A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, by David Thomson. Simon & Schuster, 2026, 368 pages, $30.00.
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For as long as film has been around, people have been anxious about what it can do. To understand this anxiety, look to literature: a medium we have been anxious about for a much longer time. In The Republic, Plato cautions that “the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts. . . . A young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal.” Over two thousand years later, Charlotte Brontë wrote a similar warning beside Shakespeare and Byron’s names on her list of recommended reading for a friend. “Don’t be startled at the names,” she cautioned Ellen Nussey. “You will know how to choose the good, and to avoid the evil.” But should she get waylaid, Brontë discouraged her from reading the comedies. In her own folios, she tore them out.
Notice her precision: read Shakespeare, but skip the comedies. She is familiar with what she critiques. To decide what not to read, one must first know what is in those books – and then, having done so, decide whether or not to put them down.
In his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, David Thomson raises a similar version of that critique about film, whose “dangerous effects” he claims have led to the rise of Trump. He is not making a new argument here; scholars from Jean-Louis Baudry to Walter Benjamin, Laura Mulvey, J. Hoberman, and Thomson himself in his earlier books have described how film manipulates its audience (Thomson begins this book by tipping his hat to one such critique, by the cinematographer Haskell Wexler). In Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America, James Poniewozik has also found its endpoint in Trump.
Thomson’s decision to rehash this old ground, however, is precisely what makes the book interesting if ultimately unsatisfying. It is the purpose of warnings to stop certain behaviors – that they have not in this case implies that this particular warning is perhaps just as dangerous as what it warns of. One must watch films to critique them. And while in the arts a warning is different from censorship – the point of a warning is not to stop us from watching films but to ask us to do so more thoughtfully – unlike Brontë, we have not felt the need to tear out the pages. Therein lies the difference.
Thomson is known for being a stylish writer. Style, however, distracts here from what is otherwise an already rather thin argument. He claims that screens have undermined audiences’ “logic and reasoning” and turned us into “helpless outsiders to what is happening.” Then he lifts iconic scenes out of a canonical list of films to prove that this is the case. He gathers evidence, in other words, to confirm a belief that he already holds.
Thomson spends most of the book running through familiar film history. He begins with Lumière, Méliès, and Edison, then moves into the nascent industry’s early heavyweights: Chaplin, Eisenstein, and Griffith; cultural tentpoles like Birth of a Nation; discusses film’s early tropism toward spectacle; the industry’s association with authoritarian regimes via directors like Fritz Lang and Leni Riefenstahl; the use of sound; inventions in editing; archetypal villains; the star system; the career of Orson Welles; the French New Wave; TV; successive aesthetic movements from noir to Italian neorealism; an interlude on Japanese filmmakers Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi; the auteur system; celebrity critics like Pauline Kael; New Hollywood directors like Schrader, Scorsese, Coppola, and Penn; depictions of sex and intimacy (the only chapter where women feature prominently); and a new generation of auteurs in Spielberg, Kubrick, Lucas, the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson.
These chapters offer what may seem like a fairly standard history, but they leave out broad swaths of it, not least Asian and African cinemas, and non-narrative, experimental, or animated work. The history is far from comprehensive, in other words. Thomson’s approach is tautological: because the films he discusses are canonical, they must be included; otherwise he has not explained his selection. Many of his descriptions of individual films proceed along these lines: “I think [Brando] won the Oscar because he was Brando.” Or “His [Hopkins’s] Lecter had an uncanny impact. Only on-screen for sixteen minutes, he deserved or required the Best Actor Oscar.” He finds the significance of these films self-evident because they are canonical. He takes the same approach when discussing film’s dangers. Edison’s Kinetoscope, he writes, “had a secretive power. . . . No one saw what we were seeing.” Later, he blames Norma Desmond’s character in Sunset Boulevard for Trump’s decision “to be wild or improv.” And in his view, audiences have no way of resisting such built-in dangers in film.
Though handed down with the bell-tolling seriousness reserved for established facts, claims like these about the importance or danger of certain works are judgments, which require the support of reproducible arguments. Readers who find themselves convinced by the book are convinced by Thomson himself and his strong style. Reviewers like Michael O’Donnell who take issue with the book do so on similar grounds. Conversely, the New York Times critic A. O. Scott supports the work by profiling Thomson instead of writing a traditional review – implying readers should consider the book on the basis of who Thomson is in this space rather than of what he writes.
But Thomson undercuts his own authority in A Sudden Flicker of Light. Having folded the reader’s point of view within his own, he then summarily shuts down both his and our attempts at self-inquiry. In the last chapter, he writes: “you may be saying. . . . ‘I don’t know where this book is going.’ You have a point, but I have no sympathy for either of us.” His resignation is not necessarily surprising. It is one of the paradoxes of anxieties about film that they betray what is usually a deeply held reverence for the medium’s effects. It is only by believing in film’s indomitable “powers” that he can resign himself to them. Thomson writes about film as if it were a thing alive. In his view, it influences, corrupts, and reprograms audiences of its own volition. He does not just reify film, either. Culture, he claims, has “central forces.” He tells us that “the nature of the screen [is] to be dominating” and cautions against the “existential melodrama of movieness.” He also suggests that “sound is so intimate we fall in love with it” and that “actors . . . can make a line so funny or touching . . . that we remember it forever.” Though certain films can certainly change us and make us see things differently, not every film does so, and surely its effects are rarely permanent in the way Thomson describes.
But let us assume, for the moment, that film can go rogue – what does it want? As Thomson understands it, film “wants” someone like Trump – that is, it creates the conditions for someone like Trump to attract us. At the end of the book, Thomson claims that Trump has put on a political performance that audiences today receive not as consequential political action but as a spectacle. He stops short of explicitly blaming movies for our current political climate but understands that our contemporary fantasies about political violence, the casual relationship we have with fact, the permeable boundary between film and reality, as well as our tolerance of and even admiration for bad actors when they are depicted on-screen, are vices first found and picked up within the movie theater.
What Thomson does not consider here are the ways in which the film industry – and the network of advisors and stakeholders who have an influence over its operations – brings certain work into theaters and onto streaming platforms and contributes to the popularity of some films over others. There is a material, economic reason, in other words, why some films make it and others do not. Thomson tells us that this is “a book trying to keep up with every fresh screen I see.” He is trying to transmit what he feels is cinema’s inborn velocity, in other words, and is keeping up with what he takes to be its natural progress. However, the conceit of attempting to watch every single film, and basing a book on the idea, seems both Sisyphean and self-canceling and would as likely obscure insight into the medium as further it.
A book that associates the effects of watching films with our current politics misunderstands the complex reasons why a figure like Trump might be in office. That is the real issue, and books should address it – film books too. But Thomson gives film an agency it does not have. He can therefore sound the warning bell about its inherent dangers but mischaracterizes the way they come about and also overlooks the teams who are responsible. His book, in this sense, should not be read as a diagnosis of the medium. It is a testimonial from one who, despite the critique, remains firmly under its spell.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the films mentioned.
