Science fiction films are not about science. They are about…

Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.

Sourced, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

“The Imagination of Disaster” from Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966), p. 212

Other Susan Sontag Quotes

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended…. Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises. - View Quote Details on Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument…
The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local, limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide. - View Quote Details on The AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which…
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don’t take place. Wars, genocides — that happened here once, but no longer. It’s something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not “really” Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all. - View Quote Details on Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond…
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing.
Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust.
No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most “wars” are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? - View Quote Details on Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims…
People do these things to other people. Not just in Nazi concentration camps and in Abu Ghraib when it was run by Saddam Hussein. Americans, too, do them when they have permission. When they are told or made to feel that those over whom they have absolute power deserve to be mistreated, humiliated, tormented. They do them when they are led to believe that the people they are torturing belong to an inferior, despicable race or religion. For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts were performed, but that their perpetrators had no sense that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show. - View Quote Details on People do these things to other people. Not just in…
Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that can be accepted as part of larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation. - View Quote Details on Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are…
Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling. - View Quote Details on Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated…
I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them. - View Quote Details on I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention…
I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don’t consider it a moral virtue. - View Quote Details on I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well…
What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art. - View Quote Details on What the overemphasis on the idea of content entails is…