Are movies bad for us? Do they waste our time, dumb down the culture, even harm society? On-screen, stars depict unspeakable acts of violence and cruelty. More subtly, movies make bad choices look appealing; viewers might watch The Godfather and think not merely I want Michael Corleone’s suit, but I want to smoke like he smokes—and maybe run my business like him too. Perhaps that last claim feels overblown, but movies indisputably falsify reality, presenting a world that seems hypervivid for a few hours but vanishes when the lights come up. Mundane life can hardly compete with the glamorous charisma of Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo or the epic vistas in Lawrence of Arabia.
An eminent film critic has written a new analysis of cinema that is propelled by exactly such misgivings. In A Sudden Flicker of Light, the prolific and controversial historian David Thomson describes film as “an engine of fantasy,” a “parasite to reality” that “has begun to diminish our nature” and “turned us into watchers, half aware that we cannot have what we see.” Thomson, who has a quirky palate and has dismissed some canonical films, writes that he “feels more than regret” over the decades of attention he has given to cinema—“as if it honored society and history.” He even appears to blame the movies for the rise of Donald Trump, the consummate camera-ready salesman. I can’t recall such a bleak appraisal of an art form since Tipper Gore went after Twisted Sister in the 1980s.
This is the right moment to take the medium’s pulse. I believe we owe the rise of Trump largely to baser human instincts rather than to any cultural product, but the president could not have built the MAGA brand without learning a trick or two from the image industry. More broadly, movies themselves are in trouble. Theaters are dying; superhero blockbusters are struggling; screens have gotten smaller; clips have gotten shorter; and AI threatens to supplant it all. Thomson’s about-face over the movies might be a surprise, but that a critic of his stature would wrestle with cinema’s enduring value is not. Whether in the spirit of saving or eulogizing the industry, the question of its influence deserves serious thought.
A Sudden Flicker of Light is nominally a history of the movies. Ranging from the film pioneer Georges Méliès all the way through 2024’s Anora, Thomson’s survey covers silent pictures, the talkies, the studio era, the New Hollywood, and the age of streaming. His book is being marketed as revisionist, but it seeks less to revise than to antagonize, with overstated claims and cheap shots, and it is particularly hostile toward directors: “The soul of Sir Ridley Scott was formed in doing ads”; if Stanley Kubrick “could have eased up an inch or two he might have been a real artist instead of a fearful dictator.” Thomson’s book, coming late in his career, is more successful as a provocation than as a persuasive indictment of cinema.
Partly this has to do with structure. Thomson sprinkles critique throughout his book like seasoning unevenly applied to a gamey piece of meat. He concedes that his argument jumps around confusingly, and he writes with an obscure style that makes his precise views difficult to pin down. Yet as I understand him, Thomson brings three broad and related points to bear against the movies: He contends that the camera loves violence; he argues that movies are inferior to literature; and, most interesting, he writes that cinema spotlights the sensational rather than the everyday world.
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Thomson makes his first point by arguing that the medium “flatters killers, or people doing taboo things.” During World War I, the machine gun “worked rather like a movie camera, one frame or bullet after another.” Once sound was added to pictures, beginning with The Jazz Singer in 1927, the clapboard “was as commanding as a pistol shot.” Violence coarsens viewers, Thomson believes; he regrets to say that he has caught himself trying to act as tough as Robert Mitchum. He disdains the chosen subject matter of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, who “were deeply affected by something in the medium that warmed to arbitrary power and the brotherhood of the gang, or the family.”
Yet I’m not sure movies are more prone to violence than, say, music or literature. Thomson ought to spend some time listening to death metal and gangsta rap, or reading the gory novels of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy. The “reactionary fortitude” of Gone With the Wind—whose propagation of antebellum southern myths is arguably a kind of violence against history itself—“is an undying part of America’s legend, and it was sustained by movies,” Thomson writes. But Gone With the Wind was of course based on a book—as, for that matter, was Coppola’s violent masterpiece The Godfather. This imprecision betrays a confusion of form and substance. Film doesn’t breed violence so much as audiences demand it. They always have, because death is one of art’s great subjects. If depictions of violence truly warp us, then we had better set aside not just gangster pictures but Homer, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Melville too.
These early precedents in fictional brutality also weaken Thomson’s next point, about literature’s superiority. “The book is so much more patient than a screen,” Thomson writes. Books “help us feel the adolescent, narrow-minded intensity of film. Its blinding concentration is awed into submission or obedience. What film does not grasp is the largeness of imagination.” Thomson, who draws his own book’s title from a line in a Henry James novel, contrasts “the childish inability of movie as a language”—that’s not a typo; he favors the singular—“compared with a single sentence marrying two points of view more potently than coition.”
These lines reveal the perspective of someone who has been immersed in one medium for too long and is now busy idealizing another. Not all novels are written by Henry James; the bookstore holds as much schlock as the multiplex. And narrative does not have to be a zero-sum game. Rather than declare one medium superior to another, we can marvel at the varied angles through which different artists can refract the world. Yes, literature takes us into characters’ minds, but film brings together photography and music in a way that books cannot. That’s to say nothing of the stage, which offers a raw immediacy that books and films lack. Does that make theater the winner of this silly exercise? Art is not a contest. It is the pursuit of beauty and truth. Send out all the search parties.
Thomson’s most interesting point is that many movies are too busy being sensational to serve as a window to the world. Projected onto giant screens and driven by the thirst for profit, they veer toward extremes, favoring crime and spectacle instead of stories about “the frequently amiable muddle”—in other words, humdrum existence. Yet “anything with pretensions to being an art or an entertainment,” Thomson asserts, “has as much duty to serve our nature as photography was once treated as the imprint of reality.” This is why starkly realistic films such as Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest win his approval, whereas movies such as Se7en and Star Wars do not.
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Here is a confession: I like all four of those movies. The silver screen does love a chase, and a heist, but it can also beautifully render a moment of unspoken understanding between two people; think of Céline Sciamma’s exquisite Portrait of a Lady on Fire. As Salman Rushdie once explained, “One of the things that literature does is it opens up to you worlds which are not your world, but through the book they feel like they become your world.” That is well said, and the principle is transferrable to the screen. Thomson apparently goes to the movies or picks up a novel to see life as it is. Yet those limited terms exclude most movies and most books. Rushdie’s broader view invites us to use narrative to see the world as it might be (Prometheus, Interstellar) or once was (Inside Llewyn Davis, The Grand Budapest Hotel), or perhaps as it shouldn’t be (The Master, Prisoners). Incidentally, those are all movies that Thomson has panned.
Overshadowing A Sudden Flicker of Light is a sort of exhaustion with film, a buyer’s remorse over a product that has exceeded its shelf life. In an unconvincing paragraph near the book’s end, Thomson insists, “I still want to believe in a mainstream of cinema,” before naming eight—just eight!—contemporary directors whose work he is willing to endorse. This is not Thomson’s only jarring list. Elsewhere, he suddenly presents the reader with half a page of worthy female filmmakers. The dour feeling that this book produces is the exact opposite of the invigorating excitement that Scorsese conveys when discussing movie magic. The distance between an artist such as Scorsese and a critic such as Thomson is as expansive as an open horizon compared with a dark room.
Movies have seen better days. They are being abandoned not just by Thomson but by large segments of their original audience. Yet movies matter as an art form because the best ones graze our souls. I’m still terrified by the overhead murder scene in Psycho. I radiate with pleasure at the way music and images take me to a Fitzroy townhouse at the beginning of Phantom Thread. The Big Lebowski always makes me laugh, and I cry every time Victor Laszlo leads the bar in singing “La Marseillaise” in Casablanca. Movies aren’t bad for us. Some days I think they keep my heart from slowing to a stop. It will take a great deal more than this sour book to convince me otherwise.