Sontag
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By making up her mind to believe everything she was told, she could make the credibility gap disappear. By substituting her hosts’ eyes for her own, her skeptical language could be replaced by what sounds like a transcription of a government brochure: “The country is pitifully lacking in . . . basic tools like lathes and pneumatic drills and welding machines,” she pronounces.18 “The Vietnamese think a great deal about their future,” she writes. They “genuinely believe that life is simple. They also believe, incredible as it may seem considering their present situation, that life is full of joy.” Furthermore, they “genuinely love and admire their leaders; and, even more inconceivable to us, the government loves the people.”19
Perhaps this is all true. But these assertions are supported by little more than the word “genuinely.” No facts are mustered; no Vietnamese voices are heard. The statements are supported only by the reader’s belief in the authenticity of Sontag’s experience. But the brilliant author of Against Interpretation—the perceptive critic who wrote the first pages of the essay—has stepped out of the room, passing the microphone to a person willing to overlook even the most well-documented facts about Vietnam: the treatment of American prisoners, for example. Sontag visits the lovingly tended grave of an American serviceman and writes that “the North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots.”
This was not too far out of the Left mainstream. In the age of the “credibility gap,” when the American government repeatedly insisted on alternative facts, many disbelieved these reports. But her hotel, a grand French pile known as Thống Nhất (“Reunification”), was five blocks from a more famous hostelry, Hoa Lò Prison, known as the “Hanoi Hilton.” There, captured Americans, many of whom were luckless draftees, were starved and beaten, shackled to cement slabs and hung from meat hooks. Susan ignored the possibility of their existence, refusing to view even the most outlandish claims of another government with the skepticism she brought to her own.
She had noted in her journals that Harriet accused her of not being “very sharp about other people, about what they are thinking and feeling, though I’m sure I have it in me to be empathetic and intuitive.” More than a decade later, in “Trip to Hanoi,” she mentioned “my empathic talents.” Back in New York, she wore an aluminum ring made from the fuselage of a downed American plane.
* * *
After “Trip to Hanoi” was published, “the American female writer Xu-Dan Xôn-Tăc” was written about in the North Vietnamese press. “Living by the Vietnamese way of life, according to Americans, would be a great loss of the soul!” one journalist exclaimed.
Of course in our perspective, the things that Sontag worries might be “lost” are not to be regretted or things that make the soul feel fulfilled. She is not yet able to understand what enriches our soul. Yet we are able to understand and evaluate American culture.20
This is surely untrue: it is common enough for non-Americans to think that familiarity with America’s more exportable products adds up to an understanding of American culture. But Susan herself had trouble creating a more nuanced view of her own country. At the end of the piece, she called for a new idea of American patriotism to replace the cruelty and chauvinism that generally went by that name. In London, in 1967, she said that
living in the United States hurts so much. It’s like having an ulcer all the time. The present administration is a world disaster, and it is mainly because there are so few thinking people in the administration. I feel embarrassed to be an American. . . . The pity is that there is a minority generation at the universities which is the most gifted, most human America has ever known. They are left with no choice but to opt out. When I come abroad, it is my way of opting out. But I am American, and when I am in America, I am automatically involved with protest—whatever good it can do.21
This is a reasonable reflection of the feeling many Americans experienced as Vietnam dragged on and on. But her outrage led her to an increasingly extreme anti-Americanism. She was amazed that the Vietnamese could fight America so self-sacrificingly while reading Whitman and Poe. In “What’s Happening in America,” she seemed to will destruction upon the entire nation: “Americans know their backs are against the wall: ‘they’ want to take all that away from ‘us.’ And, I think, America deserves to have it taken away.”22
To embrace communism—at least its Vietnamese variety—was to embrace a romantic politics unavailable at home. “It was a willful blindness,” said Robert Silvers. “Susan being carried away, Susan wanting to believe.”23 Later, she was embarrassed by the piece.24 “Even she, in retrospect, would have winced at some of the things she said during her visits to Hanoi under U.S. bombardment,” according to David. But “the horrors of war that made her go off to an extreme were anything but figments of her imagination. She may have been unwise, but the war was still the unspeakable monstrosity she thought it was at the time.”25
* * *
Before and after her trip to Hanoi, her dual role as emerging young writer and activist took her to a more peaceable kingdom. In April 1968, a cultural attaché from the Swedish embassy invited her to Stockholm to make a film.
The surprise invitation was a testimony to her burgeoning reputation. It awed her friends, who saw her go from triumph to triumph. But the impression of blessedness other people saw was not one she shared. Privately, she was still the “unloveable soldier” who was “struggling to survive, struggling to be honest, just, honorable,” and who still worried, as always at moments of apparent success, that she was falling short. In all of her work from the late sixties, a depression would be palpable that was something more than the terror that fell on so many in the age of Vietnam.
Still, the surface was dazzling. She stopped in Sweden on her way to Hanoi, and returned to spend three months in the capital of a country that had lingered for most of history in poverty and obscurity. Now, like Vietnam, it was famous: “Some countries are more famous than others,” Susan wrote. “And similar laws of celebrity—the false optics of fashion; the cruel swings of admiration, envy, and excoriation—apply to countries as to people.”26
Sweden’s fame came from one of the boldest political experiments in the world. Its social-democratic system was a non-Communist socialism meant to counter communism by removing the grievances upon which revolution thrived. To show that capitalist societies could be as friendly to workers as Communist ones, Sweden’s Social Democrats created programs that became legendary for their generosity. Through a combination of high taxes and lavish welfare outlays, Sweden became a role model, perhaps the role model, for the democratic Left all over the world.
Its political model made Sweden determined to play a role in culture, too. Bergman showed that this once-marginal country could produce artistically advanced cinema, though Swedish film was more widely known for something else. In 1951, in One Summer of Happiness, the actress Ulla Jacobsson’s breasts appeared. This was a first in a mainstream film, and caused an international frisson; Sweden’s relaxed attitude to nudity eventually gave rise to a lucrative pornography industry.
As part of its cultural diplomacy, Sweden strove to internationalize its cinema, paying for several of Godard’s films and inviting foreign directors, including Agnès Varda and Peter Watkins, to make films there. Susan Sontag seemed like a good choice: Against Interpretation had appeared in Swedish in 1967, and her essay on Bergman was influential even in his homeland.
And so she landed in room 404 of the Hotel Diplomat, on the elegant waterfront avenue called Strandvägen. There, she wrote “Trip to Hanoi” and a screenplay, Duet for Cannibals. “We all thought it was an adventure,” said Agneta Ekmanner, a young actress who would appear in Duet for Cannibals. Agneta and her friends looked forward to “a very thrilling adventure to work with Susan Sontag, whom we had already read about. Everyone was young and stupid—but very intelligent.”27
“We were used to working with very strange directors, auteurs,” said Bo Jonsson,
deputy head of production at Sandrews, the production company. “So we had a very liberal attitude when she came here.” They were aware it was a risk: “France had a hundred first directors,” Jonsson said, but only three enjoyed a full career. And Sweden had no professional scriptwriters: “Almost all directors wrote the script themselves.” Susan got a generous budget. “They liked Sweden because they were absolutely free to do whatever they wanted. As a producer, we never said: you have to do like this. That kind of dialogue didn’t exist.”28
* * *
Social Democratic Sweden was what people meant when they said “liberal,” as opposed to “radical.” But, like so many bastions of liberalism, Sweden had radicalized. Swedish opposition to Vietnam, including its willingness to welcome deserters from the United States armed forces, drove relations with the Johnson administration to such a low that the American ambassador was recalled in March 1968. This was an exceedingly rare step toward a friendly Western European country; and for almost two years, until the Nixon administration, no ambassador would return.
“Vietnam was the biggest Swedish question,” said Peter Hald, who worked with Susan. Part of the reason for Swedish interest in her was her interest in Vietnam. “Sweden was all over interested in Vietnam.”29 And so if summery Stockholm, with its ancient spires and flowery isles, seemed far removed from the napalmed villages of Vietnam, it was not. The city was filled with Americans fleeing the draft: for them, Sweden was the most popular destination after Canada.
They had “nowhere to go, to live,” said Gösta Ekman, who had been Ingmar Bergman’s assistant at Dramaten, Sweden’s most prestigious theater. “So we said: you’re welcome. And Susan heard about this, the deserters living in our house, and the intention when she came to Sweden was to make a film about the deserters.”30
In a surviving treatment, we read: “Concerns the situation of an American deserter, Tom Moss, who has come to Stockholm.” Her film would include documentary footage. Then, after thirty minutes, “his life becomes more dream-like.” Some of these scenes might have been outtakes from The Benefactor or Death Kit: “a party at which Tom, Lars, and Ingrid are all present: Tom eventually becomes so upset that he ends by bandaging much of his body, including his face.”31
This marriage of real politics to a weird dreamworld attempted to illustrate the meaning of modern art that Susan had earlier defined: “its discovery beneath the logic of everyday life of the alogic of dreams.” But she discovered that another film about deserters was being made; and so she produced a different script, one that baffled everyone involved. “I said, I don’t understand. What’s it about?” said Ekman. “And we were all like that.” But Göran Lindgren, the head of Sandrews, the production company, said: “She’s very famous. I trust her.”32
* * *
“I have never, never heard so many interesting things about film,” said Agneta Ekmanner. Susan’s cinephilia, inherited from Mildred—“my mother, movie fan-fatale”33—was also a characteristic of the sixties. “In a funny way, that was what was driving the culture at that moment, film love,” said Phillip Lopate, speaking of the years he knew Sontag at Columbia.34 It was, as Susan wrote near the end of her life, “the age of feverish moviegoing, with the full-time cinephile always hoping to find a seat as close as possible to the big screen, ideally the third row center.” This was moviegoing as education, as weltanschauung:
Cinema had apostles (it was like religion). Cinema was a crusade. Cinema was a world view. Lovers of poetry or opera or dance don’t think there is only poetry or opera or dance.
It was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to strut, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive, such as . . . it looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining.
The movies also offered a flight from consciousness: “You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie,” she wrote. “To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.” And if this setup had a sexual component, Sontag was not one to deny it: “No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals—erotic, ruminative—of the darkened theater.”35
In the late sixties, perhaps the most admired creator in avant-garde film was Jean-Luc Godard, to whom Sontag dedicated an essay in Against Interpretation and then, in February 1968, another. Only three years older than Susan, Godard was a phenomenon, “turning out a film every few months”: by the end of 1968, when he was thirty-eight, he had already made eighteen movies. Despite her longing to destroy the will, she also admired such Nietzschean creators: “The great culture heroes of our time have shared two qualities,” she wrote. “They have all been ascetics in some exemplary way, and also great destroyers.”36 The “monastic cell,” the aesthetics of silence, could coexist with this kind of heroism.
There was something else that interested her in Godard, and made him a model for the work she was trying to do. “I’m still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of Cahiers du Cinéma,” she quoted him. “The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it.”37 He had located “a new vein of lyricism and pathos for cinema: in bookishness, in genuine cultural passion, in intellectual callowness, in the misery of someone strangling in his own thoughts.”38 And he showed how a critic might become an artist:
Godard has elaborated a largely anti-poetic cinema, one of whose chief literary models is the prose essay. Godard has even said: “I consider myself an essay writer. I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays.”39
* * *
Though many tried, Godard’s mystifying films, with their interpretive, critical sensibility, were difficult to emulate. Sontag was steeped in film and film criticism. She had been on the jury at the Venice Film Festival in 1967, and on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival. Her cinephilic knowledge was second to none, but when it came to making Duet for Cannibals she seemed to succeed only at mystification.
Ekman plays Tomas, secretary to a loopy but charismatic revolutionary, Bauer, in Swedish exile. Agneta Ekmanner plays Ingrid, his wife, who watches nervously as Tomas comes increasingly under Bauer’s spell. Bauer—based on Jacob Taubes, like Professor Bulgaraux in The Benefactor—is married to an Italian named Francesca. This character is another iteration of Frau Anders, the woman-without-a-will: “She doesn’t like to be touched,” her husband says. “It’s best to pay no attention to her.”40 Bauer is suffering from some disease, which adds to the atmosphere of mistrust, espionage, and things going bump in the night.
“Not plot, but incident”: Warhol’s instructions to his collaborator Ronald Tavel offer a motto for this film, too.41 Incidents happen. Francesca locks herself in the car, for example, then sprays the inside of the windshield with shaving cream. She wraps Tomas’s head in gauze. There are surrealist gestures, as when Tomas is listening to a recording of Bauer’s voice and the voice suddenly starts speaking directly to him. Ingrid turns up at chez Bauer, falls under his charm, fucks him on the sofa, and then becomes, like Francesca, a spineless servant, another will-less woman. Francesca feeds Ingrid off her own plate; Ingrid and Francesca flirt; Francesca dies; Bauer commits suicide; neither is really dead. As the bandaged Tomas is another example of her obsessive theme of vision and blindness, Bauer’s return is another example of Susan’s “obsessive theme of fake death.”
The film is far more interesting to interpret or analyze than it is to watch. The viewer can only sympathize with the befuddlement of the actors. “We kept asking each other, out of the corner of our mouth: ‘What is this about?’” said Gösta Ekman.42 At first, said Agneta, “We felt that this was very exciting. That this film could be something very new. But we couldn’t judge. Because the script didn’t say so much.” Susan had trouble explaining what she meant. “I don’t think she had real feeling for the actors,” said Jonsson. After trying and failing to elicit explanations from her, they shrugged their shoulders and got on with thei
r work. “What it was all about . . . I don’t think any of us really grasped that,” said Peter Hald.
Susan was isolated. The actors knew each other and had worked together. She, on the other hand, had no experience with directing or acting, and no knowledge of the language in which she was directing. As in Vietnam, where she was aware that her ignorance of Vietnamese made her dependent on the interpretations of others, in Sweden she found herself in the odd situation of directing in a language she did not understand.
* * *
Susan’s difficulties in approaching the real world of politics—as opposed to the theoretical or aestheticized world of ideology—come through in “A Letter from Sweden,” published in Ramparts in 1969. Alongside Death Kit, “Trip to Hanoi,” and Duet for Cannibals, it betokens the frustration lurking beneath a frenetic surface. Susan was trying to find the passion that made Against Interpretation ring with the excitement of discovery. Even the best essays in Styles of Radical Will feel belabored, opaque: difficult rather than challenging, daunting both to reader and, one senses, to writer. In her fiction, reportage, and films—forms that were not her native languages—the difficulties become even more apparent.
“Letter from Sweden” reveals the source of Susan’s confusion, and of her difficulties. It is hard to locate exactly her objections to Sweden. To read between the lines is to find a model of a humane society, and Susan is not blind to its positive qualities. She praises its extraordinary generosity to artists, including to her. She notes that it has the highest per-capita income in the world. She describes its egalitarianism: “The country is, for example, virtually servantless.”43 She admires its lack of corruption. “The standard of honesty among people in work situations could scarcely be higher,” she writes.44 As for the status of women: “I can’t tell you how relieving, liberating it is to be in a city where an unaccompanied woman can walk around at any hour, day or night, and hardly even be looked at, much less accosted or followed by men.”45 The Swedes were furthermore “spectacularly good-looking” and in “exceptional physical health”—though she criticized “a discrepancy between beauty of face and unliberated body.”46 They were not hung up about sex: there was “no stigma attached to being a bastard.” And “if you want a dildo, you can buy one at your nearest sex store.”47