A Veteran Critic’s Indictment of the Movies

David Thomson is the ultimate film buff. He also believes film has drastically distorted reality.

It’s hard to keep loving the movies when we realize how much damage they’ve done. In A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, longtime critic David Thomson takes a far warier approach than previously to a medium he has adored in print and in private for seven decades now. According to this century-spanning “revisionist history,” film isn’t (as many of us fool ourselves into believing) a gloaming, magical realm of bigger-than-life people, landscapes, and emotions; rather it has, like an excellent cinematographer or cosmetician, feathered over and even romanticized the worst neuroses and most unsavory desires of human life. In other words, by teaching us how to see them, movies simultaneously taught us how to unsee our actual world, and the real, all-too-human lives we lead in it. They have, to paraphrase an earlier Thomson title, brought us the “gift of unreality,” and it may be time to find out if we can still get reality back.

Within the flickering light of cinemas, Thomson writes, “our grasp on life was stimulated but compromised by the invention of the lifelike.… For when we can now fabricate the imagery—we have bypassed light and nature.” The ultimate problem with movies, Thomson argues, is not simply that they divert us from the real world, but that they want to replace it entirely. In his previous books, such as The Big Screen: the Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, Thomson delivered a more optimistic history of film, as he did in his biographies of Orson Welles, Ingrid Bergman, and Gary Cooper. He assembled a dense nonchronological compendium of smart, absorbing assessments in Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films; he compiled the highly regarded Biographical Dictionary of Film (he is at his best when recounting the lifelong careers of individual actors and directors); and he achieved cultish success with one of the most unusual meta-novels of the last century, Suspects (1985), a “family romance” detailing the intertwining kinship networks of famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) film characters, from the goody-goody husband of Ilsa in Casablanca, Victor Laszlo (who not so many years after World War II betrays fellow travelers to the House Un-American Activities Committee), to Jack Torrance, the manic-obsessive writer in The Shining. Suspects (like all of Thomson’s books) bristles with countless macabre branches of a film family tree in which buffs might enthusiastically lose themselves.

If all these enjoyable books highlight one fact about Thomson, it’s that his fondness for movies isn’t simply about the stories they tell or the techniques they use to tell them—it’s about the fantasy world they create in our collective imagination. The basic problem for Thomson is that, amid current political horrors, this film world is starting to seem inimical: “Fantasy fills all the available space. And when fantasy overwhelms law and politics, it leaves only the bitter energy of disappointed dreaming. That is our violence. And all we have left?”

Exploring, if not answering, that hanging rhetorical question, is what drives this provocative book. Are movies, and the alternative worlds they offer, “all we have left?” Or, like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, can we eventually find a way out of them?

In many ways, the figure that haunts Thomson’s deepest concerns in this book is the current American president—along with that sense, shared by many of us, that a culture addicted to entertainment led us to put a reality-TV businessman in the White House. The book’s final sentence couldn’t make Thomson’s dissatisfaction clearer: “For a century the fallacy had reigned that watching [movies] would make us better. Instead of just indifferent.” This is where movies have taken us, Thomson concludes: the reckless elevation of a dangerous buffoon.

Thomson argues that movies were quick off the mark to lead people and civilizations into their flickering light of unreality—especially since filmmaking’s earliest pioneers included the likes of stage magician Georges Méliès (immortalized in film buff–emeritus Martin Scorsese’s 2011 Hugo), who was perhaps the first to discover that the new “reproductive” lens of the camera could be used to swallow up objective visual realities, digest them, and transform them into a duplicitous world of illusion. As Thomson........

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