I love being alive.
I wake up every morning very
grateful that I'm alive.
It's more than enjoyment.
I'm, uh...
I'm very happy to be alive.
I began writing when I was
6 or 7 or 8, stories and poems
and plays.
It was...yes, it was like
enlisting in an army of saints
or something of that sort--it
sounds very foolish--but I
didn't feel that I was
expressing myself.
I felt that I was, well,
taking part in a
noble activity.
My mother was very much someone
who was interested in everything.
Intellectual and cultural and
aesthetic and sensual experience.
When I turned 40, I was in
China. When I turned 50,
I was in France.
When I turned 60, I was
in Sarajevo and the bombs
were falling.
Being 70 sounds very awesome.
Despite my two bouts
of cancer, I feel fine.
I feel as if a lot of
things are still ahead.
WOMAN: ...one of the country's
most controversial writers
and social critics...
MAN: She was
the relentless campaigner
for human rights
and against war...
MAN: ...the most intelligent
woman in America...
MAN: ...critic, activist,
playwright, essayist...
she wrote 17 books
and won major awards,
including the National
Book Award...
WOMAN: Susan Sontag
was 71 years old.
SONTAG:
For the last hundred years
in our society,
the most interesting writers
have mostly been critics
of the society.
The writer very
often has taken some kind
of adversary position.
I like that
adversary position.
I like the position of
being able to express
dissenting opinions.
WOMAN: Shortly after September
11th, Susan Sontag became one
of the first prominent
Americans to publicly state
the attack was carried out in
response to US foreign policy.
[Sirens]
Sontag writes in the
current issue of the
"New Yorker" magazine...
SONTAG: This sort of
build-up of moralistic
words to describe
this horrendous atrocity was
not helping us to understand
and reach an intelligent
response, political
and military, which I'm
absolutely in favor of.
I'm not a pacifist.
There's so many
opinions around.
And I guess I'm
just a very straight
First Amendment--
strict First Amendment
person.
I want to defend
Ann Coulter.
Well, you're also a very
offensive writer.
You are part of the "Blame
America First" crowd.
You said that we were
to blame for our
foreign policy--
SONTAG: I never said
anything of the kind.
Let me--let me just--
I'm just as patriotic
and against the terrorists
as you are.
Well, your version
of patriotism is
blame America,
blame America.
SONTAG: Oh, dear.
We have a long
tradition of debate.
I'm interested in people
having a historical
understanding of
where we are so that
we can better defend
ourselves and stop
international terrorism.
GAZIANO:
And let's get into
your position...
WOMAN AS SONTAG:
It is difficult
for the citizens of America,
having never seen their country
devastated by war
to really understand
and appreciate the full
horrors of war.
The battle for peace
will never be won
by calling anyone whom we
don't like a Communist.
If we do this, we shall
someday realize that,
in the effort to preserve
our democratic way of life,
we have thrown away its
noblest feature--the right
of every person to
express his own opinion.
MAN: Everyone who knew us knew
I was totally in love with her.
We never dated but we
were always together.
She gave me the first
academic lecture of my life.
She sat me down on her bed
and ran through the argument
of the "Critique
of Pure Reason,"
Kant's "Critique
of Pure Reason."
She must have been 15.
WOMAN AS SONTAG:
In Los Angeles, I tracked
down a real bookstore,
the first of my
bookstore-besotted life:
The Pickwick on
Hollywood Boulevard,
where I went every few days
after school, buying when I
could, stealing when I dared.
I had to acquire them,
see them in rows along the
wall of my tiny bedroom.
My household deities,
my spaceships.
HAIDU: In '48, I graduated
from high school.
Sue had another semester
of high school to do...
and in the second semester,
she went up to Berkeley.
[Bell tolls]
SONTAG: And the very first day,
I was standing on line
registering for a class,
and I heard somebody
ahead of me say, "Proust."
And I thought, "Oh, my God.
It's pronounced Proost."
I thought it was
"Prowst." Ha ha!
And then I thought,
"I'm home.
"I've reached a place
where somebody else has read
the books that I have read."
It was freedom.
It was like escape.
[Trolley bell clangs]
WOMAN: Drag.
Go In Drag.
A Drag Party.
Straight.
East.
Jam.
West.
Act Swishy.
I'm Swished tonight.
This is a list of slang that
Susan learned when I took her
to San Francisco to
learn about the world
of gay people.
[Bells chiming]
This is '48, and I'm going
to Berkeley and I'm working
at the Campus Text Book
Exchange, which was staffed
entirely by gay boys and me.
And then Susan came in the
door one day to buy a book.
She was absolutely
overwhelmingly gorgeous.
She walked in, and he said
to me, "Go get her." Ha ha!
So I went.
[Horns honking]
WOMAN AS SONTAG:
First we went to the 299, then
to 12 Adler where we met Bruce
and went with him to
a homosexual bar.
The singer was a very tall
and beautiful blonde
in a strapless evening gown.
[Wolf whistling]
I wondered about her
remarkably powerful voice.
Harriet had to tell me
she was a man.
ZWERLING: And then I took her to
Peggy's Bar, and that was the
night we both got very drunk
and we started making out
together, and she was wild.
I mean, she was so...
she was so naive
and so innocent.
She'd never had
any kind of sex.
She probably necked with boys
in high school, but I mean it
was not anything
real, you know,
because men left her cold.
WOMAN AS SONTAG:
I know the truth now.
I know how good and
right it is to love.
I have in some part been
given permission to live.
Everything begins from now.
I am reborn.
ZWERLING: And then I left.
I went to Paris.
Susan went to Chicago.
HAIDU: How Sue became
Susan Sontag led
through Philip Rieff.
I was assigned to Philip Rieff's
social science class
at the University of Chicago.
After, I think, 2 or 3 weeks,
I called her and said,
"You've got to
go hear this guy.
He's a brilliant lecturer
who manages to put together
Freud and Marx."
So she went, and
apparently 10 days later
they were engaged.
Um, that was not
my recommendation.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
At 17, I met a thin,
heavy-thighed balding man who
talked and talked, snobbishly,
bookishly, and called
me "Sweet."
After a few days,
I married him.
We talked for 7 years.
WOMAN: It was
a very small wedding.
We went afterwards to Bob's
Big Boy for a hamburger.
She and I were
giggling a little.
That I remember, that we just
each caught the other's eye
and that was it.
When I visited them in
Cambridge, they seemed totally
close, inseparable.
How much of it was intellectual,
and how much was not?
I mean,
there had to have been,
at some point, some physical
attraction somewhere,
and they certainly
acted like there was.
They were just really kind
of like they were one person.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I had a difficult birth.
David was big.
A lot of pain.
I wanted to be knocked out,
not to know anything.
[Woman, as Sontag]
If only I get the fellowship
to Oxford, then at least I'll
know if I'm anything
outside the domestic stage,
The feathered nest.
I think for a while it was
just really fine, but people
change in their marriages,
and obviously she did.
He did not.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
In marriage, I have suffered
a certain loss of personality.
At first the loss was
pleasant, easy; now it aches
and stirs up my general
disposition to be malcontented
with a new fierceness.
Just got the fellowship.
Study philosophy in Oxford.
WOMAN: She had made
arrangements for her
husband's parents to take
care of the child.
But to today's parents,
it's just unthinkable.
Because she was so young when
she had her child, she hadn't
been able to live out
her own adolescence.
I think she just wanted to
do what she wanted to do.
And you know, it's...that's
really all there is to it.
[Woman, as Sontag]
Je l'aime beaucoup is
more than je l'aime bien
but less than je l'aime.
I like Paris--stronger,
more reserved.
J'aime Paris.
I like Paris.
ZWERLING: The end of '57,
she came to Paris
at Christmas from Oxford
and she stayed,
and we started living
together in a hotel.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Harriet is beautiful,
relaxed, affectionate.
I, dizzy with passion and
need for her, am happy.
Good God, I am happy!
ZWERLING:
We gave a big party, and the
night before the big party,
we had a lesbian couple over
to visit, but we drank a lot
and we smoked a lot of grass
and things started getting
a little sexy, and Susan got
into it a little too much,
and I got very jealous and
punched her in the face.
The next day was our big party
with all the American ex-pats,
the Beats.
Ginsberg and Corso and all
those people were coming.
And Ginsberg came over
to me at one point.
Susan had this big
black-and-blue mark on her jaw.
And he said to me,
"Why'd you hit her?
She's younger and
prettier than you."
And I said, "That's why."
Ha! So...
I was, at that time,
the assistant,
to a director named
Pierre Kast.
Susan was having
money problems,
and I offered her a walk-on
in this film.
It's just so funny to think of
Sontag being in a New Wave film
since she's going to
go on to make New Wave film
something very, very
important in the U.S.
She is somebody who is
constantly being reborn.
I mean it wasn't just from
being in France or from making
love with Harriet.
She was constantly discovering
things and becoming
a new person.
And that's her kind of
essential avant-gardism.
You can either suspect it
or really, really admire it.
I see Paris as getting her
out of her marriage.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
The thought of going back to
my old life...it hardly seems
like a dilemma anymore.
I can't.
I won't.
Susan had her year
or whatever it was,
came home, and said,
"That's it."
It was not a really
pleasant divorce.
WOMAN: College at 15.
Marriage at 17?
SONTAG: Yes.
A child at...
Yeah.
These numbers
suggest what?
Eagerness to grow up.
I hated being a child.
I couldn't do what
I wanted to do.
I wanted to stay up
all night.
I wanted to see the world.
I wanted to
talk to people.
I wanted to meet people who
were interested in what
I was interested in.
My parents lived abroad.
They lived in China.
My father was a
businessman in China.
They came back to the
United States for my birth
and for that of my
younger sister.
Then they left us with
various relatives.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Milk with vanilla flavor in it
and peanut butter crackers.
The egg timer on the
wall in the kitchen.
Betting 25 cents on the
world series with Gramps.
I for the Yanks,
he for The Bums.
From my upper bunk, testing
Judith on the capitals
of all the states.
Daddy died
October 19, 1938.
COHEN: He fell ill
for the last time
and died in China of
tuberculosis.
SONTAG: My father died
so far away and without
my knowing it.
I didn't even know
he was dead until about
a year after.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I didn't really believe
my father was dead.
For years and years, I
dreamed he turned up one day
at the door.
When I was 6,
my sister was 3,
we ended up with my
mother, who was very
much a part-time mother
in Tucson, Arizona.
COHEN: Our mother, Mildred,
didn't focus totally on us.
Let me put it this way. We had
a lot of uncles who were not
our uncles.
And they just kind
of came and went.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I wasn't my mother's child.
I was her subject, companion,
friend, consort.
My habit of "holding back"
is loyalty to my mother.
SONTAG: My mother met a very
glamorous war veteran,
full of medals and shrapnel.
He had been shot down
6 days after D-Day and was
convalescing in Tucson.
And his name was Sontag.
COHEN: They just went to Mexico
one day, and they came back
and they said,
"We're married."
Susan and I were extremely
hurt that we weren't invited
to go to Mexico
to the wedding.
We were delighted to have
a change in name.
We were so clearly identified
as being Jewish with a name
like Rosenblatt that my sister
who was older and I guess
an easier target did get hit
in the head and called names.
From Tucson, we moved to
Southern California and ended up
in Sherman Oaks
in the valley.
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER:
I can remember a rather
small house, very modest.
And I was lying on my stomach
in the living room and I
was reading.
And then this large pair of
pants and shoes walked by me,
and it was of course
Mr. Sontag.
He said "Sue, if you read
so much, you'll never
get married."
And I burst out laughing.
I thought this was the most
preposterous thing I ever heard,
because it never
occurred to me that I would
want to marry someone who
didn't like someone who
read a lot of books.
[Sontag speaking French]
[Man speaking French]
[Speaking French]
[Speaking French]
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
The truth is always something
that is told, not something
that is known.
If there were no speaking or
writing, there would be no
truth about anything.
There would only be what is.
She gave me a
copy of the book,
signed to me and the baby.
It's back here somewhere.
"The Benefactor."
That's her first novel.
It's awful.
"TIME" magazine reviewer for
"The Benefactor" in 1963 said it
sounded like a blurred
translation from some
other language.
All interesting writers now
have been touched in some way
by this search for new forms
or trying to do something
with the story or with
narration in one way or another.
That nobody's really
writing straight stories.
Sontag really opted
out of realism.
Very abstract,
philosophical prose.
That's what she was going for.
And I think she fashioned
herself as being both
a theorist and a
fiction writer.
Always wanted the
double identity.
That's why I find "The
Benefactor" a really brave book
even though it's a bad novel.
ZWERLING: I started feeling very
lonely, and it was winter.
Winter is awful in Paris.
Susan was living in
New York already.
I just had the idea--maybe
I should go back to New York
for a while and
see what it's like.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG: There has
appeared in New York recently
a new and still esoteric
genre of spectacle--
at first sight, apparently
a cross between art exhibit
and theatrical performance.
These events have been given
the modest and somewhat
teasing name of "Happenings".
ZWERLING: Susan was living on
West End Avenue with her son.
And I moved in with her,
and she met Irene Fornes.
Irene and I had been
involved before.
I really loved her,
but we had broken up already.
Anyway, concerning Susan,
things were going on
that I didn't quite get.
I'd be there with David,
putting David to bed and she'd
come home, like, 3:00 in the
morning, reeking of Mitsouko
which is a wonderful perfume
of Guerlain, which I had
given to Irene,
and I didn't pick up on it.
Irene was her best lover.
As I've said to many people,
Irene could make a stone come.
I mean, she was
just incredible.
With Irene, you had a real
functioning creative artist.
A part of the downtown
Bohemia of her time.
Susan discovered the
brilliance of talent as
opposed to the
brilliance of intellect.
There were these remarkable
people who didn't know
anything about the issues that
were so important to her,
who had never read Nietzsche,
who can't spell or
pronounce his name.
That was a jolt for her
and a liberating one.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
What I love; what draws me
very much to writing is it's
a way of paying attention
to the world.
You're just an instrument for
tuning in to as much reality
as you can.
KOCH: I met Susan
right around the time
that "Notes on Camp" hit
and transformed her position.
WOMAN: Sontag was an iron lady.
She was imperious,
magisterial, authoritative.
"Here is what Camp is.
"No one's ever thought about
it before, and I'll tell you
what it is."
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
The two pioneering forces of
modern sensibility are Jewish
moral seriousness
and homosexual aestheticism
and irony.
KOCH: Here was the possibility
of this gay trash coming forward
and claiming a
position for itself.
Moving away from supposed high
seriousness to low seriousness
was seen as a very threatening
thing to a certain generation.
It was a watershed moment.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
The essence of Camp is
its love of the unnatural,
of artifice and
exaggeration.
The most refined form of sexual
attractiveness, as well as the
most refined form of sexual
pleasure consists in going
against the grain
of one's sex.
KOCH: She's not making a big
theoretical argument.
She's saying "Look at this,
look at that, look at this,
look at that", and by the time
you're through, something's
been opened up to you.
You don't have to be
Schoenberg. You could be
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
and it could be good.
Maybe it's so bad
that it's good!
The idea of Camp was something
absolutely unknown to
straight people.
Really what Camp
was was a code.
NELSON: She's saying "I'm a
cultural ethnographer.
"I've gone into this strange
land of queers and I know
"something about them but I'm
not the native informant.
"I'm the outsider who's gone in
to study them with a certain
kind of scrupulousness,
but I'm not of them."
You could just read between
the lines. Of course she was
paying attention to gay lingo.
She couldn't have written
"Notes on Camp" if she hadn't
done decades of homework.
Honestly.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
My desire to write is
connected to my homosexuality.
I need the identity as a
weapon to match the weapon
that society has against me.
I am just becoming aware of
how guilty I feel being queer.
The photograph of her
on "I, Etcetera"
was a sort of pin-up
for every graduate school
lesbian that I knew.
It was just magnificent.
And you felt sort of like
ohhh...it's school girlish
to respond in this way
to the photograph,
especially cause
she won't come out.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
No matter what I
have said, my life,
my actions say that I have
not loved the truth,
that I have not
wanted the truth.
CASTLE: I distinctly
remember people saying,
"Well, she should just--
"she should come out.
She is just
letting us all down."
This is a completely unfair--
first of all, to me,
it's an unfair thing
to say about anyone.
At fir--I--and this is
an age thing.
To someone my age, this seems
to me like a private thing.
Why is it a private thing?
Because for someone my age,
for most of your life, it had
to be a secret thing.
In "The Benefactor," her first
novel, in 1963, she has
the following sentence: "I am
a homosexual and a writer,
"both of whom are
professionally
self-regarding and
self-esteeming creatures."
Does the author of "Notes
on Camp" have to come out?
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
To interpret is to impoverish--
to deplete the world in order
to set up a shadow world
of meanings.
The aim of all commentary on
art should be to make works
of art and our own experience
more, rather than
less real to us.
We need an erotics of art.
MAN: "The lady swings.
"She digs the Supremes and
is savvy about Camp.
"She likes her hair wild
and her sentences intense.
"Miss Sontag has written
a ponderable, vivacious
and quite astonishingly
American book."
KOCH: Susan was a star.
It was certainly not
just her ideas.
She had gone from being a
rising figure of obvious
interest to being suddenly
this famous writer.
Boom--there would be
something by Susan, and it
leapt out...and it wasn't
because of anything other than
its literary star quality.
Style was a huge
part of her work.
And style--her style as a
writer was inseparable from
her style as a person.
She was beautiful
and glamorous.
There's no question
about that.
And she was very conscious of
the effect she had on people.
Now, Susan, smile.
Ha ha ha!
Say cheese.
KOCH: Susan was,
among other things,
tremendously photogenic...
and knew it.
Just what
you're doing.
Tell me
when it starts.
Yes, I'll tell you
when it starts.
Whenever I read about her,
there's almost always a phrase:
"One of the most
photographed women
of her generation,"
like this is some
sort of accident of
nature, like an earthquake.
She knew the power
of photography.
So she created that image,
and it worked.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Being photographed, I
feel transfixed, trapped.
I become the looked at.
For as much as I am a
professional see-er, I am
a hopelessly amateur see-ee,
an eternal photographic
virgin.
I feel the same perplexity
each time I am photographed.
[Audience murmuring
and laughing]
I don't like being called
a "lady writer," Norman.
I know it does--it seems
like gallantry to you,
but it doesn't
feel right to us.
It's a little better to
be called a woman writer.
I don't know why, but,
you know, words count.
We're all writers,
we know that.
[Audience member
shouts]
Well, how about a woman
doctor, a woman lawyer?
Yeah, I mean, if you were
introducing James Baldwin,
you wouldn't say our
foremost Negro writer.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Man writer!
And we certainly
wouldn't say a man writer.
And so a lot of it,
a lot of it--
WOMAN: A gentleman writer!
[Laughter and applause]
MAILER: Susan. Susan--
No, I really ask you
this not in an
argumentative spir--
I will never use the word
"lady" again in public.
[Applause]
Don't allow yourself to be
patronized, condescended to,
which, if you are a woman
happens, and will continue to
happen all the time,
all your lives.
Don't take shit.
Tell the bastards off.
[Cheering and applause]
WOMAN: When she had just
become a Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux author,
Roger and Dorothea
Straus were giving one
of their parties.
The custom was that after
dinner, the men would go off to
one room to smoke their cigars
and have their conversation,
and the women would go
off to another room.
When Susan saw this, she
just went to join the men.
And that was it.
Susan broke the tradition, and
after that, we never split up
after dinner again.
WOMAN: I don't think feminism
gave Susan anything.
Susan had already taken out
the license to be a great woman
before there was
any feminism; any talk
of feminism.
In fact, I think feminism
must've curtailed her sphere
of activity because she had
suddenly to identify with all
these women--all these
dopey women! Ha ha!
SONTAG: I'm a militant
feminist, but I'm not
a feminist militant.
The main activity that
I have as a writer
I have as a writer
and not as a woman writer.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
To be a woman is to
be an actress.
Being feminine is a
kind of theater,
with its appropriate costumes,
decor, lighting,
and stylized gestures.
The feminism is there.
But she was such an
individual; you know, she
so hated to be pigeon-holed,
that, "I am not going to stamp
my little feet and
say 'Naughty, naughty,
'Susan Sontag.
Why weren't you marching
with your NOW button?'"
But she was a feminist who
found most women wanting.
"Why do they waste so much
time worrying about what they
looked like instead of
what they thought?"
SONTAG: I don't know
what it means to be
trapped in domesticity.
I was married. I had a child
whom I raised mostly myself
because I was divorced when
my son was 7 years old.
And I have had
a domestic life.
I just don't
think it's a trap.
KOLLISCH:
My son was 7 when I first
met Susan, and David I think
was about 11 or 12.
It was the first time that a
woman courted me and won me.
I might actually have
met Susan via Irene.
I don't think I ever
knew the whole truth.
I don't think she told me
really how deeply she was
still involved with Irene and
how much she was still in love
with her...I didn't know.
I mean I never considered
myself main lover...
lover number 1, main wife,
or whatever--no.
I was sort of the interlude.
We tried to have a life where
we could do our mothering
and pursue our work and have a
little extra time for fun or
walking around the Village
or talking or making love.
I was a much more
traditional mother.
I wanted my son to have
a regular bedtime.
I wanted him to
eat normal food. Ha ha!
And I think that Susan treated
David like a peer I think long
before she should
have done that.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Yesterday, David announced as
he was being prepared for bed,
"You know what I see
when I shut my eyes?
I see Jesus on the cross."
It's time for Homer, I think.
Paganize his tender spirit.
KOLLISCH:
I think she came to me for the
part that was the old Susan--
the one who was hungry and
took off her shoes and raided
the 'fridgerator and started
to gossip and be
very comfortable.
I knew that she had really
another life among
very famous people.
On one or two occasions
when I was in some lecture
or some social event,
Susan treated me quite shabbily.
She didn't introduce me,
or if she did then she left me
standing there, and that
offended me and hurt me a lot.
She was never able to
know what goes on
in another person.
I mean the sensitivity that we
exercise in everyday life all
the time, you know, like,
"What are you thinking?
"What are you feeling?
Where are you in this?"
Susan was not sensitive,
was not a sensitive person.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
My image of myself since age
3 or 4: the
Genius-Schmuck.
I develop relationships to
satisfy one or the other.
Irene, obviously, was for the
schmuck, Philip for the genius.
Yet both are always
there, like Siamese twins.
It came to me last night
that I have lost Irene.
Like a bulletin coming
into view in Times Square.
Her eyes are blank.
She has let go.
KOCH: She was briefly involved
with Jasper Johns.
In Jasper, Susan's ego
met its match.
She didn't think that there
were many people around who
were her equal, so she sought
out people who were her equal
though in very
different areas.
She slept with whomever she
felt like sleeping with.
She was very
resistant to categories.
NUNEZ: She had relationships
with women and she had
relationships with men,
and she fell in love
with women and she
fell in love with men.
LEVINE: After Irene and
Eva--oh, and then there
was Lily Engler
and Carlotta.
Things were very elaborate.
I mean this was after all,
you know, this was
the sixties in the Village.
Doctor!
Will you tell these fools
I'm not crazy?
Make them listen to me
before it's too late!
[Car horn honks]
They're here already!
You're next!
[Zapping]
Aah!
Aaaaaah!
She writes about
science fiction--
like, trashy science fiction
B films, you know--
"The Invasion of the
Body Snatchers."
You cannot imagine any other
New York intellectuals
writing about this.
It's just preposterous.
[Gunfire]
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
We live under continual
threat of two equally fearful
but seemingly
opposed destinies--
unremitting banality and
inconceivable terror.
[Explosions]
It is fantasy which allows
most people to cope with these
twin spectres.
[Explosions]
It was from a weekly visit to
the cinema that you learned
how to strut, how to kiss,
to fight, to grieve.
[Tires squeal]
MAN: In the days of the
New Wave, the latest Godard
or Fassbinder--this was a big,
big deal, and Susan was there
before anybody.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Cinema was poetic and
mysterious and erotic
and moral--
all at the same time.
You wanted to be
kidnapped by the movie.
KOCH: She says to me blandly
over dinner in a Chinese
restaurant, "Oh, by the way,
I'm going to Sweden
to make a movie."
She'd got a letter
saying, "Dear Ms. Sontag.
We would like you
to make a movie".
This is like fantasy land.
It's fantasy.
It doesn't happen to anybody.
MAN: Its a very
strange movie.
You think?
Politics--yeah,
I think it's strange.
Politics is
involved in some way.
The sexuality of these
people, the ideology
of these people
are played with.
Most people you see in movies
have very little relation
to real people.
In the average Hollywood movie,
you don't see real people,
either mainstream people
or marginal people.
[Speaking native language]
You're a little annoyed with
them, I mean, because they're
not eating or
whatever it is.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Filmmaking is blind instinct,
petty calculations,
smooth generalship,
daydreaming, pig-headedness,
grace, bluff, risk.
[People speaking
native language]
I remember the films as feeling
very Bergman-esque to me,
you know?
But she was learning how to
do it right in front of us.
Yes, I know.
I read the reviews.
MAN:
Have you any comments?
I think they're wrong.
SONTAG:
I love photography
so much.
I look at pictures.
I think about
pictures all the time.
If I were to say to you
right now, "Susan Sontag, I'd
like to take your picture,"
you'd pull yourself up,
arrange yourself.
Sure, and I'd do
this and--that's right.
We have a notion
about a photograph.
You see, we want photographs
to tell us the truth,
and we value them
because they really are
records in a sense,
let's say,
that painting isn't.
At the same time we
want photographs to lie.
We want them to make us
look good, that is
to say, better
than we normally look.
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER:
Our sense of the world is
now ruled and shaped by
photographed images.
What was the first
photograph you saw
that shocked
and horrified you?
Does it still
horrify you?
I think the overall effect
of photographs, of painful,
terrible photographs, is
that one is less shocked.
I think that when you
see a lot of very
shocking and painful
photographs,
you flinch less.
She's very deeply concerned
about the way that the image
is consuming all the
public space for thinking.
She thinks we should
be dieting, right,
that we should be
consuming fewer images.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
The problem is not that people
remember through photographs,
but that they remember
only the photographs.
LEVINE: I come in--
I had my own keys--
and I see the first sort
of pre-copy of "On Photography,"
so I take the book and I go
running upstairs,
and there she is,
indeed, lying spread-eagled
on her back on her bed.
And I say, "Oh, you know, it
looks so beautiful in the two
tones of gray," and all
of this, and nothing.
Not a word.
Sit down on the bed, and
she just turns her head,
looks at me straight
in the eyes, and said,
"But it's not as good as
Walter Benjamin, is it?"
And I thought, "OK,
moment of truth."
And I took a breath and I
said, "No, it's not, but that
doesn't mean it isn't the best
book of essays by an American
since the Second World War."
SONTAG: The first time
I ever saw photographs
of the Nazi camps,
I was 12 years old.
And I was in a bookstore
and I opened this book,
and I thought I
was going to faint.
I was so upset.
I immediately closed the book.
I was trembling, and
then I opened it again.
And I knew--I knew
what I was seeing.
I knew that the Nazis had
killed a lot of Jews.
I knew that I was Jewish,
but I didn't know it meant
what I saw.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Let the atrocious
images haunt us.
This is what human beings
are capable of doing,
may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically,
self-righteously.
Don't forget.
MAN: Being Jewish--does
that matter to you?
It matters in the sense
that I would always
stand up and be
counted any time that it
mattered for other people.
I'm Jewish because
other people say I am
and because that's what
I am sociologically or
historically.
I come from a family which
generations ago belonged to
a religious culture.
KOLLISCH: We talked
a lot about my life
as a German Jewish refugee,
my having come out of that
background, and Susan just...
I guess peeling down to
certain essentials.
It was very important to live
a mundane life and yet also be
in touch with the possibility
that your life could change
radically any moment.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I feel, as a Jew,
a special responsibility
to side with the oppressed
and the weak.
[Man speaking French]
[Sontag speaking French]
What are we gonna do
about Susan Sontag?
Is there is something to
be done about her?
I don't know. I haven't--
I can't read her.
She's unfathomable to me.
She is as useful as anybody
else to recall a mood
about America which is very
fashionable these days--
America as being philistine,
conformist, dedicated--
in the words of
Howard Zinn--to death.
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER:
At this moment, firm-bodied
children are being charred by
napalm bombs.
Young men, Vietnamese and
American, are falling like trees
to lie forever with
their faces in the mud.
As writers, guardians of
language, we may and should
conceive ourselves to have a
vocational connection with
the life of truth, that is,
of seriousness.
Let's be serious.
[People shouting]
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER: I had
accepted an invitation from the
North Vietnamese government
to visit North Vietnam
as a reward for all
the public speaking and
getting arrested and whatnot
that I had done.
[Applause]
Shakespeare, parliamentary
government, baroque churches,
Newton, the emancipation
of women, Kant, Marx,
and Ballanchine ballets don't
redeem what this particular
civilization has wrought
upon the world.
Indeed, I think she
epitomizes what Albert Camus
said: "The day when I am no
more than a writer, I shall
cease to write".
[Bell clanging]
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I arrived in Israel with a
small crew during the recent
Arab Israeli war to make a
so-called documentary.
Being rather tuned into
sadness, to the tears
of things, I put a lot
of that in the film.
SONTAG: What I want
people to think about
is how serious war is.
It is more horrible than any
kind of pictures could convey.
And maybe one of the most
horrible parts of it is that
it becomes a normality.
There is a culture of war.
[People praying]
I have may criticisms
of the government,
but I'm generally a supporter
of Israel, and I don't feel
that this is incompatible
with a general left-wing
point of view.
[Man singing]
KOCH: "Promised Lands" was made
possible by Nicole Stephane.
She was born
Nicole Rothschild.
She had had to flee
France from the Nazis.
She entered into
the Resistance.
She was arrested.
Then she became a movie star,
in these fantastic films--
the great film "Les Enfants
Terribles," in which she's this
wonderful butch girl ...
[Shouting]
[Knock on door]
And she was Jewish.
So there was absolutely
everything to fascinate
Susan Sontag.
LEVINE:
She had rented an apartment
on the Place St. Germain,
and of course,
being Susan, it wasn't just
any old apartment.
It was Sartre's old apartment,
so this is where Beauvoir
and Sartre would meet.
And she literally never spent
a night in the apartment.
She had immediately
moved in with Nicole.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I'm in love.
Don't ask me how
it's possible.
It's just not in character;
my nightmare-ridden, stubborn,
melancholy Jewish character.
And yet, it's happened.
[Woman speaking French]
SONTAG:
Despite the fact that I have
lived a good part of my adult
life by choice in Europe--
mostly in France--
I always come back here.
I certainly would not live in
this country if I didn't live
in New York City.
KOCH: We were talking one
morning, chatting, and she said,
"Well I have to hang up now.
"I've got a very
busy day today.
"I have to find out whether I'm
being thrown out of my house
and whether I have cancer."
The answer to both those
questions by the end
of the week was, "Yes."
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
While I was busy zapping
the world with my mind,
my body fell down.
I was told the cancer
was too advanced to be
likely to be curable
and that I had 6 months
or a year to live.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Trying to race ahead of my
death, to get in front of it,
then turn around and face it.
KOCH: It was discovered that
she had a very aggressive
breast cancer
that would require
very radical surgery.
The phone rings and it's
Nicole, and she says, "You have
to come immediately.
She's going to have this
operation and it's a very good
chance she won't survive."
I never thought
Susan would die.
She was so alive.
SONTAG: They were still
being very conservative
about how much
chemotherapy they
wanted to use.
So, I found a very mainstream
famous French chemotherapist
who was willing to give me
a lot more chemotherapy
for a lot longer time.
And it's really
as simple as that.
I didn't accept the fact
that my case was hopeless.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I feel like the Vietnam War.
They're using
chemical warfare on me.
My illness is invasive,
colonizing.
It makes me want to shut up.
My body is talking louder
than I ever could.
[Speaking French]
Only with Nicole could she
completely let her hair down,
and she treated
Nicole terribly--
yelled and screamed, and you
know, "Why are you living
and I'm dying?" and
you know all of this.
I remember these
marvelous moments.
We'd be at the dinner table,
and Nicole would literally feed
Susan by the fork.
She'd find some particularly
good morsel of whatever,
you know, and Susan would
just--would take it.
SONTAG: I don't like
feeling like a victim.
And even though I had to
believe that my doctors were
probably right and that my
case was hopeless, I always
believe in the power
of being an exception.
[De Rothschild speaking French]
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER:
I fought for my life.
I really wanted to live.
I have no difficulty in saying,
"Yes, I fought for my life."
I did.
SONTAG: Everything
remembered is dear,
touching, precious.
At least the past is safe,
though we didn't know it
at the time.
We know it now because
we have survived.
SONTAG: The oldest idea
of illness, of what causes
illness, is that
it's some punishment,
something that you actually
deserve or that you've
brought on yourself.
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER:
My subject is not physical
illness itself, but the uses
of illness as a figure
or a metaphor.
My point is that illness is
not a metaphor and that the
most truthful way of regarding
illness is one most purified
of metaphoric thinking.
There is such a thing as
accident. There is such
a thing as fatality,
and there is such
a thing as thoroughly
undeserved catastrophe.
And one shouldn't
try to make sense out
of one's catastrophe
by coming to feel guilty
and feel therefore that you
merited this terrible
thing that happened
to you, or allow
other people to impose
that kind of judgment.
NUNEZ: Susan had been in a
relationship for years
with Nicole Stephane who
lived always in Paris.
And Susan had been in the
habit of spending almost half
her time there--
all the summer,
for one thing.
But that relationship
broke up.
It was long and slow,
the break-up.
I think that's what
made it more painful.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
I had been hoping that
Nicole would take me back.
I have pleaded, wept,
denounced, argued, raged.
"Don't bother to lie.
Don't bother to call.
I am not interested anymore."
NUNEZ: When I met David,
he was living at home.
Susan had just
had breast cancer.
She had never wanted to be
alone, but now of course she
was absolutely terrified
of being alone.
So, um, she really,
really did not want him to
move out of that apartment.
She didn't want to eat
a sandwich by herself
in the kitchen, or have her
morning coffee by herself.
She wanted us to be there.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
Do I resent not
being a genius?
Am I sad about it?
Would I be willing to pay
the price for that?
I think the price is solitude.
SONTAG: I have lost
a number of close friends.
I've been going to funerals
for the last 5 years.
I realized that people were
made to feel guilty or ashamed
for being ill,
and that drives me--
that drives me crazy.
Then I do feel that I must
get on a horse and do battle
on behalf of
the punished ill.
PINCKNEY: That memory
I have in the kitchen,
the phone ringing.
She explains that she's been
on the phone with a guy she
doesn't know who had AIDS and
who called her up and wanted
to talk about illness.
And at the time, you know,
there wasn't a lot about AIDS
and how to deal with it,
how to talk about it.
It was still a very
terrifying and stigmatizing
sort of thing.
And she got calls from guys,
because she had written
about what it was like to
have the kind of disease that
ostracized you.
SONTAG:
"When I was home," he is
reported to have said,
"I was afraid to sleep, as I
was dropping off each night.
"It felt like just that,
as if I were falling down
"a black hole. To sleep felt
like giving in to death.
I slept every night
with the light on."
"Never mentioned,"
Kate confirmed,
"that whatever happened
it was over,
"the way he had lived until now,
but, according to Ira,
"he did think about it,
the end of bravado,
"the end of folly,
the end of trusting life,
the end of taking life
"for granted, and of treating
life as something that,
samurai-like, he thought
himself ready to throw away
lightly, impudently."
Like a hyperactive queen,
I cruise culture daily,
have a thrill or flash of
ecstasy several times a week.
My appetite is compulsive,
promiscuous.
LEVINE: Susan was attracted to
women who were dedicated to
something, right?
So, Irene had her plays,
Nicole was this producer,
Lucinda Childs.
They were very successful
at what they did.
Could never keep up
with Susan, but if there was
something she really wanted
to see or a book she really
wanted me to read, I
would make the effort.
PINCKNEY:
She was very commanding
and doing
something rather new.
And plus Lucinda was a real
star of downtown New York.
Susan's feeling was that
she preferred to stay
very private,
wanting to just be
a professional.
"That's my identity,
as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a professional.
"And not wanting
to hide anything,
"but you know just not
wanting to necessarily
demonstrate or be
demonstrative about
my private life."
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
It hurts to love.
It's like giving yourself to
be flayed and knowing that
at any moment the other person
may just walk off with your skin.
MAN: Susan broke off
with Lucinda.
She was wretched, and I
took her home from something
and stayed there that night,
all night long with her, cause
she was so miserable.
She spent about half the night
telling me what a horrible
person Lucinda was and
how much she hated her
and so forth.
And then, we got past that
and she then said, "You know,
"about poetry, Richard.
Could you tell me about
how to read verse?"
And we spent the rest of
the night doing that
with Wallace Stevens.
WOMAN: Annie Leibovitz,
welcome back!
Nice to see you.
Nice to see you.
So, why, Annie, a book of
photographs about women?
Why not?
I mean it's a glorious,
incredible subject.
I mean it's half
the human race.
Like a half stop darker
or something like that.
LEIBOVITZ: It was Susan Sontag
who suggested American
women, and I said
I would do it if she
would write the essay.
She was interested, of course,
in photography, like she was
interested in so many things,
and, you know, she said,
"You're good, but you
could be better."
Annie photographed her,
and then some flowers came.
And Susan said she saw the
flowers coming toward her
and she was thinking, "I
hope they're from Annie."
MAN: Susan Sontag was
your very close friend
and companion?
We never used words
like y'know like that.
I mean, you know, "very intimate
friendship" is probably a better,
you know,
better way.
I just never felt--we never
used the jargon words.
COHEN: I would go to New York
and stay with Susan.
Susan would leave in
the middle of the night
because Annie was
having a crisis--
Annie was having a crisis
with her family or something.
Well, that story got to wear
very thin after a while,
and I kind of figured it out.
KOESTENBAUM:
Susan Sontag lived in,
I think 410 W. 24th,
and Annie Leibovitz
lived in the tower here 465.
So they could see each
other from their penthouses.
[Raining]
LEVINE: I remember having dinner
with Susan and Annie, and Susan
starts yelling at her about
being stupid and all of this.
And then the next day, we're
going off to something
at the Museum of Modern Art
during the day and I'm walking
behind them, and I see Susan
and Annie are holding hands as
they walk along.
WOMAN, AS SONTAG:
What makes me feel strong?
Being in love and work.
I must work.
My name is Susan Sontag,
President of American Center
of PEN.
DANNER: Susan really
embodied an idea
of an intellectual that is,
indeed, you could argue, passe.
Mr. Chairman, distinguished
members of the subcommittee,
I'm very...
DANNER: It had to
do with her belief in what
the role of the writer
should properly be.
The writer was supposed
to take a stand.
The writer was supposed to
be there on the front lines.
The writer was supposed
to stand for something.
[Explosion]
[Gunfire]
SONTAG, VOICE-OVER: I guess
I go to war because I think
it's my duty to be in as
much contact with
reality as I can be.
And war is a tremendous
reality in our world.
You didn't go to be
a spectator either.
What did you do?
No, no. I worked in the city.
I worked in the city.
I mean, when I first went,
to my great surprise
they asked me
to work in the theater.
I said, "No, you know,
I don't want--"
In the midst of war?
Yeah. I said, "What do you
want a play for?"
And they said,
"We're not animals.
"We're not just people
sheltering in our basements
"and standing on bread
lines and water lines
getting killed."
Yes, and says, "That's
and end to his..."
I chose to do "Waiting for
Godot" because it did seem to
illustrate a lot of the things
that people are feeling now
in Sarajevo.
The play is about weak,
vulnerable, abandoned people
trying to keep their spirits
up while they wait for some
greater power to
help them out.
KOCH: There's a certain kind
of person who likes to put
themselves in extreme
situations because they feel
life is lived
more fully there.
And Susan was one
of those people.
You're just a little bit
more notched up than you are
sitting around having
coffee in New York City.
LEBOWITZ:
Writers don't save lives.
Writers would like to save lives
because it's more heroic.
Military action. That's
what it takes to stop
a genocide, by the way,
not productions of
"Waiting for Godot."
She had this kind of heroic
sense of what some human beings
could accomplish, in music,
in writing, in art, in film,
in everything.
Extraordinary people.
But, you know, it was
a limited number of people,
and was she ever going to drag
herself up there onto Olympus.
What do you
believe in, then?
The hanging curve ball,
high fiber, good scotch.
that the novels of Susan
Sontag are self-indulgent,
overrated crap.
I believe in long, slow,
deep, soft, wet kisses
that last three days.
And I think Susan
Sontag is brilliant!
NELSON: She had
an unbelievably good
sense of what was important,
of what was interesting,
and what was significant...
and I'm talking mostly about
the sixties and seventies and
maybe the early eighties.
I mean, I think
as time goes on, she's
less engaged with the moment
because she's getting older,
her interests are changing,
and she's less
on the front lines.
SONTAG: When I began to
write in the sixties when
I was very young,
I worried that certain forms of
the popular culture were being
neglected or ruled out
or treated in a snobbish
and stupid way.
And so I seemed to be
defending popular culture.
I think that the high culture
which I took for granted when
I was growing up--the high
culture that I aspired
to live in
and to make my minute
contribution to--
that certainly has the quality
of an endangered species.
What sort of civilization
are you speaking
of, Creature?
Diplomacy, creation--
that's what we're
reaching toward.
The Geneva Convention,
chamber music, Susan Sontag.
Everything your society
has worked so hard
to accomplish
over the centuries,
that's what we aspire to.
We want to be civilized.
I mean, you take a look
at this fellow here.
Bee-bee-ba-ba-bee-bee!
[Bang]
[Thud]
MAN: Don't you find yourself
almost inevitably drawn to
the television set,
to the so-called popular
questions...the questions
of what most people
are seeing as art,
thinking, being sold,
um...
No.
No, I don't,
and you know I don't.
I've said it in
countless interviews.
Not that I'd read.
Oh, well, then you haven't
read many interviews.
Maybe that's the problem.
She represents
grandiosity, I think.
And it is a little comic.
And there is an
aspect of Camp.
Susan Sontag is Camp.
Her seriousness is kind of
Camp, because it seems a bit
of a pose, and it's
mannered and stylized.
But that's part of the fun of
the package of Susan Sontag.
MAN: Does any part of you
wish that you had earlier
focused more
on writing
novels more?
All of me wishes that.
[Thud]
Ha! Don't drop the book,
Charlie!
Yes, isn't that awful?
I wish... I wish I were
just starting now,
but what can I do?
Those essays from the sixties,
they were very insolent,
you know, like a
young person's work.
I wouldn't mind if the
essays eventually evaporated.
I think fiction,
I think literature, I think
narrative is what lasts.
I do believe that there
is such a thing as truth,
but I prefer the mode in
which truth appears in art or
in literature.
In literature, a truth is
something whose opposite is
also true.
The last two novels--one is
called "The Volcano Lover,"
and the more recent one is
called "In America."
I discovered I was
a storyteller.
I felt I could
spread my wings.
I felt I could...I could
even be entertaining.
True, there was still time
for something really vivid
to happen.
Someone might have a heart
attack or whack a dinner
partner over the head or
sob or groan or toss a glass
of wine in an offending face.
But this seemed as unlikely as
my charging out of my window
seat to dance on the table
or spit in the soup or fondle
a knee or bite
someone's ankle.
GORDIMER:
She wouldn't like to hear
this, but her novels were not
received at the standard
at which she wanted.
Because she was so well known,
there was a certain amount
of attention, and I mean
I think it was Gore Vidal who
wrote that, "as a fiction
writer, Susan Sontag has no
talent whatsoever."
I mean,
it was always these very
strong, harsh statements.
NUNEZ: She did win the National
Book Award for "In America."
"The Volcano Lover"
was a huge critical
and commercial success.
Sometimes awards are given
in recognition of a career as
much as the merits of
a particular book.
[Applause]
But in spite of all these
well-earned awards and all her
accomplishments, a sense
of failure clung to her.
She was not happy.
CASTLE: She was
haunted by a sense
that her younger self would
not have been satisfied...that
she hadn't been good enough.
I think she was terrorized
by the fact of her own
transience, that she, too, would
become a part of the past...
fade to black.
[Woman speaking]
Certainly not.
MAN: Anne Leibovitz
is here.
She is perhaps the
best-known American
photographer around.
She has also published 6
books of her photographs.
Her most recent one
is called "9 Pounds."
No, it's called "A
Photographer's Life,
1990-2005."
In it, Annie publishes
celebrity photographs
as well as portraits
of family members,
her 3 children, and
perhaps the most important
person in her life,
Susan Sontag.
My gosh, the years that I'm
supposed to work on the book,
1990-2005, are the years
I was with Susan.
I just got very excited
because I thought I'm going to
look at my work as if Susan
was standing in back of me,
you know, as if she was there
you know, working with me
to put the book together.
RIELL:
My mother had 3 cancers.
She had a breast cancer when
she was in her early 40s.
When she was in her mid 60s,
she had a uterine sarcoma.
Then 7 years later--
or 6 years later,
she was diagnosed with this
disease, MDS, which is this
lethal blood cancer.
COHEN: She needed to have a
bone marrow transplant.
[Speaking French]
CHILDS: I had just
gotten back to the States,
and she told me what
was happening, that she had
this leukemia and that it was
just raging and
she was very ill.
And then she said, "Once I'm
over the transplant, maybe you
would come out at that time."
She was assuming that the
transplant would be successful.
And she said, "Of course there's
a risk because of my age,
and because of
the previous illnesses,"
and so forth and so on.
She said, "But it's
my only chance."
If she wanted to believe in...
the idea that she would beat
the odds once more, as
she'd done twice in the
past with cancer,
it wasn't for me
to stand in the way of that.
COHEN: We had a conversation.
She said "You need to tell
me what I've done that--
how I've wronged you."
Ha ha!
I said, "Well, I'll do it if
you'll do the same thing."
And that's when she told me,
you know, this inane wish
of hers that I'd
become an attorney.
And I thought, well, that's
really soft ball. Ha ha!
I told her the next day that
I very much resented the fact
that she didn't attend our
wedding. Ha ha!
And most of all, I resented
that she spent most of her
life not being honest with me.
And I think I really
did strike home.
And she admitted--she
was sorry she didn't come
to the wedding.
And, uh, she, um...
said that I was right and
she was sorry about that.
RIELL: My mother was
afraid of extinction.
You are extinguished.
And I think that's what she
felt and I think it terrified her.
So the way that she decided
that she would face it was to
fight to the last breath.
Fight, fight, every moment.
I guess I'm a little like Susan
in that I always thought
she would survive, too.
RIELL: She had this
transplant in the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center
in Seattle.
And when the doctors came to
tell her it hadn't worked,
she started to scream.
LEIBOVITZ:
I went to Seattle to bring
her home in an air ambulance.
It was really a
harrowing experience.
KOCH: She then returned
to Sloan-Kettering
because it was over,
and she was being
sent there to die.
Um...and she did.
I immediately went to
the hospital and then I
went in and--
and sat with Susan's
body for a while,
quite a while.
RIELL: If you're interested in
everything, if you're curious
about everything,
it's a lot harder to die.
KAPLAN: I saw her one last time
way at the end of her life.
I was walking down
the Boulevard St. Germain,
past the great cafe,
The Flore,
And she was sitting in the
front with her notebook, writing.
Sitting in Paris looking out and
writing in her notebook still.