Are movies bad for us? Are they wasting our time, ignoring culture, even harming society? On screen, stars show acts of unspeakable violence and cruelty. More subtly, movies make bad choices seem attractive; viewers can watch The Godfather and not just thinking I want Michael Corleone’s suitbut I want to smoke like he smokes—and maybe run my business like he does, too. Perhaps that last claim feels exaggerated, but the film defiantly misrepresents the truth, presenting a world that seems very bright for a few hours but disappears when the lights come on. The worldly life cannot compete with the charming personalities of Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart Vertigo or epic vistas in Lawrence of Arabia.
A prominent film critic has written a new analysis of the movie that is fueled by such doubts. In Sudden Enlightenmenta brilliant and controversial historian David Thomson describes film as a “fantasy engine,” a “reality parasite” that has “begun to reduce our nature” and “turn us into spectators, half aware that we cannot contain what we see.” Thomson, who has an eccentric taste and has ignored some acceptable films, writes that he “feels more regret” for the decades of attention he gave to cinema—”as if it respected society and history.” He even seems to blame cinema for the rise of Donald Trump, the consummate camera-ready marketer. I can’t remember such a negative assessment of the art form since Tipper Gore followed Twisted Sister in the 1980s.
This is the right time to take a middle stroke. I believe we owe Trump’s rise largely to human instincts rather than any cultural product, but the president couldn’t have created the MAGA brand without learning a trick or two from the photo industry. More broadly, the movies themselves are in trouble. Movies are dying; superhero blockbusters are struggling; screens have become smaller; clips have become shorter; and AI threatens to replace it all. Thomson’s face on the movie may be a surprise, but a critic of his stature would compete with the movie’s lasting value otherwise. Whether with a view to saving or congratulating the industry, the question of its influence deserves serious consideration.
And Thomson, David
Sudden Enlightenment in the name is the history of cinema. From the year 2024 the founder of the film Georges Méliès AnoraThomson’s investigation covers silent pictures, talkies, the studio era, New Hollywood, and the streaming age. His book is marketed as a revision, but it seeks less to correct than to contradict, with exaggerated claims and cheap shots, and is hostile to directors: “The spirit of Mr. Ridley Scott was created in making announcements”; if Stanley Kubrick “he could lose an inch or two he could be a real artist instead of a scared dictator.” Thomson’s book, which came late in his career, succeeds more as a provocation than as a persuasive indictment of cinema.
In part this has to do with design. Thomson sprinkles criticism throughout his book like a seasoning evenly placed on a delicious piece of meat. He admits that his argument jumps around confusingly, and he writes in a vague style that makes his precise point of view difficult to pin down. However, as I understand him, Thomson brings three broad and related points to bear against cinema: He insists that the camera loves violence; he says that cinema is inferior to literature; and, most interestingly, he writes that cinema focuses on the spectacular rather than the everyday world.
Thomson makes his first point by arguing that the media “flatter killers, or people who do taboo things.” During World War I, the machine gun “worked like a movie camera, one frame or shot at a time.” Once the sound was added to the picture, start Jazz singer in 1927, the clapboard was “as commanding as a pistol shot.” Violence hurts the audience, Thomson believes; he regrets to say that he has caught himself trying to work as hard as Robert Mitchum. He despises the chosen subject of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who “were deeply influenced by something that inspired the arbitrary power and kinship of a gang, or a family.”
I’m still not sure that movies are more susceptible to violence than, say, music or literature. Thomson should spend time listening to death metal and gangsta rap, or reading bad novels by Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy. “Ideological courage” of Gone With The Wind—whose dissemination of antebellum southern mythology is arguably a form of violence against history itself—”is an inexhaustible part of the American story, and it was perpetuated by the movies,” Thomson writes. But Gone With The Wind of course it was based on a book—just like Coppola’s violent masterpiece The Godfather. This inaccuracy indicates a confusion of form and substance. The film is not as violent as the audience claims. They always have, because death is one of the main subjects of art. If depictions of violence really mislead us, then we’d better set aside not just images of gangsters but Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Melville as well.
This early introduction into fictional cruelty also undermines Thomson’s next point, about the quality of literature. “The book is more patient than the screen,” Thomson writes. The books “help us feel the juvenile, narrow-minded scale of the film. Its blinding focus is admirable obedience or subservience. What the film does not understand is the size of the imagination.” Thomson, who draws the title of his own book from a line in a Henry James novel, distinguishes “the childish incapacity of cinema as language”—that’s not a typo; he grace unity—”compared to a single sentence that combines two ideas more skillfully than a combination.”
These lines reveal the attitude of a person who has been stuck in one way for too long and is now busy improving another. Not all novels were written by Henry James; The bookstore has as much schlock as a multiplex. And narrative doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Instead of declaring one medium better than another, we can be amazed at the different angles that different artists can change the world. Yes, literature takes us into the characters’ minds, but film brings photography and music together in a way that books cannot. That’s to say nothing of the action, which offers a raw immediacy that the books and movies lack. Does that make the theater the winner of this silly exercise? Art is not a competition. It is a search for beauty and truth. Send all search parties.
Thomson’s most interesting point is that most films are too busy being exciting to serve as a window to the world. Shown on the big screen and fueled by a thirst for profit, they gravitate toward excess, preferring crime and spectacle to stories about “occasional pleasant violence”—in other words, the existence of sleaze. Yet “anything that pretends to be art or entertainment,” Thomson asserts, “has as great a duty to serve our nature as photography has been regarded as a symbol of truth.” This is why very realistic films like Terrence Malick The Tree of Life by Jonathan Glazer Area of Interest to win his approval, where such movies Se7en and Star Wars don’t do it.
Here’s a confession: I love all four movies. The silver screen likes chasing, and theft, but it can also provide a good moment of understanding between two people; think of the beauty of Céline Sciamma Image of a Woman on Fire. Like Salman Rushdie once explained“One of the things that literature does is open you to worlds that are not your world, but through the book they feel like your world.” That’s well said, and the code can be moved to the screen. It seems that Thomson goes to the cinema or picks up a novel to see life as it really is. Yet those few terms don’t cover most movies and many books. Rushdie’s broad perspective invites us to use narrative to see the world as it could be (Prometheus, Interstellar) or immediately (In Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel), or maybe it shouldn’t be (Teacher, Prisoners) Unfortunately, those are all the movies Thomson has posted.
Covering the shadow Sudden Enlightenment it’s a kind of film fatigue, buyer’s remorse over a product that has outlived its shelf life. In an unconvincing passage near the end of the book, Thomson insists, “I still want to believe in the grand system of cinema,” before naming eight—just eight!—modern directors whose work he is willing to endorse. This isn’t the only Thomson list listening. Elsewhere, she suddenly gives the reader half a page of worthy female filmmakers. The pleasant feeling that this book gives is the exact opposite of the inspiring thriller that Scorsese conveys time to discuss the magic of cinema. The distance between an artist like Scorsese and a critic like Thomson is as wide as an open horizon compared to a dark room.
Movies have seen better days. They are abandoned not only by Thomson but by large sections of their original audience. Still, movies are important as an art form because they feed our souls. I’m still scared by the high kill scene Psychologically. I happily reflect on how the music and images take me to Fitzroy town hall at the beginning of the Phantom Thread. The big Lebowski it always makes me laugh, and I cry every time Victor Laszlo leads the bar in singing “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca. The movie is not bad for us. Some days I think they stop my heart from slowing to a stop. It will take a great deal more than this painful book to convince me otherwise.
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