Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays

Rating:
Summary: Read it
Review: Susan Sontag is "highbrow." Her essays have scope and intellectual ambition, which readers who have an allergy to these qualities may find "pretentious." She can almost mercilessly point out when something is derivative, weakly conceived, or a sell-out. She has a commitment to cinema as High Art; she takes the contemporary novel to task for being complacent and reactionary; she has a particularly sharp eye for intellectual fraud. Readers who are only interested in marching under one banner or another, or come equipped with biases or blind spots they are proud of, will probably find her annoying.

Sontag may be guilty of "neglecting to take into consideration" entertainment or commercial value, but I'm not sure why it necessarily is a requirement for her to take these things into consideration, since so many others are happily doing so. The fact that a film enjoyed great commercial value does not necessarily exempt it from being an example of "fascist aesthetics"; it simply may mean that it was a fantastically successful example of fascist aesthetics. Sontag was writing at a time when many used the word "fascism" in a very kneejerk way, as though it was this mysterious bad thing, an unknowable plague. Sontag doesn't allow herself such a simplistic attitude. She shows that in fact fascism has many attractive aspects, which is why its aesthetic still turns up everywhere, from Michael Jackson videos to Pink Floyd's The Wall to the WWF. I'm not sure she necessarily thinks this a bad thing; Americans, as we always like to remind the world, are free to enjoy whatever we enjoy, but at least we should not be dishonest about giving things their true names.

The judgement that this writer is a product of "1960s anti-establisment, feminist movement that views anything organized or male-oriented as fascist" is just a inaccurate, vague generalization whose purpose is to dismiss Sontag without having really read or thought about what she is saying. Sontag has skewered "anti-establishment types" and various feminists with the same lack of mercy she dispenses to Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer. Nobody's obligated to read Sontag or like the kind of criticism she practices. But for anyone really interested in cinema, art, theater, the novel, and related subjects, she's essential.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable
Review: There are many reasons to read Susan Sontag. Two of them are her brilliant essays on Walter Benjamin and Elias Canetti that appear in this volume. Both works suggest as much about Sontag and her intellectual and moral values as they do about Benjamin and Canetti. If you care about twentieth-century European intellectual history, don't miss Sontag on Benjamin and Canetti.

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, high-brow, dribble
Review: When Sontag analyzes the film making style of Leni Riefenstahl, she makes numerous references to the use of the "fascist aesthetics." Sontag's book, Under the Sign of Saturn, drones on about the use of this style of filmmaking employed by both fascist and communist regimes. This genre displays a "preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of characteristics pageantry: the massing of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transitions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and congealed, static, 'virile posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death" (New York: Doubleday, 1980, p. 91). To her credit, Sontag goes on to point out that films such as Disney's Fantasia, Berkeley's The Gangs All Here, and Kubrick's 2001 all fit the fascist art form. At least, she admits that not all films that fit this style are made under dictatorial governments. The tone of her attack on this genre of film would lead one believe, that she was a student of Siegfried Kracauer. Someone blindly lumping all film together as commentary on their society and neglecting to take into consideration their entertainment or commercial value. In fairness to Sontag, one must consider when she made her observations of Riefenstahl. In 1980, the United States was still reeling from the affects of the Viet Nam conflict. Susan Sontag is most probably a product of the 1960's anti-establishment, feminist movement that views anything organized or male oriented as fascist. In the 1999, Sontag's self serving opinions and criticisms seem as antiquated prohibition was as solution to public drunkenness.