Fascism and its favorite sexual taste, sadomasochism, have come into a certain degree of fashion in the movies recently, and that’s the subject of a scary essay by Susan Sontag in the New York Review of Books. She finds films like The Night Porter to be, on one level at least, attractive to certain audiences because of their undertones of doom and death. That may be an aspect of the times or it may just be that such movies reach areas of the personality that weren’t widely admitted before; she’s not sure. But she’s worried.
