Susan Sontag Under Construction

HISTORY	SPACE RACE	BLUES POETRY

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Firstly reading Susan Sontag. Going back down these old roads now – I find myself somewhere between Col Smythe-Smythe cleaning his skeet shooter or Saul Steinberg hand drawing memorialization holy cards of Italian Futurists, Fascists, architecture and Clouds with Holes. How this here ramble got to over 2,000 words I will never know. Have a great Summer! -JV

Science-fiction and action serials often provide us with the specimen "Techno Villain," or Villano tecnológico.  I don't recall this figure being called out in the cannon criticism of the late Susan Sontag, but the idea set me to ruminating. Nemo is the classic template, said by some to be based on Odysseus. Today, barons of technology walk the corridors of power, or fall down the stairs of the Corridors of Power, and then shoot off some rockets. I am thinking of Musk, but Altman, Zuckerman, Theil, or Huang [the sane one for now] could fit the bill. Like more common folk, they experienced the Pandemic, and one at least as cast his own persona in the light of science fiction villains. Well, maybe Insanire Científico, or Mad Scientist who is also baron of industry [barón de la industria] is a better fit.

Something happened to us before and during and after the Pandemic, and what would Sontag say? This story skirts those issues, you might say - sometimes you have to circle a few times like a dog before you find your spot. Going back to the start of the 20th Century, technology has held hope and terror both - I am guessing some historica rumia may cast light on the present dilemma. Have we seen this before? What is different this time?

The 2020 Pandemic made me an inveterate Amazon and tubiTV watcher – watching anything. Among anything was StarTrek – something that had always been on but something which I walked past or talked over as friends or families tried to focus. In 2020, however, it got my attention. 

Then, not just classic StarTrek, but the new StarTrek adaptations too. The world was about to end. We were floating through space. Eras were meshing, Particles and waves as well. Worlds were being destroyed with der flick of a’ switchy. And… diseases were coming onboard. Unknown diseases: Threatening  all. 

What surprised me was the very common case of some kind of nameless blight coming on board. 

I didn’t recall Pandemica hovering over the 60s sci-fi. I would have guessed hydrogen bomb, communism, automation as bogeys. But with a more learned 2020 view, it was blindingly obvious that wipe-out pandemics were quite there too.

Wonder what Susan Sontag would say.

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Susan Sontag loomed – incredibly influential – as a critic of the 1960s, and  is probably due for generational rediscovery these days.

In the 1960 and 1970s, she ranged the landscape as one of the main thoughtslingers, no small feat that -- among the era’s hard hitting lineup of activitst intellectuals. She and they appeared in the day’s critical periodicals, most especially the New York Review of Books. At the time, its other name was the New York Review of Viet Nam.

Then as now this was a newsprint tabloid-size publication. It offered an entry ticket to a New York intellectuals’ cocktail party. For a Wisconsin boy trying to either one} understand the Viet Nam War’s assault on the American psyche or, two) win a few points in light classroom fisticuffs with Young Republicans, the NYRB was a taproot.

Sontag was imposing. Why not? She’d taken on the yeoman’s job of dismembering male chauvinism. That’s a narrow view, of course, she did more than that as we will allow below.

Anyway, what do I know? I got my ‘NY learning’ more from Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and Bob Dylan – from Esquire. My take on the era was extracted from Boston writer Wayne McGuire in Crawdaddy [link as of July 5, 2025]: 

“The real question is: How can we control and humanize an increasingly uncontrollable and proliferating technology, when the value foundation for that attempted humanization is rapidly disintegrating and when the attempt by humans to control such power (who would be the master programmer?) would most certainly be corrupting in the extreme).”

Lost on me at the time but Sontag was on that beat, and more. As she was in New York’s Pop Abstract milieu, and quite a deep thinker, she’d dwell on the meaning of the A-Bomb, and on American-brand racism. 

What was the Happening? That, the mixed media freak out that raged briefly in the cities, but mostly New York? It was An Art of Radical Juxtaposition, she said.

Important to me, she unveiled the hidden messages beeping in both the cheap science-fiction movie and the Bergmann or Goddard opus. Her willingness to plumb the dregs of the day’s mass media in order to understand what goes on.

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How deeply can the emergence and phenomenon of Camp sensibility be described? There’s a Sontagian mission statement if there ever was one. The chokehold of Interpretation? Let me at it, said Sontag. Why do cheap science fiction movies seem to resonate like a thermometer stuck in the flank of what this world has come to? She can tell you what that means. Not only that, much of what she discovers for the world in 1964 are things that are everywhere today, established part of the culture, even if a continual magnet for conservative consternation.

“Regarding Susan Sontag” on TubiTV provided me a better view on Sontag as a complicated person. [Link as of July 2025 https://tubitv.com/movies/616728/regarding-susan-sontag] 

She was kind of from nowhere. Her parents roamed the world – mostly the Orient. Came back home to spawn the kids – two girls – then left them with the Grandparents back in the USA, to return to Asia – pa, a fur trader who was to die of TB before the girls ever saw him, maybe.

She and her sister became a “Sontag” years later when her partying widowed mother remarried [Susan’s birth name was Susan Rosenblatt], and settled down with a World War II vet in Arizona and, later, LA. 

The new name was welcome. But the American development cul de sac not. She was at Berkeley at Berkeley at 15 or 16. Graduated from the University of Chicago at 18. Married at 17 to a professor who was something of a mentor; became a mother at 20. The academic circles she became part of were A-List thinkers of the era. Wikipedia does a better job than I on this part. 

Eventually, she went off to study in Paris. Where she met Ginsberg, Burroughs and a lot of fine girls. She returned to the US and gained an ever more powerful place in the New York literary, gay, nightlife and political scenes.  

If she was not in first reckoning the killer philosopher kin or heir to Barthes or De Bouvier, a role she might have wished for, she was somebody – she certainly embraced the Now. The documentary discloses she could party, and seldom turned down an invitation to spar. Long Black hair and short black jacket – she struck a figure. Her writing deftly combined logical polemics and dry humor.

Kind of from nowhere but always there. She was the big intellectual lesbian on campus with that jacket jeans and cowboy boots  and long black hair, said a participant in the documentary. 

Susan was quite there. Susan, the representative of the NLF is having a Tea… she’s there. “Susan, Andy Warhol just found a new band called the Velvet Underground.” She’s there. “Susan, Norman Mailer is going to debate Germaine Greer at Town Hall” – she’s there. That she got out should not be a put-down; she engaged with her times, fair to say.

‘Regarding Susan Sontag’ caused me to ‘revisit’ places I’d never really been. Her essays on Interpretation, Camp and science-fiction were especially intriguing.

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1- "Against Interpretation” condenses what every young boy should learn from the history of 20th Century Art – specifically, the danger of trying to figure out what is going on versus engaging with the mystery cuttings art drags from real life. The good critic would, as she had it, “reveal the sensuous surface of art without mucking about in it.” This is distilled from Susan Sontag’s well-grounded version of Abstract Expressionist discourses. To these she adds the Pop Artists who so often defined the 1960s, as they forged “content so blatant, so ‘what it is,’ [that] it .. ends by being uninterpretable.” Form in her non-interpretation was outdone by content. She was in the front but not alone in this in those days. Marshall McLuhan comes to mind as similarly forceful on this point. 

2 - Generally considered pivotal, Sontag’s 1964 essay "Notes on 'Camp’" theorized Camp as a way of viewing the world that perhaps is Theatrical, Exaggerated, Ironic, Droll, Hammy or Kitschy – there are quite a few ways in which the Camp sensibility can manifest. Sontag is credited with bringing the term into more mainstream academic parlance with this essay. What was campy included a lot: The National Enquirer, La Lupe, The Brown Derby, Fay Wray in King Kong…Not long after Sontag’s essay we saw forms of Camp with songs like Winchester Catheral, the Eggplant that Ate Chicago, Honey Pie and more, that satirized the stylized ardor of the [then ‘ancient’] 1920s. This and more prepared this writer to ‘get it somewhat’ when he went to a free show put on by the Cockettes at a 2nd Avenue film house. Wrote Sontag: "Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a 'lamp'; not a woman, but a 'woman.' To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater."

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3 – “The Imagination of Disaster” - Sontag wasn’t the first to posit the culture of the day beneath a mushroom cloud - or was she first to find comedy in the dull anxiety of sci-fi films of simple usable formula. But her combined seriousness and wit deftly explored the sci-fi format and what it might say of the larger society’s little spoken plight. She visits it, like an alien, but describes it knowingly – and yes, these films were regular fare for Them that were Watching the Late Late Show The cliches that comprised such as Thing from Another World, Rodan, They Mysterians, and When Worlds Collide, she wrote, were not serviceable “in our present extremity.”

The luxury of knobs and flashing lights that defined the hermetically sealed space ship set - the conference rooms where leaders of state mulled doom – the effectless blasts of the counterattacking Earth armies – the ennui of “something unknown on the ship” – the rote dialog (“Let’s just pray this actually works!” or “It’s our last hope!”) – she had it all. In the end, as she says, referring to the Battle in Outer Space as well as D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, “there is nothing like the thrill of watching all those expensive sets come tumbling down.” 

And, she writes, “… science fiction films can be looked at as thematically central allegory, replete with standard modern attitudes. The theme of depersonalization (being “taken over”) which I have been talking about is a new allegory reflecting the age-old awareness of man that, sane, he is always perilously close to insanity and unreason.”

We seem somehow far from the ways Sontag processed living history, gestalt  and their exhibitions in everyday film criticism, tho lord knows they try.  Suggesting: Revisit Sontag - starting with “Regarding Susan Sontag.” 

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Addendum: Listing some milestone films that were arguably ‘so bad they were good.’

1-The Batmen of Africa was a wonder to me. Most notable for cliff hang after cliff hang, and a hero -Clyde Beatty - lost in the jungle where armies flew like birds around a futuristic city in a cove. It is the kind of thing that led me to write poetry, and I’ve continued on that for about 58 years. The repetitive cliff hangs-came about as older Saturday afternoon Bijou weekly serial episodes were spliced together in long form to run on old afternoon WGN TV.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060152/

2 -Spysmasher – Saw shortly after Batmen of Africa. The crescendos of To Be Continueds {the hero repeatedly dies, only to be somehow saved in seconds} out-do any other serials. IMHO. Took notes back in 1967 that formed a poem later on in the March of Time. To wit:

Making the other guy blink.

Like a fly to flypaper,

Spysmasher jumps to the roof of a flying car.

To battle a wrestling man until

he jumps off just before the crash.

The chase is perpetual.

3- Commando Cody in Radar Men From The Moon – He had a rocket pack! Could have been the template for the Rocketeer. Shows how world works under the illusion. Here are the Chapter titles and run lengths: "Moon Rocket" (20 min)"Molten Terror" (13min 20s)"Bridge of Death" (13min 20s)"Flight to Destruction" (13min 20s)"Murder Car" (13min 20s)"Hills of Death" (13min 20s)"Camouflaged Destruction" (13min 20s)"The Enemy Planet" (13min 20s)"Battle in the Stratosphere" (13min 20s)"Mass Execution" (13min 20s) Planned Pursuit" (13min 20s)"Death of the Moon Man" (13min 20s)

Wrapping: Flash Gordon doesn’t fit the so bad it was good theme. It was just good. Now, what sweet mystery did I find in these campy near-to-scifi films on TV? Guess it’s just beyond Interpretation.

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“Interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” - Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation [for related thoughts on topic See Elsewhere on this blog.

 

“... one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.” ― Susan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’

 

"... ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror." - Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster, Commentary