Did the movies sleepwalk us into the elections of Donald Trump? This provocative question hides in plain sight throughout A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, British film historian David Thomson’s unsettling and often downbeat new book, his 45th on the art form he loves — or, perhaps, loved until very recently.
The obtrusive shadow of the 47th president looms over A Sudden Flicker like the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock. For much of the book’s 368 pages, Trump’s presence is measured in sweeping, implicative statements (“There are people now in the US, leaders, who seem captivated by the iconography that [Leni] Riefenstahl laid down. This is enough to make us wary of genius.”) or succinct asides related to Trump’s personal taste in cinema, as when Thomson compares him to the Norma Desmond character from Sunset Boulevard: “Who else is readier for the camera with his way of lurching from horror to screwball in an endless untidy sentence?”
But it’s the final and most controversial chapter, titled “Quiet, Piggy,” that Thomson unloads on the president in tone and diction that will satisfy many. It’s the natural conclusion of the author’s bilious contention that the medium he’s cherished for 60 professional years bears at least some responsibility for Trump’s ascension — as opposed to, say, a hundred other fluky things. “He is a jerk and a genius and a lowlife whose only escape from his dank cave is being on camera. He always knows where it is; he sighs at it, like a Don Juan tired of kissing.” Thomson cites the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., as the epitome of Trump’s instinctual command of the camera — the instantaneous, telegenic fist bump that’s still seen on T-shirts and bumper stickers across the fruited plain.
Movies prepped us for this, or as Thomson argues, “movie” prepped us: He often references the medium as a singular, hulking collective noun, like Borg. This takes the reader some getting used to, but it speaks to a hive-mind mentality, even a kind of brainwashing, that films have engendered.
The chapters proceed in a largely linear fashion, Thomson building his case like an eccentric and easily distracted detective — it’s no wonder he loves Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye — but they also tend to function as self-contained essays examining the different ways the film industry has ushered in a widespread acceptance of bigots, monsters, and fascists.
That last word is a loaded one, and Thomson deploys it frequently. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation was “the first fascist picture.” And, “like other fascists, Hitler felt an innate excitement at how movie worked; maybe the dream spurs authoritarianism.” I began highlighting every reference to this political philosophy until its mentions became overwhelming.
Thomson essentially traces a line, from Griffith’s racist apologia on through to Fritz Lang’s grandiose vision of an authoritarian state in Metropolis and his chilling early talkie M (“The killer suddenly had an open future on the screen”); to Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s literal glorification of the fascist takeover of Europe; to Orson Welles’ hulking studies of megalomania; to the floodgates of pleasurable violence opened by Psycho, Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, and so many other hallowed masterworks that programmed us to worship the criminal, to degrade the woman, to love the bomb.
Thomson makes astute points on every page — in every paragraph. In a chapter on the advent of editing, he cites the Odessa Steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as a formative example of couching an unspeakable event in cinematically palatable ways: “The editing makes it viewable; the unprecedented violence is done in such a way that makes the spectacle modest or tasteful. We have digested it when perhaps our outrage should be so total that it tears down the screen and the entire pretty artifice of spectatorship. Why sit still to contemplate scenes of Auschwitz?” “A cut,” he adds, “can be a swift instrument of lying propaganda.”
No one knew this better than Leni Riefenstahl, the subject of perhaps the book’s most disturbing chapter, “Hitler’s Hand,” as Thomson deconstructs the ways she seduced us through the poker-faced neutrality of the moving image. Reifenstahl, he writes, “is now firmly placed as a bad thing. But in 1935, when this film opened, the screen could not tell that.
“What do you need to photograph a fascist? Answer: a camera. Adolf Hitler was just an adjunct or a stand-in, not the best-looking guy around, until he was in every picture.” In Thomson’s view, to elevate the Third Reich, it just took a bit of cinematic conditioning. Likewise, the propaganda on our home front also elided the truth of war’s monstrosity, even with Frank Capra behind the camera: “Movie as a whole garbled history in a way that cannot be recovered. But the Why We Fight films were as misleading in their insistence that the war was understood and under control.”
Not all of A Sudden Flicker of Light is a downer. Thompson artfully weaves history, culture, literature and visual art into a spiraling, multifaceted argument that this review cannot appreciably do justice. A chapter on the explosion of artful foreign cinema, starting with Italian neorealism and onto the French New Wave and the masterpieces of Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi, stands as a bulwark against the increasing conformity, untrustworthiness, sexism and cretin-elevation of Hollywood. His best chapter arrives late in the book, and its first half reframes the film director as the most troubled and vexed of artists, his or her myriad anxieties and visions congealing into sleepless nights and repressed panic during ever-more-complicated shoots: “It’s a monstrous occupation … The director is in alarm at the thought that he will have to be an auteur once the light breaks.”
There is also much humor on this journey, even if it’s ultimately a downward one. Thomson has a gift for distilling dense ideas in a fragmented but plainspoken prose, capturing a worldview in a few concise words that ring true. He describes early magnate Marcus Loew as “a sad-looking fellow with a drooping mustache and spaniel eyes.” He credits the success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Jack Nicholson’s “shabby mercury.” “Star Wars,” he writes, “could be the best film ever made if you were going to stick at being eleven.”
My single favorite line describes Psycho, to which he devoted an entire book back in 2009: “I sometimes regard that movie as a rat that got into my house in 1960 and that I have never managed to exterminate or train.” And I particularly love his take on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line: “This is a military film but with reverence for desertion. It’s a war movie that doubts the notion that war is vital in our history.”
Thomson has much insight into the ways television shaped the movies and our habits of seeing — exclusively for ill, and in ways that have only been exacerbated in the streaming era. He argues that commercials, and now “ads,” inserted into shows, have made us cynically doubt and disbelieve all content, even the documentaries and news footage that sandwiched them. Of the glut facing the modern television consumer, he writes, “There is so much to see, we can’t always muster the belief or the curiosity. To contemplate the myriad of shows streaming is to guess in advance that missing one, or all of them, does not really matter.”
All of this being true, and likely accepted by most readers, I still don’t make the leap Thomson bounds in the final chapters, whose bleakness can be overpowering. “We are no longer the selves we hoped to be,” he writes, in peak despair. “We are not exactly alive any longer. We do not matter. And we are sick to death of watching the strutting idiocy of those who claim greatness.”
OK, but Thomson’s revisionist history is a selective one. He returns again and again to some of the totemic pictures mentioned above to make his point, especially his love-hate relationship with The Godfather franchise, which has never entranced me like it has most viewers. (I’ve seen the first two films once each, thought they were fine, and have not shown an interest in revisiting them.) He complains that films, with a few cited exceptions such as The Long Goodbye and Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, cannot, in their rigid, fascist mechanization, emulate the “white space” between the lines of text in a novel — the sort of moments of in-betweenness that Manny Farber called, with much praise, “termite art.”
But so many wondrous filmmakers go unmentioned in A Sudden Flicker of Light, voices that did not contribute to an authoritarian gaze, and that burrow at life like Farber’s termites. I’m thinking of directors, just in the Anglo-speaking world, such as Terrence Davies, John Sayles, Albert Brooks, Richard Linklater, Kelly Reichardt, Wes Anderson, Chloe Zhao, Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman and Jim Jarmusch, just to name a few. The latter’s best film, Paterson, is nothing but white space. Animation is never introduced in the book, so Hayao Miyazaki remains on the cutting-room floor, along with the entirety of Black cinema, which has often foregrounded a response to oppression. Oscar Micheaux, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Steve McQueen, Ava DuVernay — all are excluded from these pages.
It’s not that Thomson is incorrect in one aspect or chapter or appraisal; it’s that his revisionism is slanted and incomplete, and too tethered to the unfortunate political zeitgeist. I just don’t — can’t — buy the additive nature of Thomson’s pessimistic undertaking, that onscreen “violence has turned into existential affectation, and we swim along in the myth that no one is hurt. But that detachment may be the breeding ground for a male self-destructiveness that has brought us to a terrible brink.”
Or, the wrong guy lost a popular election by nearly 3 million votes, winning the presidency through a racist, antidemocratic Electoral College whose organization had nothing to do with the deleterious effects of “movie.” For all its potent truth bombs, would this book exist had 34,000 votes in three states in 2016 swung differently? I suspect not.
A SUDDEN FLICKER OF LIGHT: A REVISIONIST HISTORY OF MOVIES, by David Thomson, Simon & Schuster, 368 pages, $30.