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TRASH, ART, AND PAULINE KAEL: HIGH AND LOW, LOVE AND LOATHING

EMILY KANE

April 15, 2025

What if trash was closer to truth than art? Pauline Kael’s legendary essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” didn’t tidy up cinema—it tore it open. She wanted to feel the movies, not admire them like relics. This piece dives into Kael’s radical, visceral vision of film criticism, where pleasure beats pedigree. Enter the storm that redefined what it means to love the movies.

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Pauline Kael, the legendary (and controversial) film critic for The New Yorker, never set out to save the movies. She wanted to live in them. She wanted them to hit her in the solar plexus, to make her laugh, to stir something inside her that no theory, no canon, no museum of respectability could ever fully contain. When her essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 1969, it was not a thesis. It was a storm. And like all storms, it left behind a different landscape. It remains one of the most passionate and provocative pieces of writing ever devoted to film, not because it presents a neat argument, but because it refuses neatness altogether. It is a manifesto against boredom, against solemnity, against the people who sit quietly through art films because they believe that suffering equals significance.

What Kael wanted, above all else, was to feel. She did not care whether that feeling came from a piece of trash or a piece of art, and she did not believe that those two categories had anything to do with truth. Her allegiance was not to form, not to genre, not to historical pedigree, but to sensation. And in “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” she laid waste to the cultural hierarchies that had for too long separated so-called good taste from what actually gives us pleasure.

Kael began her piece with a jab at the way people discuss art. How they praise what they are supposed to praise, and defend their boredom as if it were a moral achievement. If a movie is slow, incomprehensible, or foreign, then it must be good. This is the lie of cultivated taste. It is not that Kael hated foreign films. She loved many of them. But she could not stand the self-congratulatory reverence that too often came with them. She suspected, often rightly, that audiences did not actually enjoy what they were watching, but simply believed they ought to.

Redefining trash one movie at a time

The problem with the idea of art as elevation is that it removes the viewer from the experience. It becomes a duty, a test of worthiness. You must understand why Antonioni matters. You must respect Resnais. If you do not, then you are either vulgar or insufficiently educated. Kael pushed back against this idea with everything she had. She believed that a movie should move you, should excite you, should offer more than a posture of intellectual depth. What is the point of art if you do not respond to it?

She wrote, “The movies we respond to work on our emotions in a direct, physical way—they engage our imagination, our senses, our sexuality.” This was not an invitation to mindless pleasure. It was a demand that we stop lying about what matters to us. A bad movie that makes you laugh, that keeps you on the edge of your seat, that lives and breathes, is closer to the experience of life than a great movie that puts you to sleep. Kael did not want to be taught lessons in ennui. She wanted the shock of recognition, the thrill of storytelling, the messy intoxication of human feeling.

There is a moment in every cultural conversation when people begin to confuse difficulty with value. Kael was writing between the 1960s and the late 1980s, a time when film was becoming respectable. And that was precisely the problem. Respectability, she believed, was killing movies. It made people afraid to say they liked The Dirty Dozen more than La Notte. It made critics sound like priests, parsing the mysteries of cinema with all the joy of a tax accountant. Kael was having none of it.

She defended trash because trash had life. Not all trash, of course. She was not interested in stupid films. She was interested in the ones that worked—the ones that did what they set out to do. She admired craft. She admired energy. She admired movies that knew how to entertain. It was not enough to be profound. Something had to be good. And being good meant reaching the audience. It meant contact.

Kael wrote, “Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.” That sentence is often misquoted, often misunderstood. It is not a surrender. It is a challenge. She is saying that the measure of a movie is not whether it fits a certain definition of seriousness. The measure is whether it works on us, whether it matters to us in the moment we watch it.

When the lights go down and stories flicker to life

Kael had no patience for piety. She could see through the critics who praised films because they were difficult. She could smell the fear in their sentences: fear of appearing uncultured, fear of admitting that they were bored. She wrote with the tone of someone who has seen through the performance and wants the real thing.

Kael believed that a movie is not an object. It is an experience. It does not sit on a pedestal. It happens to you. You live through it. The best ones stay with you like dreams, or bruises. This is why she was suspicious of those who spoke of films as if they were sacred relics. That kind of reverence, in her view, was the enemy of love.

She did not want to write about movies the way academics wrote about literature. She did not want to analyze symbols or trace influences. She wanted to capture the pulse of the thing. She wanted to give shape to the feeling you have when you walk out of the theater and the world looks a little different. She wanted criticism to be alive.

This is why her writing still feels so electric. She did not summarize plots, and she did not describe cinematography unless it mattered to the feeling. She told you what the movie did to her, what it made her see, how it made her feel. Her criticism was not an argument, but a reaction. A record of emotion. That is why people read her—not to agree, but to feel something too.

When she hated a movie, she could be savage. She despised Stanley Kubrick’s perfectionism, which she thought drained the life from his films. She dismissed 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as “monumentally unimaginative.” She had no problem going against the tide. What mattered to her was not consensus. What mattered was the encounter.

“Trash, Art, and the Movies” was an attack on what she called “art-house orthodoxy.” It was also an attack on condescension. The people who assume that an audience is dumb because it likes action or melodrama or comedy were the ones she most distrusted. Kael believed that there was intelligence in pleasure. She believed that emotions are not beneath us. They are the point.

She saw a kind of moral snobbery in critics who dismiss genre films as mindless entertainment, because they miss what is most alive in cinema. They prefer purity over vitality. Kael believed that the movies that mean the most to us are not always the most refined. They are often messy, imperfect, and thrilling, and are made by people who know how to reach us.

High priestess of low pleasures

At the same time, she was not an anti-intellectual. She read widely. She had a background in philosophy and literature. But she did not let her education interfere with her instinct. She trusted her responses, and she demanded that critics write honestly about theirs. She had no patience for theory when it gets in the way of feeling.

Kael wrote like no one else. Her sentences moved fast. They snapped. They curved. They surprised you. She could pack more meaning into a parenthetical than most critics could fit into a paragraph. She did not care about structure. She cared about rhythm. She wrote the way people talk when they are excited, when they are angry, when they are in love.

Her voice was personal. It was intimate. She made you feel as if you were sitting next to her in the dark, sharing glances, gasping at the same moments. She invited you into her experience. She made you see what she saw. And if you disagreed with her, she was fine with that. She wanted argument. That’s how you know that movies still matter.

She did not want to be above her readers. She wanted to be with them. That is why she changed criticism. She opened it up. She made it possible for others to write with their own voices, to trust their own taste, to speak from experience rather than dogma. She made criticism democratic.

Kael could be dismissive, and sometimes wrong. She could let her grudges show. Her dislike of theory sometimes made her ignore important political questions. She did not engage deeply with issues of race or gender, except when they touched her directly. Her love of the visceral could make her overlook subtlety.

And yet, her honesty was rare. Her passion was unmatched. She did not pretend to be objective. She gave you herself, every time. She did not claim to have the final word. She wanted to be part of the conversation. That is why her writing still matters. Kael gave us permission to enjoy what we enjoy. Permission to be moved by movies that are not masterpieces. Permission to say “I love it,” even when no one else does. She did not want us to be ashamed of our taste. She wanted us to defend it.

She believed that movies are not just art. They are life. They are a way of seeing, of feeling, of connecting. They can be trash and still be beautiful. They can be art and still be boring. What matters is not what the movie is supposed to be. What matters is what it is.

In “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Kael gave us a map—not of film history, but of film experience. She showed us how to trust our reactions, how to articulate our pleasures, how to fight for the movies that make us feel alive. She did not offer a theory. She offered herself. That is what made her great.

Emily Kane (b. 1970 in Hollywood, California) is a film scholar who has never watched a movie, believing that viewing corrupts interpretation. She reconstructs films entirely from reviews, synopses, and hearsay. Raised in boarding schools that prohibited screens and later educated at institutions where cinema was treated as a metaphor rather than a medium, Kane developed a rare form of cinephilia that is entirely conceptual. Misunderstood by critics and academics alike, she lectures in darkness and refuses projection.

Cover image: Ripping up cinema