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Welcome back to the Bulwark Goes to Hollywood. My name is Sonny Bunch, I am culture editor at the Bulwark and I'm very pleased to be rejoined today by David Thompson, who is the author of A Sudden Flicker of Light, a revisionist history of movies. New book, it's out, it's climbing the Amazon charts for film history, film business. And I have to say I'm real excited to have you back on because you're one of my favorite film writers. I have a number of your books. You can probably see some of them there behind me. But I, but I have to say I am, I'm also a little bit nervous because it does, it does feel reading your, your, your book here that, you know, you have some, you have some regrets about doing the thing that I have that I am spending my life doing. That you have spent your life doing. What was it? What, what was it that want. Why did you want to sit down and write this book?
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Well, I guess a process of thinking set in during the COVID withdrawal, which really changed the way we related to our access to the media. And it's led me to the point of wondering where this medium is going now. This is a medium that hooked me at the age of four. You might say something very similar. I feel for it passionately still. I, I am excited every time I go to see a movie or every time I see a movie, even on my iPhone, which I do often, much more than I thought I would do a few years ago. I think great movies are being made, but I'm troubled about the relationship between the public and the screen because I think we don't trust the screen anymore. We don't, we don't feel the old adage, which was that you have to see a movie in a theater where the faces, the close ups are as big as a two story house, if you know what I mean. And, and you're drawn into the emotion because of that. I find that watching on my computer screen, watching on my home screen, that used to be a television screen, but television is really not adequate as a way of accounting for it now. But that image is actually brighter, more detailed, clearer, and therefore more emotionally engaging than the image in a theater. For several years now, I have found the quality of projection in theaters getting worse and worse, whereas the quality of the image and the sound at home, not always, but it can be better and better. And it's a part of that feeling that I meet and talk to people, strangers sometimes people at parties and so on. And they know the Movies I know, sometimes they know more than I know, but they haven't been to a theater in years. And you know, the people behind a film like the Odyssey will tell you, oh, you've got to go to see it in the very best, largest IMAX version available. Not that many theaters really offer that service. And yet still people are not going to theaters. They, they, they have lost the habit. We have lost the habit of seeing films in community and sharing our reactions with 2000 people. Maybe. Most of the theaters I went to as a kid held 2,000 seats and they were often packed. Now we watch the movies relatively alone, sometimes absolutely completely alone, and that changes them. And whereas there was a feeling once upon a time that the crowd could be educated or moved in unison and moved forward, enlightened as a crowd, as a group, that, that's gone. And somehow our solitude, our loneliness, our aloneness anyway, has been increased by the medium. And all we know about the technology tells us that we are at the dawn of this new age. The thing called AI, which very few people really understand properly, but we, we sense it is there, just as we sense terrible climatic futures are there. And those things are more and more daunting. And, you know, I want to keep doing what I do as long as I live, and that's not going to be nearly as long as you're going to live. You want to do the same. Film critics want the medium to go on because their job depends upon it. Actors, filmmakers, all want that to go on. And yet isn't that the case, that we're living in a climate where that confidence is at a very low ebb? And you can say, well, I'm going to just cross my fingers and keep doing what I do because I, I don't know what else I could do. But the worry doesn't go away. And I've seen movies which are sort of in development, are being made that are completely AI I don't like them, they don't feel natural, they don't feel lifelike. But I'm confident that the people, the geniuses, the technical mastery that's behind it will improve because technologies always get more sophisticated anyway. That's a long winded way of saying why I feel uneasy. And I suspect, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I suspect you know exactly what I'm talking about.
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I do, I do. I mean, look, I have two young children and I spend a lot of time thinking about how they interact with the media and with various forms of screened entertainment, right? And that, and that, you know, the, the, the oncoming, the onrushing future, not just of AI, frankly. You know, let's, let's set the AI question aside. The, the world of YouTube, the world, world of user generated content and short form media and attention grabbing. Right. You hear Netflix talking about this a lot, that they want to get into the short form video that they, that they want, they want to capture that Instagram reels audience or that TikTok audience. Is that movies, is that TV? That is, that is kind of the question. That is one of the questions I think in your book. But here's, there's, there's a second one and I think this is the big, this is, this is one of the big things that you are arguing or, or getting at. Maybe arguing is maybe a strong word, is that the movies have changed us in ways that are both very obvious and largely negative. We, we as a people are having trouble separating reality from reality as it is lived from the reality that we have seen on screens. And as a result, the reality that we are living in is coming to resemble screens more and more, which seems, seems like a simulation of life itself.
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You put it very, very well. And I do think what I'm talking about is a particularly American sensibility. And you know, I'm speaking as someone who was born and raised in England. I'm an American citizen now, but I feel, in many ways I feel English still. And I have always been troubled at the way this country is earnestly engaged in pursuing what is called the American dream. And I've reached a point where I feel, well, I wish that America pursued the American reality more. You know, when a president talks endlessly about a greatness that I find it extremely hard to define and grasp and aim myself at, and when at the same time he is presiding over a government and an economy that is increasingly neglecting realities, looking away from them and claiming that the problems in them do not exist even. I'm very troubled about the preoccupation with dream and the loss of reality. And I do think that the whole experience and the cultural lessons in watching movies has to do with that. I don't say it's the cause of it simply, but I think it's a factor in a system where we are encouraged to sit in the dark and observe some beautiful, brilliant, moving sensation in which we have no physical involvement and no responsibility. I think the form of cinema film has trained us to watch and be incapable of actually involving ourselves in what we're seeing. I don't know what we do about that. But what I'm trying to do in this book is to say, look, think about it. Is it possible that we are feeling extra helpless because of the way we, we have been onlookers who are not responsible for what is being shown to us?
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This, I mean, you're talking about passivity here, right? The passiveness of film. The kind of act of just sitting there and watching as opposed to interacting with the world. And it is interesting in your book you write a bit about David Fincher and Seven and to a lesser extent Gone Girl and some, and some of these and other movies that kind of revel in a darkness in society. Do you think that the, the success of those films, just the act of making those films and showing them to smaller and smaller audience. I mean, you mentioned the audiences are getting smaller. We're watching these movies in smaller groups. Oftentimes alone I can watch seven in my, on my television, you know, 20 seconds after we get off this call, right. I can put in the disc and watch it by myself. Which feels like a, feels like a. Very. Frankly, knowing what we know about the content of that film seems like a really self destructive sort of thing to do. If you look at it in a vacuum. Do you think that that sort of behavior is influencing how people see the world and interact with it and just decide to kind of give up?
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Well, you have young children. I, I have young grandchildren. I think compared with the world in which I grew up, and I suspect the world you grew up, I think there is a feeling of helplessness about the future that has curtailed and restricted our own optimism about ourselves. I have grandchildren who have good university degrees and they have very little chance of getting a job that is in the field in which they have their degree. In other words, the sequence of life where you get an education and you then use it to make a living that is sufficient to support a family. That whole rhythm in life, I don't think it's working reliably anymore. And I'm not sure any of us see a way in which it could be made to work. Whereas I do think it's clearer than ever that our society could devolve into a situation where we become more and more slave like and manipulated and directed by an elite. An elite with extraordinary wealth and extraordinary technical knowledge and understanding of how the brain works. And we are into what I see as a dark age. A dark age in which human values, humanism itself no longer really function and operate. And you know, the transactional pragmatism of Our present regime is alarming enough, but it could be no more than one step in a direction that is very concerning. And I think this has to do with the way media have become almost the religion that has taken the place of the actual official religions that operated into at least the middle of the 20th century.
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Can you, can you, can you drill down on that just a little more? Because I feel when we, when we, when we talk about the media, that means so many different things, right? The media is film, where this is a book about film, right? And the. In the media is film, but the media is also the news. The media is also, again, these kind of burgeoning social media platforms, right? Twitter and Instagram, TikTok, etc.
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Thinking of it as a presentation of life on screens. I used to feel that the essence of movie was the camera and the projector, a way of recording life and then redelivering it so that we were moved by it. I've come around to the feeling that much more important than the camera system, the recording system, is the screen, because the screen presents itself initially as a window on life and a window on reality. Whereas in fact, I think there's another function in screens which is to say, oh, don't kid yourself, you can't get in, you can't get into the screen and you can't get into the reality. You are just a watcher. That is your identity as an individual and it is our identity as a community. So that most reasonable people today would say we have extraordinary problems and questions that face US climate, AI, the potential for fascism. And we're living in this country in what is closer to a fascistic state than we have ever been before. And what can we do about it? I think people wake up every day increasingly distressed at what the news has to tell them, so they stop watching the news and the screen haunts us all the time. And it is a message to us that we don't matter, that we don't count. Now that's a long way from the excitement that existed in the early days of cinema and which existed, I think, well into the 60s and 70s, that you do count and the stories on screen are there as a proof and a lesson to you about how you count and how you can count and do something. And I just feel that that process is underway and it has an increasing momentum and I'm very scared about where it. It's going. And, you know, for people like ourselves who are part of the media, marginal parts of it, let's say, but still part of it. I think what we say about what we're seeing is very important. And if you take a film like Seven, which. Which you refer to. I mean, there are many, many ways in which Seven is very well made. It's well photographed, it's well written, it's well acted. But I found myself asking the question more and more, why make Seven and why go to see it? Because there is something so cruel in the film that it really has no justification beyond saying, look, I can show you this, and it's up to you how you deal with it, how you can digest it, or how you can forget it once you've seen it. Now I pick on Seven, but there are many other films that present the same sort of problem. I think I talk in the book about the Godfather. The Godfather is a monumental achievement. It's. It's sort of as good and as rich and detailed, as close to perfect as a big narrative picture can be. But all of that praise for the film, and the film won every award possible. All the revenue it brought in, because it was a huge success, doesn't get away from the fact, it seems to me, that the film is saying, particularly to men, don't you want to be part of the gang? Don't you want to be part of the family? Secure in the fellowship, capable of acting in a bold, swaggering, authoritative way, shutting women out of the room? And, you know, there is a large part of the male Persona and the male society that really finds it very difficult to deal with women, to talk to them, because they present issues that undermined male solitude and male power and authority. And that's a very, very important part of the Godfather. The Godfather, I think, is advertising a kind of male authoritarianism that helps one understand why it is the president's favorite film. And is that really a full model of the kind of life we're interested in achieving? Do we feel that purpose any longer? Is it really still part of the American project? Or has the notion of the American dream eclipsed our ability and our energy to pursue the reality?
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Can we. I want to hop back to something you mentioned when discussing 7. I think this ties into people who obsessively rewatch the Godfather as well. I am certainly among them. So, you know, I'm including myself in this conversation. Maybe, but when you were talking about Seven, you. You asked. I'm paraphrasing, but you asked, why make Seven? Why make this? Why. Why make this movie? Why put that into the world? Why put this message into the world? This kind of nihilistic you know, empty, you know, cruel, whatever, whatever word you want to use. This, this message into the world. I, I'm curious how your own thinking about film has evolved. And, and by what I mean, what I mean by this is how you're thinking about how we should think about the, the morality or the message of a film. Right. Because I, you know, I, I am very much in the tradition of the movie is the movie, and you can analyze the movie. I don't like making necessarily moral judgments about the character of the film. I do occasionally. I reviewed the Citizen Vigilante movie that came out a couple of weeks ago, and that's a horrible movie. It's not just incompetent, it is also very nakedly fascistic. And I couldn't help but discuss that in my review. But for the most part, I try to keep that to the side. Have you found. Have. I'm curious if your thinking on this has evolved at all over the years or if you've always kind of looked at the humanistic quality of the films as they've gone as, as you've been watching them, liking certain films with better messages more. I just, I, I, I want, I want to know how you, how you have thought about this over the years.
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Oh, it's evolved enormously. I mean, I went through an infant stage, if you like, of just absolute delight and terror at the same time about the film. I, I regularly had to be taken out of a movie by my parents or whoever was there had taken me to see it because I was so upset by it.
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And
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I sort of, I began to realize how things were done. And I fantasized, I thought that I could be Montgomery Clifton, Red river, say, or, you know, James Dean in East of Eden. And I then found myself thinking, well, these movies that mean so much to me, they're made, someone makes them, maybe I could make them. I go to film school. I learned in a very rudimentary way how to make a film. Not, not with the technology that exists today, but, you know, Super 8, 16 millimeter, that kind of thing. And that led me into what I think is a very dominant part of the culture of a film buff's life, where you ask yourself all the time, how did they do that? And you put yourself in the position of the filmmakers and you become more and more interested in, in the intricacies of how things are put together. But in doing that, there is a risk that you stop asking yourself, well, what is the film about? When I saw Red river at the age of eight, I think even then I could see that the relationship between John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in that film meant something to me because it reminded me of my relationship with my own father, which was not a great relationship, but one in which I felt enormous awe for him. And I think that films like that helped me grow up in certain ways, but in becoming somebody who might be a filmmaker, who might. Who literally went through a period, quite a long period, where I looked at everything I saw in real life, including the people very close to me, where I looked at them as if they were characters in my movie, that has led me to increasing disquiet over where that takes us. You know, I mean, I don't want to get a duly confessional now, but my first marriage, I would say, ended because movies meant so much to me that they had, they had distorted my sense of reality. And, and I have tried in growing older to moderate that sense. And I don't know how successful I've been, but I, I will not deny now that films are about something. And if you take a film like Seven, I think Seven is about making some money and it's about cruelty. And when you put those two together, I think you get a fairly ugly proposition. And again, I don't mean to make this a personal attack on David Fincher. He's done some wonderful work. Zodiac is a film I like very, very much, but Seven I dislike very, very much.
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The follow up question here then is naturally, what is to be done about it? And I, you know, set aside, set aside the. We're, we're not studio heads. We're not, we're not green lighting these things. So we, we don't, we don't have say there. But when, when we are writing about it, when we, when we, even, not even critics, just when we, people are writing and thinking about and talking about these movies and trying to decide if we want to tell are, you should go see Obsession. You know, that's the, that's what all. That's the biggest word of mouth hit I have seen since COVID ended the Obsession. Right. And that, that is another movie that is very. There's a lot of darkness at, at, in the heart of that film. And there, there's a lot of kind of ugliness in the heart of that film. But it is an enormous hit and people are connecting to it in a very real way, which I find. I find both interesting and maybe a little bit troubling. But what responsibility do we have then if we, if we, if we say movies are about Something. And movies that are about ugliness are not good for us. What. What is our responsibility as writers and thinkers and, frankly, consumers in a situation like that?
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Well, I mean, for me, the only thing I could see to do was to write this book in the. In the expectation that it would be controversial, that a number of people, both spectators and filmmakers, who really are addicted to the medium would be troubled by it, would disagree with it. But at least we were beginning, let's say, to talk about these issues. And I think for myself, it's the least I could do, but it's the most I could do. And I did think long before this book was published, but as I was finishing it, I sort of imagined getting into conversations with you, an intelligent, knowledgeable person, about the medium, where just the issues we're talking about were raised. And I guess I want nothing more, or I have no more expectation than the chance that in talking about these things, we begin to think about them more. I'm not sure that humans can do anything to stop the momentum of the technology we have allowed to come to being. And that's a very, very frightening thing, because what it means is that we are like the slave people in a film like Metropolis, where we're just answering the needs of the machines more and more. And I can't offer any sort of solid, practical way of stopping that. But I do think what I could do and what I've tried to do in this book is to say, look, stop. Consider your relationship with the screen and with life and ask yourself questions about what is happening in these films to us. I'm raising the worry, and it doesn't stop me going to the movies. I do think that there is a tradition of filmmaking outside the United States that is much more respectful, are actual realities in life where the fantasy element is very much reduced. And I think one of the great dangers of American culture and American history is the way in which the idealism and the optimism, the new project has been compromised by the commercialization of fantasy. And I can only state that issue. I cannot solve it. I cannot attempt to solve it. I don't mean to say stop seeing films. I mean to say maybe we can think about them more deeply.
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The way you describe screen, the way you describe media and screens, is really interesting to me because it does feel. It feels like, you know, towards the end of your book, you write about the. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump and his immediate reaction in the aftermath, which was, if you. If you don't mind reminding people what. What was his immediate Pose on the stage?
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Well, I mean, he, he behaved admirably. He had been hit probably by a fragment of decor, more than a bullet, but he had been hit. He was bleeding, no question about it. And I sympathize with him. In the situation, to be shot at is not a nice way to be. But what was extraordinary about him is that he reacted instantly or certainly within a second or so like a character in a movie. It was as if he knew what he had to do to be a fantasy ideal of what a president is like. So he stood up, he thrust out his fist, and he exhibited that American heroism that we know so well from movies, but which we seldom see in real life and really don't expect in real life, because the basic condition of people is far more to be scared than to be brave. And that's not necessarily anything to be ashamed of. Being scared is very human. We're talking together about a situation where maybe to different degrees, we both feel scared about where we are and where we're going.
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I must fear, Yes. I live with a low level sense of dread at all times, which I'm sure is not, not particularly healthy. But we, you know, we, we get along. I want to read, I want to read the passage from your book where you, where you write about Donald Trump, because I, this, this gets to the, the broader point. I want, I want to ask you about, about screens here. This is a. I'm, I'm reading from your book now. It's not simply that he is the manifestation of a culture led astray by celebrity. It's monotonous brightness, it's surrender to fantasy and it's corruption by advertising. It's that he is a jerk and a genius and a low life whose only escape from his dank cave is in being on camera. He always knows where it is. He sighs at it like a Don Juan tired of kissing and end quote. And, and that, that really jumps out at me because that does feel like how not just Donald Trump lives, but how many of us live all the time in an age of kind of. In the Panopticon of social media, in a moment where you can be live on Instagram in a second and being streamed to a million people in a world in which no public setting is really immune or off limits for instant broadcast to the world. We are all kind of like that in a way. He is, as you, as you write in your book, kind of a natural. He. This is what he, this is his natural milieu. His, his. I don't know, his mean his media. But the, but the. But we're all kind of like that now. This is the. The world of screens has kind of consumed us all in, in a way that I think, and I think you get at this point in your book, that we can only really understand by having watched other people on screen, which inevitably changes how we act and how we behave and how we think, which can't possibly be healthy.
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You put very well what I tried to say in the book. I, I think this is exactly where we are. And if you think about the way people felt when movies first began, the awe, the wonder, the delight, the thrill, the laughing, all that kind of thing, it's been a pretty drastic change. And you know, I say again, I have a horrible feeling that if the human race is going to survive, then we may have to learn how to become unhuman. I don't mean inhuman necessarily, but we need to drop a lot of the apparatus of humanism just to get through, just to survive. And I don't know how we talk to our children and grandchildren about that. I don't know how we begin to deal with them or do. Are we left in the position of saying, well, look, soon enough our children and grandchildren will be on their own. They've got to survive. And survival becomes more pressing than the quality of the life that we want to survive. You know, this is, this is large, dark, gloomy stuff, but I think in a hundred years we've got there. And I do think that screens have a lot to do with it.
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And as you, as you mentioned, I don't know how things get much better with not just the technological changes that are coming, but the speed with which they are coming and our general inability to handle change that quickly in a reasonable way. Yeah, great. Well, that was great, cheery stuff. Now, I always like to close by asking if there's anything I should have asked if you think there's anything folks should know about your book or the state of the meaning. Let me ask. Actually, let me ask one last question. Taking, going with the kind of theme, the overarching theme of your book, could you, could you name the movie that you think has been most. The movie that has had the worst impact on the world as a whole and the movie you think may have had the best impact on the movie, on the, on the world as a whole, the film that has best impacted the world and how we. We see it, if, if such a thing exists?
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Well, I mean, the. There are so many films out of Asia, broadly, Japanese cinema, Indian cinema, so many Films that are so deeply aware of the way very ordinary people live that they're shy of building films about fantasy figures. I mean, Pathapanchali, let's say, the first films that Yajit Rai made. That seems to me to be a near perfect portrait of people enduring great poverty but having an inner imaginative wealth. I love that kind of film. I would love to see American films made in a similar sort of vein. I think that I can easily think of films that come out of America that have been extraordinary boosts and encouragement to morale. A film like Casablanca, say. I mean, Casablanca is a. Is. It's a very, very contrived, artificial film. But I think there's no doubt that when Casablanca opened in 1943, it helped people get along with all the difficulties of 1943. And, you know, movies that make you feel better have a great place, and I have great respect for them, and if they persuade me that they're aware of the actual realities of life, then all the better. And there are many films like that.
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All right. Casablanca. I do love Casablanca. Let's end on a happy note. Mr. Thompson, thank you for being on the show today. I really appreciate it.
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Thank you very much.
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And again, the name of the book is A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thompson. You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, local bookstores, wherever books are sold. And I do look. I recommend reading it. It's a provocation, but it's a provocation that needs to. Needs to be made. I think we, you know, sometimes get stuck in ruts and it's good to. It's good to think about these things, fight about them, argue about them in a respectful way. And this. This book is respectful and you should read it and enjoy it, I think. I think there's a lot to chew over here, but I. My name is Sonny Bunch. I'm Culture Editorial at the Bull Work, and I'll be back next week with another episode of the Bull Work Goes to Hollywood. We'll see you guys then.