream, the rhythms, you know, I read a lot, this was part of Barbara's tutelage. I figured out, I was talking to somebody the other day and I realized that I've You've probably read all of Edmund Wilson by this point, you know. That's a lot. And I'm a dropout. I'm well-educated in some areas, ignorant in other basic ones. I'm kind of self-invented in certain ways, even though I did go to an Ivy League school. And also, I'm from the working class. My father quit school at 14 to go to work in factories where he worked all his life. So I was always aware of a major social gulf between me. Pretty much everybody else. I mean, including my co-workers at The Review, who mostly came from upper middle-class families. And I had this interest in popular culture, a certain kind of popular culture. You know, I mean my mother always wanted me to go on Jeopardy and I could not go on jeopardy now because of my deep ignorance of popular cultural over the last 50 years or so, but you know. I still had like very firm footing in popular culture at the time and especially popular music. You know, I try to be a rock critic, but I'm really glad. I'm so glad that Rolling Stone never published my teenage efforts or I might have given up my career right then and there. But I did like writing about popular music and popular movies and stuff like that. And this was just a perfect opportunity. And it wasn't just my saying Here is a biography of Elvis who lived from 1937 to whatever. This was something with a point of view that I could grapple with. And I just wrote this thing kind of overnight. And the rest of my life began at that point, right?

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, it really has a structure that recalls the perils of Pauline because you break it down at the level of, it's not necessarily word by word the way the Adler does, but it has to do with the structure of the argument and the kind of conceits that are repeated over and over in terms of like how a certain idea gets shorthanded or how certain evidence get set up and alighted. At the end, what is so kind of moving is after kind of diagnosing, I think this happens in your piece on John Lennon too, which we'll get to, you then kind of do, after sort of analyzing the problems with the book, you then give your own version, like your own account of what's meaningful about Elvis as an artist and as a person. And I think that that's an aspect of this kind of writing. Especially about pop culture that's really important. And I think is a lot of the basis of your critique, which is like this guy has bad intentions. He's like doing this thing that is really not fair about who Elvis was and why people love it. And actually, if you don't identify with the culture of people for whom Elvis means something.

Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett Earnest: Then you really shouldn't be writing about him. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so in order to land a piece like this, you as a writer have to convey, like, okay, this is what this guy doesn't get. Right.

Lucy Sante: I was aware of Renate Adler's influence and I was aware, although I know absolutely nothing about the law, you know, but I was, but for me it was also the Jesuits. I learned how to argue from the Jesuits and it's very legalistic and rational and progresses from point to point and you move around the spectrum hitting every point as you go, you know, so that was important too.

Jarrett Earnest: So that first piece for the review is 1981. And then in 1988, you write a piece on Albert Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon. And this is a kind of, in some ways, it's like the pair with the Elvis piece because it's a continuation. But what I guess like what you argue is that the bad faith perspective that emerged in the Elvis biography is so metastasized in this piece on.

Lucy Sante: On the

Jarrett Earnest: on The Beatles. And I wondered if having already engaged with that book on Elvis, was it your idea to go to engage with this John Lennon piece?

Lucy Sante: Yeah, because as soon as I read the early press material, I knew this is a book that had to be taken down. Because one thing, the Elvis piece, as I recall, and it's been many years now, as a recall, the thing about the Elvis pieces is that he made a lot of hay out of just social prejudice. The guy was a hayseed, he was white trash, all this. He couldn't do Oh god, some of the associations, you know, the fact that Allen Ginsberg danced with his underwear on his head in the same room as where John Lennon was means that John Linnon danced around with his underwearing on his hat. That kind of, you now, it's all like, it's McCarthyism in a certain way. It's cultural McCarthyism.

Jarrett Earnest: I want to hear more about your writing on pop culture figures like music because they're very specific and so it's like someone like Elvis or the Beatles or Bob Dylan, they sit at a particular, a particularly central relationship and kind of prismatic relationship to the culture. And so what is it about those particular kind of figures? Is it because they have infiltrated? The culture at a certain level of depth that you are able to engage them, or is it just because you respond to them in their own terms?

Lucy Sante: Well, because when I was growing up and I was young, they were like unmissable parts of the landscape. They were more major than I think any figure we have today really in terms of unified attention because before the internet, there was television. Everybody watched television, half the country read Life magazine, et cetera. So we had these like more. Unitary culture than we've had at any time since and furthermore I started to trying to be a rock critic when I was 14 was buying You know Rolling Stone in its early years and they also had a little boxed the back looking for reviewers Etc and I was fourteen and trying to make myself appear older Which is stupid because they would have published if you're for sure if they knew I was 14 but I was trying to pretend like it was an adult. So I Everything I and they really messed me up because they would like send a note saying Oh, we're going to publish you in the next issue and then we come back with a rejection slip two weeks later So they were stoned. What can I say? But at the time This was like late 60s. Just so you know when I started reading rolling stone was 1968 or nine and The beetles the stones bob dillon and elvis And also Jimmy Janis and Jim Morrison, who'd recently died, between them, those figures completely filled up the sky. There wasn't really room for anything else. And the acts that came up in their wake around that period, like that awful year of Woodstock and Altamont, I mean, that was the end of a certain kind of rock. And part of it was that these bloated figures had just occupied. So much space, whereas in 1965 had been, let a hundred flowers bloom. And so I was responding to this, you know, at the same time admitting what was great about Elvis and John Lennon, but, you know. But it was like, I mean, there's no real equivalent for people now. Like Elvis, it went both ways because there was a lot of social prejudice, especially up here in the feast, right? But with John Lennon, he was universally admitted. Well, except by the right wing, but by everybody else, he was our greatest, you know, along with Bob Dylan, the two of them were like our greatest rock and roll star slash thinker. You know, they were major intellectual figures as well. Not necessarily deemed as such by the New York Review of Books at the time, right? Because Bob and Barbara were born in the 1920s. And so, For them, it was already like removed. They didn't get it. It was something else. Well, I don't remember what else I wrote about popular music for the New York Review. I do remember the only time I ever retracted, I ever like took back a piece because we couldn't stop fighting about it. And that was the review I wrote of Lipstick Traces by Grail Marcus, which is about the sex pistols and like the cathars and the situation is international and all this stuff. And so that's a piece that Barbara and I could not see eye to eye on. And I realized in the course of arguing with her that we were both using the word culture, but using it to mean different things. So for Barbara, culture meant Stravinsky, Auden, Balanchine. For me, culture mean bowling alleys, bus stations, jukeboxes, you know? It was a major class and generation thing at the same time. I mean, I very seldom argued with Barbara. She was one of the two or three most important people in my life. She educated me. But we'd occasionally have an argument if we did, it was about something that I'd experienced from my generational viewpoint that she had no access to in that way. So anyway, I didn't write too much Bop. Pop culture for the new york review i may have written other pieces but i can't call them to mind right now

Jarrett Earnest: Well, I think there is a particular frisson to writing about Elvis or John Lennon within the context of the review, partly because that particular framework, it's like playing with and against it. I was thinking about that with the Renata Adler piece, because it's, like, Renata's writing for the New Yorker, so is Pauline Kael. And it's this complete assault by one. Peer on another in the space of the New York Review of Books, like around 8,000 words, like it is really an extremely polemical thing to do. And I wonder like, what you felt the fallout of that was or the kind of shockwaves of it.

Lucy Sante: That, I wasn't in the right position to really observe that, you know, I was too young and powerless to be able to gage that, really.

Jarrett Earnest: There's something about, because you have this large sweep understanding of popular culture over a longer duration, something I've been thinking about, that particular generation you've been talking, you were talking about like the impact of the Beatles or Elvis or like I wrote something recently where I was just like listening, going really deep on Lou Reed and being like, I can't believe that this is still. This powerful, like it's still this good. It holds this is like pop culture from 50 years ago or more and it is still so vivid. And I think that there's something about the relationship to recording and access that is extremely unusual that happens in 20th century pop culture that allow that's partly people are trying to figure out culture subculture pop culture right now that really seems unclear. And I think it has to do with this kind of continued presence, like real present time presence of things from the past basically 100 years.

Lucy Sante: Right.

Jarrett Earnest: How do you think about that?

Lucy Sante: Yeah, there's a British rock critic who lives in the United States. His first name is Simon. He wrote these big histories of the rave movement, of post-punk and stuff. And he wrote a book called Retro Mania, which is the idea that every pop culture manifestation is the ghost of something else. He's got a point. Incidentally, allow me to throw in a commercial for my next Look what you'll be out next fall. But it's called The Beginning of a New Age, The Velvets and the Underground, 1960-1970.

Jarrett Earnest: The thing that's so hard about someone like Lou Reed is he's, first of all, just a genius as an artist, but I'm like a die-hard Nico person. Oh, me too. I'm in it for Nico. Me too. And the thing between them, like the way he treated her and whatever, it's so painful. I know, I know. I mean, it's like you listen to Velvet Underground and Nico, and it's just like, skip me to her tracks.

Lucy Sante: And then, you know, and I, you know, I did unearth a quote where he's saying that the marble index desert shore and the end are like the most incredible albums ever made. And he's complaining about the fact that he's being interviewed by Lenny K in like 1976 and he's complaining about the fact that, and this is true and people don't remember this fact, these albums were great and you knew they were great and you heard about them from people, but you couldn't find them. You couldn't order them by mail. They had just legendary. You had to keep trying record stores. I had to go to Amsterdam to buy my copy of the third Velvet's album, for example.

Jarrett Earnest: And then that becomes part of the story of your relationship to it that is extremely important. And I think the seeming availability of a bunch of stuff takes that away. Like somehow it doesn't become a narrative part of your life in the same way, like the discovery of something.

Lucy Sante: I know that, I mean, like the lengths I had to go to buy this record becomes a whole story in itself and it hangs on the record forever after, you know.

Jarrett Earnest: Having to go to a particular church in Switzerland to see a Grunwald painting. Right, right, right. And then that's a story that is your life.

Lucy Sante: Yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: That you can write about that, you know? And I think that one of the things about pop and rock criticism from the period that you're talking about, but also what Pauline Kael I think was doing at the best moment of her writing was making the story of your life, how you experience it, what's happening in the world, coexist or calibrated with the engagement with the object in its own terms. Like it has a setup.

Lucy Sante: Right, right.

Jarrett Earnest: And I think that's something that's kind of really a deep part of of pop music criticism for better or for worse than for other forms of criticism. There's another aspect to this particular era of New York Review essay that I would like your sense of which is the Renata Adler piece occasioned like a slew of really long and really angry letters. Like people were deeply offended. And, um, and they were printed at length.

Lucy Sante: I wish I'd looked them up before coming here. Yeah, I printed them out.

Jarrett Earnest: I printed them out. I can give you a taste of it. There's something about that that's so fascinating because it really shows you that like you can write something like that and then you get a direct feedback that people are like this hit a nerve.

Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm

Jarrett Earnest: And it feels like that's kind of was like historically a big deal of the of the New York Review. These kind of letters where people would write these kind of needling comebacks.

Lucy Sante: But they're usually like based on some item of fact like he writes that it happened in 1486 well I happen to know to happen in 1483 and you know those kind of exchanges that go on forever but it's very rare I seldom got any reaction to my pieces in the review because they were my opinion and usually people didn't quibble so much about opinions

Jarrett Earnest: Well, there was a long response to your Lennon piece by Goldman.

Lucy Sante: Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. I also got an anonymous, sort of vaguely threatening postcard after the Elvis piece, which I think still exists.

Jarrett Earnest: But I wanna know like how that presumes a certain audience for criticism, like who it's for and how it's received. And I wonder like what your experiences have been and how its shaped your writing.

Lucy Sante: Well, I'm just going to move away from that part of the question for a minute to recall for the benefit of your younger listeners that New York City was like along with Paris. I mean, there were the two capitals of cinephilia, you know, actually, Susan wrote about this at some point that movies were something you talk about over breakfast with whoever you'd slept with. I mean movies, there were so many movie theaters of so many kinds in New York and the discourse was something that everybody engaged in. You could get yourself into a really lively discussion with 12 people at the coffee shop or on the bus and they were not people of your background but everybody'd seen these movies and was passionately invested in them. And that's something that's just gone away. I mean, we come together on certain things. I mean I've spent the last three months having conversations about hacks, but it doesn't really happen very often. Yeah.

Jarrett Earnest: If one were to write about something like hacks, which is television, which is funny that Renata Adler starts with kind of a dig on television where she's like- It's an appliance. Yeah, this isn't an art medium, it's an compliance on which sometimes you can see things, so funny. Although I think there's a real serious argument to be made that, I mean, and many have made it, that the long form of television, of like prestige television, has been one of the dominant forms of the last moment. And so there are people. Who wanna talk seriously about hacks, probably more than any other cultural artifact right now. But I think that they're, to go back to this point that Renata Adler made is like, is there a value in a kind of specificity around the history of a cultural object or a subject? Because like, I get really annoyed when somebody who writes about television. Reviews a serious painting show, like for The New Yorker. And I'm like, it's not that you don't have a, shouldn't have an opinion about this, but it's just that you literally don't know about painting. So maybe you shouldn't be writing art criticism. And that's a real tricky position to try and say out loud, but it is something I've been wondering about. Well.

Lucy Sante: First of all, I'm a deep, deep believer in self-education. So I think if you're into Velazquez, even though you're a neuroscientist, well, go right ahead and write about Velazques. You might not know as much as the experts, but you have a point of view. I'm actually more interested in reading non-specialists. Than specialists unless it's something very specific. You know, I want a certain kind of information about this cultural product. So I'm interested in hearing what the cinematographer has to say. But other than that, I mean, I think anybody is capable of turning in a valid viewpoint. It's more important to me the fact that they can write or not.

Jarrett Earnest: That seems like even more challenging. Yeah. Okay, so I just pulled up some of these letters for you just to give you a taste. This one is actually kind of gives you the sense, to the editors, I wonder if you will allow me as a long time steadfast and very often admiring reader of the New York Review, but with no other claim to your attention to express my unhappiness with the piece in your August issue, Renata Adler's review of Pauline Kael, outside the pages devoted to politics, which don't count. You never published, or so I supposed anyway, I missed the first issue, a diatribe of such labored vehemence and such protracted length." And it goes on and on, maybe four or 500 words. But it's like, you know, clearly people had a personal identification with.

Lucy Sante: I have an emotion, and because I'm a New York Review subscriber, I can couch this emotion in some very fancy language rather than in the comments of the Instagram post. Maybe he comes along and says, I dispute this, but most of it is just like, hey, I'm loyal reader and you just really bumping out by assailing one of my favorite people, you know. It's eh, you know, who cares

Jarrett Earnest: something that this kind of letters are an index of, and maybe it's for better or for worse been just like obliterated or transformed by social media where everyone has an opinion about everything all the time, is to say like, oh wait, this person's film criticism matters, and this person critique of it matters, and I'm, you know, it's like a kind of measure that that's the case. And I wonder if the actual role of the critic right now has changed or like what criticism can do.

Lucy Sante: Is different? I mean, one thing that I meant to bring up at the beginning, actually, the idea of the house critic, this is almost a vanish. And the thing about the value of these house critics for me was movies coming out. I'm kind of interested, but I'm between two stools. I don't really know if I want to see it. Is it going to bum me out? Is going to bore me stupid and so. What I do is I read Vincent Kenby and I read Andrew Saris and I read Pauline Kael and I kind of triangulate between them. I know that Pauline Cael resists anything kind of European, especially, or avant-garde or anything like that. And I know, that Andrew Saras has to filter everything through this politique des utiles lens. So in other words, they all have their prejudices. And it doesn't matter to me so much. I'm not gonna take their advice and either see or not see the movie on there or say so. But I can say, ah, I see. The movie is like too European for Pauline and it's too raunchy for Cyrus. So maybe I like it, you know? It would like give you a way of positioning on a kind of mental map. And you don't really have that anymore. I mean, it's not to say there aren't some good critics, because there still are, you know, but they just don't have that quality of being fixed compass points, you now, on a map that you can identify and filter your own experiences through to see how they bounce. And so, I live upstate. It's not like I can walk down the street to the theater or take the subway. So, you, know, I kind of think, am I gonna see this movie, really? I have to do my own kind of... Decision, maybe a friend of mine likes it and it's a friend I trust. So cool. Otherwise I'll end up paying an expensive ticket to see that Coppola dream project last year, which was just like jaw droppingly bad. I kind of liked it. Really?

Jarrett Earnest: Well, it's just like, at least he's doing his own thing.

Lucy Sante: Well, that's true. But A, it really should have been a musical. Agreed. And B, he lets, which sometimes works really well, depending on who the director is and what the context is, but he's letting all these actors direct themselves and they have wildly clashing styles. They're constantly colliding and not in a good way. And it's set in this like abstract realm, very expensive sets that don't actually put you anywhere. It's amazing, it's ambitions and all that, but it doesn't hold together in any way. It just collapses in front of your eyes. A for effort, but Z for result, really. Not F, Z. Not that it's like so much worse than F, but it's in another galaxy altogether. Totally.

Jarrett Earnest: To your point about the disappearance of like, I can count on one hand, people who have critics who have staff positions.

Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm. And

Jarrett Earnest: You know, I really appreciate the way you're describing that it is a different relationship with a reader where you have an ongoing kind of one-sided dialog with a critic where you know that kind of critic has to have a point of view and then they have to have voice that you follow and it's sort of parasocial where it's like, oh, this person didn't like this but I know that my relationship to their taste and so I can act accordingly. After this kind of evisceration the possibility of this kind of staff criticism. And actually, I mean, in the piece by Renata Adler, it made me think like, oh, maybe it's okay that this is gone. You know, like we just don't, we structurally can't sustain this kind of writing, it doesn't exist. And the reasons that that doesn't exist are not good, but also maybe it is fine. You know? And so my other question is like, well then what other kinds of criticism are apposite or necessary given our particular cultural situation?

Lucy Sante: Yeah, you know, I really got to say, I mean, I don't follow contemporary criticism that closely. It's that the landscape is just too vast. I just know that there are whole areas of especially like music and film that are things I probably really like, but I've never encountered them because like this, it used to be a supermarket and now it takes up an entire city. And you You know, you can't go down every aisle, you know. The thing. You're unconsciously looking for is a kind of surrogate self, a critic who will anticipate what you like and serve it to you. And it's very comforting. And some people need that so much that they will fashion whoever is the critic into their surrogates self and take on the opinions. That was happened with Pauline Kael a lot. I think people identified with her, or identified. You know, with being her child or something, and it just became a kind of ideology, you know, the Brian de Palma-ism, you know? Whatever.

Jarrett Earnest: That's kind of a negative aspect, or I'd say like an unconscious relation between a reader and a critic, but what is the best possible relation?

Lucy Sante: The best possible relation is to have more than one critic, not have anybody depending on one single voice. You need a lineup. You need like, well, I mean, it's a little crude, but in Cahiers du Cinéma, for years and years and years, they ran a box with like positive or negative judgments from like 18 or 24 film critics. So you'd see like, oh yeah, they all like Django Returns. I got to check that out. You know, whatever. You know having a kind of culture where a lot of people are weighing in and none of them is the Pope, you know? Everybody in a democracy of ideas has an equally valid approach, but then you know, you start to notice, well, did this one really look at the movie? Or you know this one is struggling to express something important but can't get the words right. I mean, you just need a much more varied media landscape. And right now, it's kind of impossible because you've got a few independent structures that continue to maintain. And I have no inside information on what goes on at the New Yorker or the New York Times. But I do remember that I was a monthly critic for two institutions. And I'm not gonna tell you which one. Told me to change my opinion about a particular movie because the star was next month's cover model

Jarrett Earnest: I know, but those kinds of conflicts of interest, I think, are the kinds that we can deal with. Like, actually, that doesn't concern me as much.

Lucy Sante: Me pissed off.

Jarrett Earnest: I'll tell you that. Well, also I love the footnote in Renata Adler's essay where she's talking about the way that Pauline Kael characterizes the things this particular actress does and it's Candice Bergen and there's a footnote and the foot note is Candy Bergen exclamation point. Like that's funny, squashing people like a bug. But there was something that you brought up that I wanted to say, which is, so here's another moment where what you were saying just kind of reminded me of why Adler finds this thing with Pauline Kael so offensive. And I think it has to do with the kind of judgments that are not about convincing. Like, I think, I'm not really interested in opinion, really, because it's like, whatever, we all have, like we all know our opinions don't really mean very much, like we like it, we don't like it. But I think what then is the role of the critic is to actually convey in a tangible way that someone else can feel and connect with why this is the way it is. Why you think it's good and why you think its bad. It's like show me on the doll where this happened. And I just do not see that in most writing now. It's a given like, oh, I like this or I didn't and if you liked it then it's.

Lucy Sante: Yeah. Or else they'll bring in heavy critical baggage of the critical theory version, which they leave me standing on the shore as they sail down the river with that stuff.

Jarrett Earnest: I mean, I can go pretty much anywhere if the writing is good, you know, if it's interesting.

Lucy Sante: If it's interesting. The fact is too much academic background does not do much for one's prose is what I'm suggesting.

Jarrett Earnest: So there's a moment that's on the heels of I really love when you were talking about the damning way she analyzes the use of I, you, we, me, us, some people, those people. And somewhere in that argument, she starts talking about how the reviews of this book as they have appeared are completely all positive. People saying this is the great body of criticism compared with Shaw, et cetera.

Lucy Sante: Mm-hmm.

Jarrett Earnest: And so Adler says, the pervasive, overbearing, and presumptuous we, the intrusive you, the questions, the debased note of righteousness, and rude instruction, the whole verbal apparatus promotes and relies upon an incapacity to read. The writing falls somewhere between huckster copy, pay-ins to a favored product, diatribes against all other brands and their venal or diluted purchasers, and ideological pamphleteering, denouncings, exhortations. Code words, excommunications, programs, threats. Apart from the taste for violence, however, which she takes to be a hard intellectual position, there is no underlying text or theory, only the review, virtually divorced from movies, as his own end." Yeah. And so like that to me, it really says like, I'm not trying to convince you of this. I'm trying to show you why I love it or don't. I'm just telling you what it is, and then I'm like badgering you if you don't agree.

Lucy Sante: She's BULLY

Jarrett Earnest: I kind of can't believe that somebody wrote this. It took a lot of bravery to do it because I'm sure certain people were completely relieved in the way that I was like, you did such, if you ever write something negative, everyone wants to secretly be like, it's so great that you did that, we all thought this. But then nobody wants to deal with it.

Lucy Sante: I mean, as a young critic, I was so envious. I really, really wanted to find a subject I could take down that everybody loved.

Jarrett Earnest: Yeah. Did you ever find it?

Lucy Sante: No.

Jarrett Earnest: You can read Renata Adler's essay, The Perils of Pauline, as well as many by Lucy Sante, including the ones we discussed today on Elvis and John Lennon, and so many others, with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which, in addition to 20 new issues a year, grants access to our complete archives, going back to 1963, searchable on our website. You can subscribe today for a discount at nybooks.com slash plsub. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Earnest, along with associate producer Luna Hayes-Dean. The audio is edited and produced Tyler Hill. The music is composed by Matthew Aucoin, and it is a production of the New York Review.