Yeah, "the Look." I was always unimpressed by the ideas too. I remember that she was touring for a year back in the '70s, making the (really, really startling) argument that "Triumph of the Will" was a Nazi movie. I suppose her "Notes on Camp" bit was OK, though it always seemed to me you could pick up everything you might want to know about camp by hanging out with a campy gay guy for about a half hour.

So I wound up figuring that she served a High Culture function: she embodied (in a very theatrical, and I guess theatrically effective, way) some people's fantasies of what an Intellectual Woman should be: difficult, tragic, austere, etc. That gray streak in the dark dark hair didn't seem to hurt the image. Mistrust me on this because I'm just remembering rumors that may have been groundless. But there were those who said that Sontag was really the creation of the publisher Roger Strauss (of FSG), who not only published her but forged her image.

Wasn't Jacqueline Bisset's character in "Rich and Famous" said by a few people to have been based on Sontag?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 30, 2004 12:18 PM