JOIN USThe new HBO movie on intellectual pinup Susan Sontag doesn’t engage with her ideas, choosing instead to look at her life. I thought something may have been lost here since Sontag stood for ideas, but the film becomes engaging as it reveals the person behind those difficult, controversial and radical theories.
I had long been interested in Susan Sontag’s life, having read her since college, and as and when something appeared in print about her personal life, I would eagerly seek it out and gulp it down.
To now have a movie looking at her life — Regarding Susan Sontag — is an unexpected bonus, but it would seem that the new direction — or at least one of the new directions — that documentaries are exploring is biographies of famous culture critics — Scorsese on Fran Lebowitz and James on Roger Ebert.
A fairly juicy book on Sontag is Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Sontag, an intimate look at Sontag by Sigrid Nunez, who was a young, aspiring writer when she first met Sontag. In her account, we learn a few interesting things about Susan: she had over 6,000 books that she would arrange and rearrange subject-wise, not chronologically; she wrote her name on every book, and said, “You can tell how serious people are by looking at their books.”
She hated working alone, and always worked with someone in the room, avoiding solitude. She equated teaching with failure, and she “had the habit and the aura of a student all her life.”
She chain-smoked and pounded away at the typewriter all night. She tells the narrator, “When I was writing the last pages of The Benefactor, I didn’t eat or sleep or change clothes for days.
At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarette. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing.” Nunez then adds that it was 1962, and her son, David, was 10. She was a big moviegoer — one every week. But she would “sometimes fall asleep in a movie, then wake up and say, ‘that was terrific, wasn’t it?’”
Her favourite movie was Tokyo Story. She was shocked when Nunez said she didn’t like it, coming back with, “Oh my god, didn’t that make you weep? Oh, it’s just because you are too young, years from now you’ll see it again, and then you’ll understand.” Nunez wisely adds, “Actually, it didn’t take years. And, I didn’t have to see the movie again.” And quotes some lines from the film: “Kyoko: Isn’t life disappointing? Noriko: Yes, it is.” Sontag’s son buried her in a Paris cemetery, the same one where her literary idol, Beckett, is buried.
Like Nunez’s memoir, the HBO film Regarding Susan Sontag probes and reveals her life — her battle with cancer, the controversy over her closeted bisexuality, and the provocations her literary theories set off such as Notes on “Camp”. What I am drawn to in her work are her essays; her subject was everything from aesthetics to pornography to silence. Sontag once said that she could only write about the things she loved and admired. It felt distasteful to her to be negative, to write about things she didn’t care about. Sontag saw herself as a critic who commented on art, not evaluated.
I also prefer the later Sontag, the Sontag of the collection of essays called Where The Stress Falls, where she gets down to specifics and away from larger arguments, and looks at writers and books she cares deeply about. Sontag later moved to fiction (The Volcano Lover, In America) and felt “narrative lasts more than ideas”; it is her fiction, she has said, that she likes more than her criticism! Whether it is the early polemical essays or the later portrait essays, Sontag has never wavered from her purpose: “to defend the idea of seriousness — true seriousness.” Sontag left herself out of her writing.
She wrote slowly, precisely, agonisingly (fanatically spending an hour on just one word). Critic Craig Seligman said of her writing that her “sentences give off a soft glow.” They “glimmer with a subdued but very beautiful light.” He remarks on the “lunar beauty of her prose,” and gives as an example her definition of beauty: “a gladness of the senses.”
Regarding Susan Sontag, directed by Nancy Kates, showcases a varied collection of archival materials, imagery and accounts from friends, family, colleagues and lovers — including Sontag’s sister, Judith Sontag Cohen, authors Stephen Koch, Eva Kollisch, Fran Lebowitz and Sigrid Nunez herself. The excerpts from Sontag’s work itself are read sensitively and magnificently by Patricia Clarkson.
I think it is Nunez who remarks, “In spite of all her passions, her huge appetite for beauty and pleasure, her famous avidity, and the unflagging pace of her enviably rich life, she was mortally malcontented, and hers was a restlessness no amount of travel was going to cure... a sense of failure clung to her...”