Dec 5, 2014 6 min read

The late cultural polymath Susan Sontag was a whirl of contradictions and complexity, driven by an insatiable intellect, fiercely private about her personal life, but coolly fearless in the public arena, where she commanded attention for more than four decades through a rich output of essays, novels, films, criticism and public pronouncements.

Her name alone became shorthand reference for intellectual superiority during her lifetime. It also immediately cued a mental image of a striking, formidable woman with a shock of white descending from her forehead along the front of her dark hair.

“I love being alive,” says Sontag (voiced by actress Patricia Clarkson) at the start of Nancy Kates’ enigmatic and mesmerizing documentary “Regarding Susan Sontag,” airing at 9 p.m. Monday on HBO. Other statements by the author, who died of blood cancer at 71 in 2004, are more challenging to parse.

If you watch “Sontag” expecting easily digestible clarity about the subject, you’ll be disappointed. However, if you take a less passive approach and connect the multiple dots Kates and co-writer John Haptas have positioned through the 105-minute film, you’ll begin to understand what made her tick.

The early biography is telling. She and her sister, Judith, were born in the U.S., but their parents otherwise lived in China, where her father worked in the fur trade, and the sisters were farmed out to relatives. After Jack Rosenblatt’s early death from tuberculosis, Sontag’s mother returned to the U.S., retrieved her daughters and moved to Tucson, where she had a succession of male companions before marrying Nathan Sontag. Susan was grateful to give up her birth name for one that was less obviously Jewish, she said.

After high school, she entered UC Berkeley and was introduced to the thriving gay scene in nearby San Francisco by Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, who became her lover. After transferring to the University of Chicago, she met the much older sociologist Philip Rieff, married him only days later and gave birth to a son, David, in 1957.

You could say that Sontag was inventing herself as she went along, fueled by that insatiable intellect. With such a peripatetic childhood, and devoid of any parental constant in her life, Sontag became, in a sense, her own parent.

After divorcing Rieff, she had relationships with men and women, including painter Jasper Johns, choreographer Lucinda Childs, the writer Eva Kollisch, French actress and producer Nicole Stephane, Cuban playwright and director Maria Irene Fornes, and photographer Annie Leibovitz, her last and most enduring relationship.

Yet she wouldn’t publicly acknowledge her homosexuality. In writings, she said that “my desire to write is connected to my homosexuality.”

But that was the private Sontag, not the Sontag who, in the wake of 9/11, dared to call the attack on the World Trade Center a response to U.S. foreign policy and wouldn’t back down.

That was also not the Sontag who stunned fusty graybeards with the 1964 publication of the essay “Notes on Camp” in the Partisan Review, in which she posited that “the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural” and argued that camp and popular culture were worthy of serious study.

And that was not the Susan Sontag who insisted that “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings”‘ in her landmark 1966 work “Against Interpretation.”

In 1975, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and told it was terminal. Ignoring American doctors, she found a French physician who would administer an especially aggressive form of chemotherapy over a long period of time, and Sontag beat the odds.

That experience stoked her mind to pen “Illness As Metaphor,” in which she took aim at the all-too-human inclination to assign blame or reasons for serious illness, or for any variety of catastrophe, for that matter.

It’s in our nature to look at illness as some kind of punishment, she observed, as something you somehow deserve or have brought on yourself. It is no such thing, she insisted: One shouldn’t try to make sense of catastrophe, or imagine that you somehow merited it.

Watching archival footage in Kates’ film of Sontag speaking is telling. No matter how harsh or inflammatory the statement – in fact, especially when she was standing her ground on a controversial subject – she always seemed to smile. You could say it was a smug smile, but more accurately, it was a smile that seemed to radiate steady and impermeable self-confidence, as if to say, I’ve thought about these issues, deeply and carefully.

Those given to knee-jerk dismissals of Sontag as a narcissist and an ego-driven provocateur during her life could conclude that Kates is too forgiving of her subject, but her intention here is not as simple as determining when Sontag was right and when she was wrong. She’s primarily interested in standing back to allow a more complete and nonjudgmental portrait of Sontag to emerge. And that portrait is far more interesting.

There are myriad informative interviews in the film, with Leibovitz, Kollisch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Fran Lebowitz, Stephen Koch and others, but this is far from the usual exaltation of talking heads. Instead, with cinematographer Sophia Constantinou, and a haunting musical score by Laura Karpman and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, Kates has created a fact-based profile, but with boldly evocative impressionist strokes that mirror the complexity of Sontag’s life and career.

In the end, we look at the dichotomy between the public and private Sontag not so much with perplexed curiosity but perhaps with a certain mild surprise when we are told that a sense of failure clung to her all her life and that she didn’t think her younger self would have been satisfied with the older Sontag.

The facts tell us that her first novel was a disaster, that other works of fiction were less than successful, that her films were imitative, that she sometimes seemed to offer points of view largely to provoke outrage rather than discussion, and that in an era of evolving openness, she dodged questions about her personal life and sexuality.

And yet, the image she created for herself, of commanding selfhood, of certainty in all things, was tailored with such skill and constant, nurturing attention that it thrives today, a decade after her death.

To the world, she was many things, and many may have taken issue with her positions, but few would have thought Susan Sontag ever experienced any significant self-doubt.

Nothing to speak of, at any rate.