David Thomson’s Revisionist History

Commenting on the book’s landing the number one spot in the S&S poll, writer Geoff Dyer (Zona) called it “one of the most absurdly ambitious literary achievements of our time” and noted that it reads as “a vicarious and incremental autobiography. In that context, even Thomson’s diminishing interest in cinema—or current cinema at any rate—becomes a source of fascination.”

To some, Thomson’s interest these days seems less diminishing than festering. In A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, the latest of his more than forty books, Thomson describes himself as “a critic and historian of the movies” who “feels more than regret that over the decades he has given time to wondering which film was the greatest ever made . . . and to treating the enterprise of darkness and light as if it honored society and history.”

“David Thomson has written a book attacking the movies,” writes Stephen Smith in the Financial Times. “It’s as if the ravens had not only left the Tower of London but awarded it zero stars on TripAdvisor on their way out.” Thomson was born and raised in London and has spent the past half century or so living in the U.S. He turned eighty-five in February, and his publisher is calling A Sudden Flicker of Light “a career capstone of sorts.”

“What if he’s right?” wondered A. O. Scott, who was a chief film critic for the New York Times for two decades before switching over to the NYT Book Review in 2023. Chatting with Thomson a few months ago, Scott discovered that the esteemed cinephile was not quite ready to commit to a full-blown condemnation of the movies—but his assessment of the state of the art is dire nonetheless.

“From the vantage point of a dystopian present in which ‘attention has become infernal, hopeless, yet unstoppable,’” writes Scott, Thomson “chronicles how, under the spell of movies, ‘we let the lifelike distract us from life.’ This isn’t an abstract, philosophical predicament; it’s a political crisis.”

“In general,” Thomson tells Ciné Club’s Tom Macklin, “Hollywood believed in advertising what a great time we were all having and how the happy ending was just waiting for us, and that it was absolutely legitimate to be part of the American dream—whereas, in reality, America has not really managed to pull off the happy ending, to say the least.”

Worse, according to Thomson, our addictions to screens big and small has numbed us to the emergency. “Smartphones and streaming,” notes Ed Potton in the Times of London, “AI and Trump have led us to apathy, he writes. ‘Baby, we don’t care. For a century the fallacy has reigned that watching would make us better. Instead of just indifferent.’”

Thomson “pleads his case like a brilliant drunk representing himself at night court—you struggle to follow his zigs and zags, but on balance you feel that he deserves to walk without bail,” writes Harper’s columnist Dan Piepenbring. “For good reason, he’s been writing progressively more pessimistic versions of the same book; it’s a long walk out of the movie palace. In his next history (and I do hope there’s another), he may finally set fire to the place.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds Thomson in his latest book to be “as brilliant, eccentric, exasperating, and absorbing as ever.” For Jordan Hoffman at Foreign Policy, though, the “riffing at times reads like a Lenny Bruce monologue, a cascade of small insights as one image hyperlinks to another to create more a sensation than an argument.”

In the Atlantic, Michael O’Donnell notes that Thomson “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.”

O’Donnell isn’t buying it: “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.”

Writing for the A.V. Club, Tim Grierson argues that O’Donnell “misses the big picture—and Thomson’s point.” A Sudden Flicker of Light is “galvanizing,” a “devil on every movie lover’s shoulder, the one who whispers that we’ve wasted our lives watching and thinking about movies. Thomson’s perspective isn’t necessarily more true because it’s more despondent, but it is vital because we hear it far less often . . . Only someone who still loves movies could fill a book about the medium’s failures with such melancholy beauty. A spiritual exhaustion has overtaken him, yet it reads like Thomson’s plea to be disabused of his own fatalism.”