Reeling from the power of the big screen

Senior Features Writer

Thursday 11 October 2012

The subtitle to David Thomson's fine new book The Big Screen summarises the contents as "the story of the movies and what they did to us".

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Writer David Thomson talks sex, love, politics and the movies with Teddy Jamieson

It's the "what they did to us" that matters, I think.

That's not to say it doesn't deal with the former too. Thomson is quite simply the greatest living writer on cinema we have. Best known for his thrillingly and at times infuriatingly opinionated Biographical Dictionary of Cinema, he has spent the past 40 years or more writing about movies with a lancet eye. The Big Screen feels a bit like a greatest hits, almost. Here are Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, all caught in glittering prose. But it's also a book that invites us to cast Thomson as something of a former lover. Reading the book I pictured him as someone who is still half in love with the medium but who can now see all the flaws that love may have blinded him to in the past.

This is a book about how the movies have changed us. "It's a history of technology and communication and our relationship with reality," Thomson tells me as he sits in a London hotel room. "It affects everything in society. It affects politics as much as it does art. I think in the past 20 years, let's say, there's been such a proliferation of screens in the home, everywhere, that it is easier to see we're actually screen-watchers."And one must never forget that screen is a word with two rather contradictory meanings. A screen is something where you show something, but a screen is also something you use to mask something too, to hide something. And what I think has been neglected, relatively speaking, is the idea that the screen while trumpeting reality to us and saying, 'Look, I can show you wonderful things,' has also taught us to exist in a way that is cut off from them. And that has a bearing on political commitment and responsibility, just as much as it does on violence and sexuality and the art of film."In short, the way we think of love and sex and politics – and the way we participate in all three – are different because for the past century we have been been shaped by what we've watched. Thomson feels it personally. Writing of one of his favourite directors Howard Hawks – the man who gave us The Big Sleep and Bringing Up Baby – he wonders what damage Hawks's attitude to life did to the director and to the writer. It seems churlish, then, not to ask him to adumbrate it. "I think I had a love of Hawks's films. I still have it but I felt it intensely [in the past]. And I think it taught me a certain attitude to women that was problematic and it did not allow a full sense of their reality. I think the same thing happened to Hawks in his lifetime. I think it's happened to many people. "There's a constant fostering of fantasies in films – female fantasies as well – and it's what drove cinema commercially for many decades. But there are dangers to it. The great fantasies that Hollywood projected include the idea that happiness is not only a pursuable thing, but a catchable thing. And again, that has a huge political consequence."I wonder. Surely most of us recognise the game-playing nature of film? As children we are indocrinated – via Disney, Tom & Jerry or The Simpsons – into the fantasy of images. But we are also usually aware that it is a fantasy; that this is a world where reality (sometimes even gravity) doesn't necessarily apply. Thomson is not so sure. He argues that people in the US, where he now lives, believe there are more irrational shootings than ever before. He links it to video games. I'm not convinced. Equally, I'm not convinced by a bravura sequence in the book that links I Love Lucy to Las Vegas to the stock market crash, all, he suggests, powered by the "adrenaline of fantasy".And yet his arguments are so wonderfully phrased that I enjoy the debate. And much of what he says is so right. At heart, cinema is a desire machine. It has, as he says, eroticised the act of looking. "Absolutely. I think without it, cinema may cease." But change is coming, he feels. "While access to old movies is greater than ever, the culture has moved on. I suspect one of the great changes we are going to see is the closure of an enormous number of our theatres. The finishing of film as a theatrical form. Now that's going to be extraordinary in its impact."In that case The Big Screen is as loving and bittersweet an obituary as you could want to read.The Big Screen by David Thomson is published by Allen Lane, priced £25.

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Reeling from the power of the big screen

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