Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me
IN CRAIG SELIGMAN'S new book Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, the author takes on two giants of American criticism. At their best, Pauline Kael and Susan Sontag were trail blazers, impacting the way we look and talk about, in Kael's case, movies, and in Sontag's, cancer, camp, photography and just about everything else. Seligman, who knows his subjects well, packs a maximum amount of ideas into a slim volume. He gives a blow-by-blow take on each writer's precepts in a compare and contrast mode, but too often gushes with adulation for his old friend Kael. Much more compelling is his teetering ambivalence on Sontag.
Kael was often chided for ignoring foreign films. The allegation is only partly true, but it cuts to the heart of her great insight: that American genre films were ideal fodder for works of artistic novelty and even transgression-an insight she also applied to foreign films. Just as pop culture with its myths and cliches spoke to the national psyche, cutting-edge artists like Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman and Bernardo Bertolucci could gauge the national psyche and shake things up by subverting pop genres.
Seligman rightly reminds us that Kael was an avid news junkie, politically and socially conscious. Writing in the spirit of the 60s, she took a hard line on her country and hoped movies could critique and challenge it. The flip side is that she frequently cut herself off from films that had little or no American content. On Stanley Kubrick's masterful Barry Lyndon, all she did was hem and haw.
Unlike Kael, there seems little American-centric about Sontag. She's ignored mass culture, modeled her fiction on the nouveau roman and of course took that reviled trip to Hanoi. Critics even accused her of anti-Americanism after her article in the wake of 9/11. "Let's by all means grieve together," she intoned on the country's response, "[b]ut let's not be stupid together." Many, including Seligman, were shocked that Sontag seemed more intent on mocking Americans. Arguably the real insult for most was her presuming to speak as one of the grieving. You don't speak ill of the deceased at a funeral, especially if you're part of the family. Yet here was Sontag slinging mud at the media and the president, and worse still, implying that all Americans should do likewise.
Ultimately Seligman agrees with Sontag's arguments and even accepts her tactlessness. Forcing words down your ear when you're too complacent to listen-that's what critics are required to do. As he rightly praises both his subjects, "Diplomacy isn't one of their virtues-outspokenness is."