Acclaimed film historian David Thomson has brought his decades-long romance with the silver screen to its logical, exhaustive conclusion, officially diagnosing the medium of film as the terminal disease responsible for the erosion of the American republic.
The revelation, which arrives not with a cinematic bang but with the exhausted sigh of a man who has sat through entirely too many projection-room retrospectives, positions the moving image as the grand architect of our national rot; a sentiment that one might trace back to the canonical rigidity of Andre Bazin's text What Is Cinema, though Thomson applies it with a distinctly more fatalistic, and perhaps uniquely Anglo-American, despair. It is a thesis that demands we, the ostensibly literate public, view the flickering light of the multiplex not as a harmless mirror of society, but as its very executioner, systematically dismantling the civic mind one twenty-four-frame second at a time.
To grasp the sheer, agonizing weight of Thomson's grievance—assuming you have the intellectual stamina to do so—one must look beyond the immediate landscape of contemporary franchise fodder. We must first locate the medium's austere boundaries within Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet's 1975 structuralist monolith Moses and Aaron; a necessary crucible before one can properly contextualize the aesthetic bankruptcy of, say, Justin Lin's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Thomson, in his infinite and slightly burdensome wisdom, suggests that the very act of sitting in the dark and yielding to such spectacle has fundamentally rewired the American populace to accept illusion over the arduous, unglamorous labor of democratic reality.
The tragedy of Thomson's profound cinematic betrayal is that he is only just now realizing that a century of artificial lighting and montage was never designed to elevate the human condition, but merely to distract us while our institutions quietly dissolved.
Thus, we are left to grapple with the wreckage of Thomson's lover's quarrel, a sprawling, text-heavy divorce from the very apparatus that built his reputation; an intellectual uncoupling that ultimately flatters the reader by presuming we, too, possess the bandwidth to care deeply about the ontological threat of the motion picture. It is a noble, if thoroughly exhausting, endeavor to blame the total collapse of a superpower on the existence of the screen actor, leaving us to wonder if the republic might have been saved had we simply stuck to reading the Greeks, or at the very least, possessed the fortitude to refuse the talkies.