enthusiasm

What would you do if everyone around you dismissed the object of your love as frivolous and instead extolled the virtues of someone else, some other.  Most of us can imagine such a thing in terms of some movie or such that one loves despite it’s obvious failings.  But few people would say that we should give up watching Star Wars because 2001 is so much better.  And there is no danger that Star Wars will disappear as a consequence.

When the object of your love is a film critic rather than a film, however, that danger is real, and that is the danger that Craig Seligman faces but never confesses in his book Sontag & Kael.  Seligman is a great lover of Pauline Kael, the once-formidable film critic for the New Yorker who retired in 1991 and died a decade later, but while Kael and her criticism will always be important to those who knew her, as Seligman did, and those who read it as part of their introduction to film as a form, her influence will continue to wane as the years pass and those who knew her and can extol her pass into history.   Kael may have been the most influential movie critic that ever lived but that is a relatively minor accolade since movie critics just aren’t that influential.

What galls Seligman is how much more respect Susan Sontag gets than Kael.  Sontag, almost everyone agrees, will be read for some time and remain one of the great critical voices of this age.  She will be read and admired, if seldom loved, for generations.  While this assessment could turn out to be wrong, Seligman simply can’t understand or abide the disparity between Sontag’s stature and Kael’s.  This book is his attempt to rectify this disparity, and he tries to accomplish it as much by tearing Sontag down as he does by raising Kael up.

The book is organized into four lengthy sections, two of which primarily focus on Sontag and two primarily on Kael, with each section making forays into the opposite character for effect and comparison.  How he chooses to compare them makes his project clear:  he compares Sontag to Kael when he wants to show how strident, joyless, or lacking in sympathy Sontag is, but he compares Kael to Sontag when he he wants to show how Kael is every bit as engaged or accomplished as Sontag.  He uses Kael to make Sontag look bad, but uses Sontag to illuminate and elevate Kael.

At the books midpoint, just before he turns his primary focus away from Sontag and toward Kael, he quotes one of his early readers in an attempt to shut off and prevent this line of criticism.  He friend asked, “Why are you devoting half your book to a writer you hate?” and it’s a good question because it gets at the hidden, probably unconscious, agenda of the book.  Seligman protests that he doesn’t hate Sontag, and I believe him, but he never asks himself why he would write about her so unsympathetically.  He thinks she’s just exasperating so that’s enough.

Sontag is universally admired and respected if never loved (and seldom even liked), while Kael is much beloved by all who know her if often dismissed as mere reviewer by the wider culture.  The question raised by his first reader, and that likely will occur to all readers, can be answered simply by noting this fact and appreciating how devastating it is for Seligman, who so loves his Pauline.