by Susan Sontag
Most people consider dreams as the trash-bin of the day: an occupation that is undisciplined, unproductive, asocial. I understand. I understand why most people regard their dreams as of little importance. They are too light for them, and most people identify the serious with what has weight. Tears are serious; one can collect them in a jar. But a dream, like a smile, is pure air. Dreams, like smiles, fade rapidly.
But what if the face faded away, and the smile remained? What if the life on which the dreams fed withered, and the dreams flourished? Why, one would really be free then, really lightened of one’s burdens. Nothing can compare with it. We may wonder why we seek so meager a daily portion of that divine sensation of absence and soaring which rises from the commerce of the flesh to erase the world. We may well say of sexuality: what a promise of freedom it is, how astonishing that it is not outlawed.
I am surprised dreams are not outlawed. What a promise the dream is! How delightful! How private! And one needs no partner, one need not enlist the cooperation of anyone, female or male. Dreams are the onanism of the spirit.
EIGHT
I started keeping a journal in which I wrote down my dreams, ventured to interpret them, spun reveries around them. This work was made possible by the new leisure I obtained by giving up reading. I had discovered that the taste for print, and the ability to read rapidly, depend on a trained mental passivity. It would be an exaggeration to say that the bookish man does not think. But he thinks only up to a point; he must arrest his thoughts or else he could never pass beyond the first sentence. Because I did not want to miss even the faintest whisper or echo of my dreams, I determined to discontinue the habit of crowding my mind with the printed dreams of others. One day I cleared my room of most of my books and donated them to the public library of my native city. I retained as souvenirs some lycée textbooks on the inside of whose covers classmates had scribbled various affectionate or insulting messages. I also kept a Bible, a handbook on semaphore signals, a history of architecture, and the inscribed copies of his works which Jean-Jacques had given me.
I was no longer so ingenuous or so eager to share my ideas with others. You must not imagine that I had entirely lost the capacity to confide in my friends. But I had lost the confidence that they might teach me something I did not already know. Thus I saw less of Jean-Jacques, who continued to treat me as a novice in any matter we discussed.
Young Lucrezia had succeeded her not greatly lamented mother as my companion and prospective mistress. (No one, not even her husband, exerted himself greatly over Frau Anders’ disappearance.) I worried about my growing tendency to irascibility, and made a considerable effort to be less demanding of Lucrezia than I had been of her mother. This was made easier by the fact that she was not in love with me, nor I with her. I was happy when with Lucrezia, but she was a luxury that I was not sure I deserved. Nothing really interested me as much as my presumptuous dreams. And I felt a certain reluctance, perhaps it was selfishness, to initiate Lucrezia into my secrets.
However, the waning pleasures of friendship, as well as thinking and writing about my dreams, were not at that time all of which I was capable. I was a young man still, and it was natural for me to translate part of my restlessness into activity. Amidst all my inner perplexities, I also wanted to live more actively—with the proviso that I not bind myself to any useful, remunerative, or self-advancing occupation. It was thus that, in place of a life of action, I settled for a brief career as an actor. Through the group of people formerly collected by Frau Anders and now presided over by her daughter Lucrezia, I met a number of independent film-makers and began to work with them. My first job was rewriting scripts for a young photographer who was doing some short films on night life in the capital. Four were made: one about the barges that ply up and down the river, one about two lovers on the Metro at midnight, one on the prefecture of police, and one on the Arab quarter near the university. Then I wrote a screenplay of my own, about a nun. It was filmed, though the changes and excisions did not have my approval. Work on this script took over a year; I write very slowly. During this time I also had several small acting parts.
Eventually, as an actor rather than a writer, I graduated to the commercial cinema. This was the first decade of sound films, and although foreign directors can claim pre-eminence during the silent period, at this time my country’s cinema was, I think, the best. I never had or aspired to leading parts, but I at least avoided being typecast. I played the butler and the jilted suitor in two romantic comedies, the older brother in a family melodrama, and the patriotic schoolteacher in a film about the conscription of schoolboys at the close of the First World War.
In performing a role I liked to imagine myself inserting a surreptitious footnote to the audience. When I was supposed to play a good-hearted lover, I tried to insert a promise of cruelty in my embrace. When I played the villain, I hinted at tenderness. When I crawled, I imagined I was flying. When I danced, I was a cripple.
The need to contradict, at least in my private thoughts, seems to have grown on me during that period. While in my daily comportment I rarely contradicted the wishes of others, except when I was entirely convinced that I was in the right, every word I heard made me think of its opposite. This was why acting was so felicitous an occupation for me. Acting was a happy compromise between word and deed. A role could be condensed into a single word or phrase; a word or phrase could be expanded into a role. “Butler!” “I do not love you.” “Liberty, equality, fraternity”—to give but a few examples. And while I played the role, enunciated the word or phrase, I could think of its opposite with impunity.
Eventually, of course, I could not help but wish for roles which would themselves exemplify these contradictions. I wanted to play a fat African, whose flat cavernous nostrils twitch in disgust at the floral scent of a white woman. I wanted to play a painter, blind from birth, who hears the murmur of colors in his paint-tubes and considers himself a musician. I wanted to play a rotund and genial politician who, when his prosperous country’s farmlands are afflicted with drought, sends the nation’s grain reserves as a gift to the starving millions of India. Such roles, unfortunately, are not often available. There is a need for more writers to create them. Jean-Jacques could have written parts like these, if he had wanted to; but his art was in the service of other ideals—an idea of comedy, both measured and extravagant, which I have always been either too solemn or not finely tuned enough to appreciate.
Why did I not write such roles myself? you may ask. And why did I give myself to acting? Though I was approaching my thirtieth birthday, it was not that I suddenly felt the lack of a profession. No, the truth was that I was enjoying myself (I am capable of enjoying myself in many ways). I must not omit, however, that the enjoyment was somewhat tainted by vanity. Vanity surely played a part in my preferring acting in films to the theatre. But I enjoyed the fact that in a film the role and my performance were indissoluble, one and the same; while in the theatre, the same role has been and will be performed by many actors. (Are the films in this respect more like life than is the stage?) Also—another incentive to vanity—what one does in a film is recorded and as imperishable as celluloid; while performances in the theatre are without record.
I also preferred the cinema to the theatre because there is no audience present except one’s working colleagues, and no applause. In fact, not only is there no audience, there is really no acting either. Acting in films is not like acting in a play which is, whatever the interruptions of rehearsal, in performance continuous, cumulative, and replete with consummated movement and emotion. What is called acting in the films is, on the contrary, much closer to stillness, to posing for a sequence of still photographs like those in monthly roman-photos read by shop girls and housewives. In a film every scene is subdivided into dozens of separate shots, each of which entails no more than a line or two of dialogue, a single expression on the actor’s face. The camera creates motion, animates these brief frozen moments—like the eye of the dreame
r inhabiting and at the same time being a spectator to his own dreams.
I find the cinema a much more rigorous art than the theatre; and one which gave me a profound analogue to the way of behaving whose initial model came from my dreams. I don’t mean that watching a film, in a darkened theatre which one can enter on the spur of the moment without prior appointment, is like entering a dream. I am not talking about the dream-like freedom which the camera has with time and space. I speak here not of the spectator’s experience but of the actor’s: in acting in the films, one must forget passion, and replace it by a sort of extreme coldness. This is easy, even necessary, because the scenes are not filmed consecutively; the actor before the camera is not propelled by the quasi-natural emotions which accumulate in the course of any single performance of a play.
The only advantage I could see which the theatre has over the cinema is that one can repeat the same role night after night—more times than the number of takes a director requires before he is satisfied that he has a shot he can print. And while in each take the actor tries to improve his performance (a period corresponding to rehearsals in the theatre), once the actor has done it correctly the shot is concluded. In the theatre once the actor has learned to do it correctly, he is ready to begin to do it over and over as long as there is an audience for the play. This is the final analogue between acting and my dreams. Those things we do well are those we do over and over, and best are those which have themselves an essentially monotonous form: dancing, making love, playing a musical instrument. I was fortunate in that the activity of dreaming had for me this character. There was enough time and repetitiveness for me to become good at it. I became a good dreamer, while I never became an outstanding actor.
Through my cinemaphile friends, I made the acquaintance of Larsen, the well-known Scandinavian director, who was casting a film based on the life of a fascinating personage in my country’s history. This person, whom no doubt most of my readers can identify, was a nobleman, of ample fortune and aristocratic title, who as a young man fought alongside the devout peasant girl who freed the nation from a hated invader, and somewhat later in life was denounced as an apostate, heretic, and criminal. For his apostasy, for heresy, and for crimes which included having lured to his castle, violated, and murdered hundreds of children, he was tried and sent to the scaffold. Before his execution he repented fully and most movingly of his crimes, and was forgiven by the Church and mourned by the populace.
I read the script, and expressed strong interest in the project. Larsen had me audition for the role of the confessor who is assigned to the nobleman after his arrest. He liked my performance and engaged me. I would have preferred a smaller part—say, one of the judges—which would have taken less of my time, but Larsen insisted that my face was exactly as he imagined the face of the zealous priest who procures the nobleman’s repentance.
Work on this film occupied me for the next half year. We went on location to the south, and most of the film was made in a small farming village in the neighborhood of the nobleman’s castle, the very castle, now in ruins and visited only by truant schoolboys and adolescent lovers, to which he had brought his victims many centuries ago. Social life in this town was dull. I had a tender affair with the mayor’s daughter, whom I used to meet clandestinely in an abandoned barn on the edge of the town. I also passed time with the village priest, arguing about religion and politics. But it was difficult to escape the company of my colleagues. There was only one small hotel in the town, and the actors and entire production staff lived there. It became virtually a dormitory. The director, cameraman, script girl, and cast would meet each morning for breakfast to discuss the day’s shooting, and in the evening sit together in the parlor to listen to the hotel’s radio, one of the few in the entire town, for news of the civil war which was raging at the time in the country to the south.
I got along with the other members of the company, in particular with Larsen and his pleasant young wife. The one exception was the make-up man, who on the first day of the shooting schedule took a dislike to me. We were to begin with a scene in which the nobleman is led through the village to the place of execution; the cameraman wanted morning light, so the cast had to arrive at six o’clock to be made up in order to get the first take no later than nine. I arrived promptly, but the moment I sat down in the chair in the basement room of the grain warehouse where our props and costumes were stored, and the man in charge of make-up examined my face, he grimaced and began complaining under his breath. For an hour he labored over me to apply a small amount of rouge and powder, for, he told me, I was a hopeless case: I had a type of skin, not too rare but thankfully uncommon in the acting profession, which resisted the application of make-up. “Your skin is matte,” he said.
“This is my only face,” I replied sarcastically.
“The director won’t like it. But he can’t blame me.”
“Nobody will blame you,” I told him.
I had been told something of the sort by make-up men in other films in which I had worked, but never in so surly a manner. Needless to say, my non-absorbent face caused no difficulty that morning.
The actual making of the film went smoothly, though it is difficult to see progress when one proceeds so piecemeal. We worked in a jungle of ladders, scaffolding, cables on the floor, lights and gauze shades for the lights, mimeographed copies of the script, stacks of free cigarettes, and bottles of wine for the crew. We seemed, as befitted a historical spectacle, a multitude. Besides over two score of staff, film crew, and principal actors, extras were recruited from the town, as well as tanned bare-chested men and boys in khaki shorts and sneakers to haul the camera, lights, and props about, and to bring lunch to us while we were shooting. The only still point in all this activity was Mme. Larsen, the director’s wife, who spent most of each day in a corner of the set knitting first a beige sweater and then a blanket.
There was some trouble with the investors in the capital, who had chronic doubts about the film’s commercial soundness. Everyone on the set learned to respect Larsen’s scowl when he was brought his mail at four o’clock each afternoon, sat apart to read it, then stuffed it in the back pocket of his knickers. He also was frequently called to the hotel for long-distance telephone calls. Whatever pressures were being put on him, though, I felt it was principally due to his own indecision that it took as long as it did (seventy-three days of shooting spread over a period of four and a half months) to finish the film. We arrived with a complete shooting script, but he was continually making changes, and much of the breakfast conferences were wasted in debate over sexual motives and theological ideas. I played a modest role in these discussions, and can take some credit for keeping the film from turning into an anti-clerical tract. For Larsen, who had written the script, could not decide how to represent the nobleman. Some mornings he would threaten to halt production so he could rewrite the whole middle of the script, to show that the nobleman was entirely innocent of the extraordinary crimes of which he was accused. At least, he wanted to exonerate the offending nobleman—as a man broken by the torments which an overscrupulous conscience imposes upon an unconventional sexual temperament.
“He must have been a very passionate man,” mused the director. “Antoine,” he said, turning to the actor who was playing the nobleman, “you must get more of that into your performance.”
I demurred. “I imagine him as very serene,” I said. “Such a great quantity of victims testifies to an immensity of appetite which amounts to indifference.”
Everyone at the table disagreed with me. “How could anyone be so cruel!” exclaimed the short-haired young woman who was playing the patriot. “Think of all those little children.”
I tried to explain. “I don’t think the nobleman illustrates the extreme of cruelty of which human nature is capable. He illustrates the problem of satiety. Don’t you see? All acts are undertaken in the hope of their consequences. What passes for being satiated is simply the arrival at the consequences—the ful
fillment—of one’s act. But sometimes the moral atmosphere becomes clogged. There is a backlog of consequences. It takes a long time for the consequences to catch up with the act. Then one must go on repeating oneself, and boring others, in the interval between act and consequences. This is when people say, he is insatiable. And sometimes—very rarely to be sure—there are no consequences, and one has the impression of not being alive at all.”
“You’re trying to exonerate him, too,” said the script girl.
“No, not at all,” I replied. “I would be the first to agree that he should have been executed. For who would act as he did except for the purpose of incurring punishment? It’s just that he was very literal-minded. He repeated himself—that is, his crimes—extravagantly. He became a machine. The only questions for me”—I turned to address Larsen—“are these. With each repetition, with each revolution of the machine, did he become less oppressed, until it was as nothing for him eventually to confess and to be sent to his death? Or would he have been satisfied with one murder, if he had been caught?”
“Go on,” said Larsen. “I see you have given the matter much thought.”
“What does it mean for someone to murder three hundred children, when one murder more than suffices most people?” I said. “Did this man have three hundred times the capacity for murder that you and I have? Or does it not rather suggest that for him one murder could only weigh one-threehundredth of what it does for an ordinary person?”
