David Thomson's Case Against Cinema, Rebutted
SkimNews Take
Thomson's complaint is structural — cinema reshaping how reality is perceived — which no defense based on the medium's best examples can fully address.
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- David Thomson published "A Sudden Flicker of Light," arguing cinema is "an engine of fantasy" and "a parasite to reality" that has "begun to diminish our nature" — and even blames movies for the rise of Donald Trump
- Thomson's book surveys film history from Georges Méliès through 2024's "Anora," covering silent pictures, talkies, the studio era, New Hollywood, and the age of streaming
- Thomson advances three central arguments: the camera flatters killers, movies are inferior to literature, and cinema spotlights the sensational rather than "the frequently amiable muddle" of everyday life
- The Atlantic reviewer disputes Thomson's violence thesis, noting that Homer, Shakespeare, Stephen King, and Cormac McCarthy deliver just as much fictional brutality, and that "the bookstore holds as much schlock as the multiplex"
- Thomson endorses starkly realistic films like "The Tree of Life" and "The Zone of Interest" but pans crowd favorites including "Se7en," "Star Wars," "Prometheus," "Interstellar," "Inside Llewyn Davis," and "The Grand Budapest Hotel"
- Thomson names only eight contemporary directors whose work he's willing to endorse, and the reviewer characterizes the book as "a buyer's remorse over a product that has exceeded its shelf life"
- The film industry is simultaneously in crisis — theaters dying, superhero blockbusters struggling, screens shrinking, clips shortening, and AI threatening to supplant the medium
Why it matters: A critic of Thomson's stature rarely renounces the medium he's spent a lifetime studying, making this an unusually high-profile act of artistic disillusionment published as theaters close, blockbusters sputter, and AI threatens the form. The debate therefore carries both aesthetic stakes — what movies are for — and material ones, since the industry's contraction gives Thomson's elegy a receptive audience it might not have found a decade ago.
