A Sudden Flicker of Light: Has David Thomson Fallen Out of Love With the Movies?

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States. Hello everybody, we are live in San Francisco at my home, one of the world's great cinematic cities, of course, the home of Vertigo, Bullitt, many other movies, also the home of perhaps the world's leading film reviewer, David Thomson. He's a neighbor of mine, and he has a new book out. It's called A Sudden Flicker of Light. David, welcome to Keen on America.

00:01:25 David Thomson: Well, thank you for asking me. I'm pleased to be here.

00:01:28 Andrew Keen: David, would it be fair to say that in this new book you declare that you've fallen out of love with the movies.

00:01:38 David Thomson: I would not say fallen out of love, but I'm more wary about movies and the whole enterprise than I think I've ever been in my life. I began at four, totally suckered in, and convinced by the medium, loved it, and loved it for decades, and taught about it, and wrote about it, made films too, and I would say that in the last, oh, 10 years, 10, 15 years, I've begun to be more suspicious of criticism that concentrates on major directors, regards them as great artists, as well as great businessmen, and even will write books about single films, and sort of ignores what's been happening about the whole medium, and I have found in the last years that what is happening to our society, to our culture through screens is so important and so alarming, often so exciting, that I wanted to concentrate more on that, and I still get enormous pleasure from individual movies, but I'm, I'm dubious now about how good for us the medium has been, put it that way.

00:03:32 Andrew Keen: That's a sharp thing to say, that the medium hasn't been good for us. Should we think that the mediums are good for us? Why would any medium be good for us? You mean us as human beings?

00:03:47 David Thomson: I mean, no, in abstract, why should they, fair enough, except that we have developed them, we've invented them, we've refined them, and we have permitted them, and you know the fact is that human beings have a very bad track record at inventing a new technology and deciding to put it aside, the technology takes control of this, and it, it's, it sets in a very profound way that affects our understanding of a whole lot of things that are above and beyond the stories of individual films and I'm, I'm troubled by the way in which we have become a society that believes it is our right to sit back in our secure darkness and watch things and have a fantasy involvement and a fantasy life with those things, but to have no responsibility for them, so I think the sort of sense of helplessness that we have in this society now has a lot to do with us having been trained to watch things where people are not really hurt, no matter that their bodies are torn apart, they're not really happy. Or in bliss, though they say they are in the film, and where whatever happens to them, we remain spectators, and, and, and we do not take responsibility for what we're seeing now. Extrapolate that out into a broader world and I think you have a society in which for all the paperwork of democracy and government by and for the people and so forth we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained in the broadest sense, frightened sometimes, and we are accustomed by now to the sort of the realization that we can't do anything about what's on the screen, I think this country, our country now, America is in that state. I think for several years we have known that we were going in the wrong direction. When I say we, I mean the majority, a big majority of the people have known that, and the first recourse was immediately to say, well, for God's sake, the Constitution will protect us, the Supreme Court will protect us, the President will protect us. Fact, none of those things have worked, and I think freedom-loving people, peaceable people, are at a point where they say, "What on earth can I do? And then, well, I don't think I can do anything, which means that I am insignificant in a way that is completely at odds with the notion of this country, and not just this country, but many other countries being places where the voice and the feeling of the majority of people would determine the direction the country would take.

00:07:50 Andrew Keen: Is there a personal element, David, to this narrative, in the sense that you've been watching films all your life, you've probably seen more films than almost anyone in the world, perhaps collectively been one point in the book, or in one of your books, you talked about seeing three films a day, that it's a sense of disappointment about yourself that all these films that you've watched hasn't created a sense of agency, the agency that you're looking for.

00:08:30 David Thomson: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I wouldn't be doing this book if I didn't feel the difficulty, the trouble, the anxiety over it personally. Yeah, I mean, this is not something I just observe in the rest of the world. It's something I have felt, and I, I have always had the feeling that being a sort of film historian, film critic, whatever you want to call it. It's important to keep looking at old films again, and I'm especially interested in the way they change over time. They don't change, we change, obviously, but I have felt with many films that I adored as a kid, as a child, as a youth, as a young person, I have much more trouble with now, because I see I see the fundamental compromises that are going on in story after story, to take one example, nothing original about saying this, but the culture of manhood and the serious neglect of women was going on in every film I saw up until at least the 1980s and you could argue well beyond that, and that is a kind of tacit advertising. It is a way of saying, look, this is really a very good way for how the world should be, I guess, in old age, that's what it comes to. I have found that harder and harder to endure as an idea, and I think that too is very much a part of the troubles we are in. I think we're in lots of situations like the war in Iran, which I do not believe would have been as likely if we had had enough women running the country, because I think I simply think that women feel and think and think and feel together in concert in different ways, because they do not feel they have to live up to the power and the virility of manhood. I think I think they feel that compassion and sentiment and reason, just plain rationality, can enter into their process more than a lot of men, you know, I'm generalizing, and there are exceptions, obviously, but that's a sensibility that has only really made me feel the need to change. Oh, I guess last 20 years, something like that.

00:11:37 Andrew Keen: So this is all very well, David, and obviously very interesting. I'm sure a lot of our viewers and listeners will agree with your politics, but I don't understand what it has to do with cinema. I mean, we could have been having this conversation in the 1960s which in your wonderful new history of the cinema, a revisionist history of movies? You talk about the 60s in some way as a golden age. What's the connection between you brought up the war in Iraq or Iran and the war in Vietnam or other American colonial wars and the movies?

00:12:30 David Thomson: Because the movies have given us examples of how to live that have been intensely persuasive, and they have to do with the kind of political decision making that goes on in, in the country, you, you can't have a mass medium without the mass being affected, without the ways in which they think being shaped. I mean, I think that's where it's a terrible error to say, well, the movies, they could be art, they are entertainment, they are a business, and not see that they are a system of rendering information and ideas that shape how we live? They are deeply educational, so surely there's a connection between the medium and what I'm talking about, the—

00:13:21 Andrew Keen: Medium and the message. So, are you arguing against art? Some of the directors in the movies, who you, some of the great quote unquote great directors in the movies that you articulate a degree of ambivalence about now in your new book are Hitchcock and Welles, both you acknowledge great artists, maybe not great men, or maybe not bringing out the greatness in others, are you suggesting that the film should just be a kind of political education, maybe going back to the Soviet cinema.

00:14:00 David Thomson: No, I'm not suggesting they should be. I think they are. That's a helpless condition. If you sit people in the dark and you show a bright light in front of them, you are beginning to shape them, but you are telling them that the light has some power, some force, some truth, some emotion that's important to them, and clearly that is the way people have gone to the movies, that is the way people are using their iPhone today, it's the same process, no matter if the scale of it is altered hugely. I mean, here's an example that I talk about quite a lot. We still send children to school, and we teach them what a word is. We teach them to spell the word properly. We teach them the rules of grammar, and we hope that that is going to make them something we call literate. We ignore the fact, and we have been ignoring it for decades, that the same children invariably have spent far more of their lives watching moving imagery than they have reading. There are exceptions, you may be worth them, I don't know, but most kids have grown up. Watching moving imagery, and we do nothing in our education to say to them, think about what is happening, like what does a cut do? Now you know you can say, well, a cut is obvious in filmmaking. A cut is not obvious in filmmaking, and when people first started watching films, they were crazed and enraged by cuts. They couldn't understand what was happening. Every cut is in itself violent, but exciting too, because it says put two things together, see a connection in thought, and in the process we're watching now, we still don't insist that our children be educated about that kind of thing, but surely we know it's had a profound effect on them.

00:16:29 Andrew Keen: Talk a little bit more about cuts, you talk about them in the beginning of the book. I'm quoting from the book. If you don't feel good today, just cut to tomorrow. It's the cutting that is organic and energizing. The moving image is all very well and lovely, but the cuts teach us we may be crazy. Do the cuts distort reality, David. Do they reinvent reality or appropriate reality? Let's be clear on what a cut is.

00:17:00 David Thomson: What a cut is, is where the stream of imagery you're watching goes from one shot to another shot. A cut is a separation, but it's a marriage, and every cut says to us, and people learned how to do this in watching films, it says join them up, and the way we measure the effectiveness of directors of the era of D.W. Griffith was that they found ways, they felt ways to put shots together, so film had sequence, it had order, like the order of sentences in writing, and every cut has an element of violence in it, because you're seeing one thing, bang, you're watching something quite different, and you know we can all think of shortcuts in horror films and crime films that are jolts and very arresting.

00:18:07 Andrew Keen: Or even Short Cuts.

00:18:09 David Thomson: Or Short Cuts like—

00:18:10 Andrew Keen: Robert Altman's movie.

00:18:11 David Thomson: Yeah. But we haven't really done anything to talk to our kids about what's the nature of a cut, giving kids bits of film to make cuts and joins themselves is a very educational thing, it makes them alert to how this medium is working, and you know, film is so much fun that it's not natural for the audience to ask themselves how it's doing, what it's doing, that's part of the charm of it, that's what makes it entertaining. What feels relaxing, in fact, where people go to see the movies, they aren't relaxed, they're their sensibility, their senses are raised, they get aroused, they get excited, they get frightened, they start laughing. Big things are happening to the human organism as it watches film. We know these things as an education culture, but we don't make our kids go back and look at them and think about them. I think we should.

00:19:31 Andrew Keen: Two thoughts on this, David. Firstly, are we giving when you've got five kids? I've got a couple, so we've all seen them grown up. Are we giving them enough credit? My guess is that most 10-, 15-year-olds, when they watch YouTube or the cuts on TikTok know that it isn't real.

00:19:55 David Thomson: I, you see, I think you've said something that is kind of alarming. I think we're in a world where more and more people have more and more trouble telling the real from the unreal, so don't take it for granted. Don't give our kids the credit, don't give ourselves the credit for saying, oh, I can tell one thing from the other, that's okay, I've got this under control. Do you feel you're living in a society where people have got things under control?

00:20:33 Andrew Keen: I feel I'm living in a society where people have things as much under control as they don't be, which is sometimes they're under control, sometimes they don't, but I don't guess since then much has changed.

00:20:46 David Thomson: You see, I don't feel that. I think there's been a slippage, and I think that the slippage is connected to our feeling that we have issues that face us, which are nothing to do with particular political control and direction that are out of control. I think people think the climate is out of control. I think people think that AI is out of control. I think a lot of young people, particularly, think the world is going to end during their lifetime.

00:21:24 Andrew Keen: Now, even after 1945 I don't think that feeling was as widespread, and I don't think the sense of futility was the same then as it is now. I take your point, and I'm sure you're right on the young people thinking that the world is going to end, but are we blaming cinema here? I mean, you have chapters on George Lucas, on Scorsese, on Welles, on the early history of the American cinema, are we blaming the great directors Polanski, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, for the fact that kids can't separate reality from their screens?

00:22:08 David Thomson: I think blame is maybe not the word I would use, but responsibility is a word I would use, and I think we tend to overlook the more profound consequences of what people are doing. An example, you and I, and most people of our sort of generation would take it for granted that the Godfather is a landmark in film, and certainly one of the epic achievements in modern cinema. We say modern because the influence of the Godfather is still there, although the film is 50 years old. It's an extraordinarily well-made film, from the writing and the structure of the drama, through the photography, the decor, everything. The casting is outstanding, and the film made a ton of money. It won lots of prizes, and to this day, anyone who's interested would probably list it in the half a dozen great American films of all time. I tried to suggest in this book that all of that talk and all of that admiration and esteem ignores the fact that the real draw of the Godfather, the power it has, is as a male fantasy. It's saying, wouldn't you like to be one of the gang? Wouldn't you like to be one of the family, wouldn't you like to be in a world where you don't have to listen to and argue with difficult women? You can shut them out of the room, and you can kill your enemies, and you can be a group of family together that feels self-confident and assured now that compared with the glory of the film, unquestioned glory, that is a very troubling response, and a lot of our films have that failing, that split in their nature, and I'm bound to say that I think to be a film director is to become a little bit of a gangster. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that film directors are into organized crime, but they carry themselves with the assurance and the sort of the swagger that goes with the Godfather in the years since that film was made, I think there's been a fascinating way in which you can see the larger community of Hollywood, not just the filmmakers, but the lawyers and the entourage of agents, and all that kind of thing that surround them, acting like people in The Godfather, and repeating its lines, many of which they know by heart, as if they apply to their lives. That they're living out the fantasy now. When I put it like living out the fantasy, does that remind you of anyone in our culture?

00:25:37 Andrew Keen: We'll come to that. We'll come to that.

00:25:39 David Thomson: It does remind—

00:25:41 Andrew Keen: —you to dominate this conversation [unclear: crosstalk], although, of course, we will come to him, because you end the book, and in a way, you begin the book with a certain American president, but David, in the book, there's history, in some ways it's a polemic, in some ways it's a wonderful history of movies, beginning with Muybridge, ending in the 2020s with Anora, you talk about the emergence of female filmmakers, and in fact Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, which recently was voted the greatest film of all time. You maintain, I think, a degree of ambivalence about this. Is — yeah — is that Akerman and feminist filmmaking, isn't that the antidote to The Godfather? Isn't Jeanne Dielman the reverse of Brando or Pacino?

00:26:30 David Thomson: No, I don't think it is, because I don't think I don't think it gets at the problem in The Godfather that I'm talking about. To deal with the problem in The Godfather that I'm talking about. I think the character of Kay, the Diane Keaton character needs to be given much more voice and agency. It's, it's wonderful that in many places all over the world, in other places more than in America, still women get to make films, and they have a very good record so far in what they do, and I think that's admirable. I don't even think you have to label it as feminism, it's just it's enlarging the sensibility that is making the films, and all for that, just as I'm all for a community like the American one that sometimes will watch films in languages and from countries that they know next to nothing about, there is an ongoing educational value in films like that, but I do not think we're anywhere near a state where the mindset of women is having an equal say in the kind of films that get made compared to the say that men have.

00:28:03 Andrew Keen: But is this a critique, David, of the medium or of the culture of Hollywood? You talk in the movie about, you talk in the book about seeing Anora, and your daughter was a little ambivalent about it. Anora won an Oscar a couple of years ago about a very spirited young American woman who gets involved with the Russian gangsters. She's spirited but also a victim, I guess, of the male hood that you're not comfortable with. Why is this the problem with the moving image? What's this got to do with a sudden flicker of light? It's just a medium.

00:28:40 David Thomson: Well, you're, you're, you're suggesting, I think, from what you say, that the medium exists independent of the people that make it, are you saying that the medium is okay because it's just out there as something we don't need to take any responsibility for, we don't need to ask ourselves about its structure of organization. Do you feel that?

00:29:08 Andrew Keen: Well, I'm interviewing you, I'm probably wrong on that. Is that why, at the beginning of the book, you focused, in terms of the invention of the medium and the business of the medium, on men? Of course, it was men who came out west to California to create the industry, that it wasn't women who built it. Are you suggesting that this medium and this industry, the movie industry, reflects the men who founded it, that values are somehow built in to the cinema. Yeah, when they're not self-evident in the same way, perhaps that some people argue that the internet itself somehow reflects the values of Silicon Valley, even if it isn't explicit.

00:29:48 David Thomson: I think that I think there is a basic setup, a basic emotional setup in films. It's less now than it was, but it's still here, in which men are active, they're brave, they're leaders, they do strong things that determine the end of the story, and they will therefore determine the way the world is going, and women are told to, and apparently are content to be beautiful, slim, kind, and ready to comfort the man, and ready to take off their clothes for the men, as film goes on, and it gets to different levels, but they are absolutely passive, iconic dolls that men own. There are exceptions to what I'm saying, but I think the generality of films are like that. The films I saw from the late 40s onwards, certainly through the 50s, broadly conform with that pattern, and I think that pattern is socially disastrous.

00:31:24 Andrew Keen: So, it's Norman Mailer's Monroe.

00:31:29 David Thomson: I'm sorry — so it's...?

00:31:31 Andrew Keen: Norman Mailer's version of Marilyn Monroe.

00:31:40 David Thomson: I think Norman Mailer's sense of Marilyn Monroe is a very good example of what I'm talking about. Yeah.

00:31:48 Andrew Keen: Let me again... I'm not sure it's for me to defend the movies, David, but nobody else is here to do it. Let's take a movie that you write about some detail in the book, which you seem very ambivalent about, Hitchcock's Vertigo, which on one level speaks exactly to what you're talking about, about the female as the ultimate male fantasy, and such a fantasy, in fact, that a man dresses up a woman as another woman, but it's also a movie about Hitchcock himself, his own failure with women, lack of power. It's a movie about the madness of men. It's a movie women may not come out of Vertigo very well, but certainly men don't either, it's a work of art. You may not approve in a way of the message, but why is I take your point, perhaps on Godfather, or the Godfather also speaks, I think, of the failure of male violence, and the, you see, the spiritual emptiness of being a mafia don, then taking the example of Vertigo, doesn't that make your argument for you about how pathetic men are?

00:33:00 David Thomson: Well, that's a very good interpretation of one aspect of the film, and I agree with what you're saying. I think very highly of Vertigo. I think highly of Hitchcock, although in the end for me he is too, he's too obsessed with contrived fear to be a really profound artist, but he, but he's a great filmmaker. I don't think the Godfather does talk about the defeat of crime, I think it talks about Michael being left, certainly at the end of part two, as a kind of ominous, terrifying presidential-like figure who's cut off from the world, just as he's cut off from his own children, and there's a certain sort of immaculate quality to the to the way Pacino is shot and the way he acts in the last part of The Godfather, part two. He's done terrible things. He's—

00:34:15 Andrew Keen: Killed his brother. We see him at the end on his own. His wife's left him. His kids don't have anything to do with him. He's just killed his son's favorite uncle. I mean, I don't think—

00:34:25 David Thomson: But he's in charge, and being in charge is a tremendous reassurance to the fantasist.

00:34:34 Andrew Keen: Are you, David? The more I listen to you, are you expecting too much of these great directors? Are you disappointed in Hitchcock or Scorsese or Welles? You're expecting them to be gods. They're not gods, they're full of weaknesses and contradictions. The greater they are, the more they're contradictions.

00:34:51 David Thomson: I don't want them to be gods, but why should I not expect more from them?

00:34:57 Andrew Keen: What more would you expect from...

00:35:01 David Thomson: Well, I would expect something of what you see in, say, the films of Jean Renoir, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Rossellini, Bergman, a lot of filmmakers from other parts of the world who are simply operating within a setup, a narrative setup that is not so dependent on fantasy. I think it is the catering to fantasy that is most suspect in American cinema and most suspect in American life.

00:35:01 Andrew Keen: So it's the realism. You talk about Rossellini, and obviously the Italian neorealist tradition was very powerful after the Second World War. Are you suggesting that the American cinema took a wrong direction after the war, and should have might be Italians focused [unclear]?

00:35:01 David Thomson: I think I think increasingly after the war American cinema felt uneasy about what it had been doing. I think that the realities of the war, the discovery of concentration camps, I think that made it harder to really believe in the fantasy that everything was getting better and we were all going to be happy and have everything we wanted, so American cinema faced a period of retrenchment enormously accelerated by the impact of television, because television sucked up so much of the energy that wanted entertainment, and it led to a great period in American filmmaking, I think, which is broadly 1967 to say 1975 very rich period where people made films with a lot of realistic pessimism in the films, as opposed to what I would call the fantasy optimism that had operated in films. I think that that was a great period. And then I think something happened, which was that mass cinema returned, I think. Cinema, you see, has reached a point, and had reached it by about, oh, the 1970s where it did not need to be a mass form. We don't think of novels, we don't think of symphonies and paintings as having to satisfy a mass audience, it's quite possible for them to appeal to and reach a select audience. I think films ought to be in that world. I think the attempt of American films to make blockbusters, I think that is the most accident-prone way they can proceed. I think it's when we make small films about much more ordinary situations in life that I think we make the best films for this world today, and those films are being made, and you know, for all that, I'm critical of many films. I love many films that have been made. Yeah.

00:38:37 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Paul Thomas Anderson's short movie. I know you're a big fan of that one.

00:38:42 David Thomson: Yeah, I'm a big fan of his work altogether, and he seems to me to be someone who simply says when I look at American life, I don't see the archetypes of the classic Hollywood film, I see strange, odd, real people, and I do my best to like them all. A film like Magnolia, say, I think, is a wonderful cross section of American society. It doesn't make judgments about any of the people, really, but it treats them in the way that we can recognize the people we know and the people we are ourselves. I think that's where cinema should be, and I think that's valuable in the overall social cultural way.

00:39:32 Andrew Keen: Is there anything really changed, though, in the politics of movies? David, you end with Trump being shot, and his fight, fight, fight remark, knowing that he was on camera, as clearly, as to quote your phrase, a movie man.

00:39:49 David Thomson: He can't conceive of his existence as not being on camera all the time, that's a badness.

00:39:58 Andrew Keen: It is a madness, but I'm guessing, and you imply this in the book, the what most bothers you about Trump is not so much being a movie man, but his general political unpleasantness. But you begin the book, or early in the book, there's a lot of stuff on D.W. Griffith and the racist Klan-like origins of the movie industry. So, in that sense, has anything really changed? I mean, Hollywood began racist, and it perhaps continues to be racist.

00:40:30 David Thomson: Oh, I mean, come on, I mean, we're talking about a world now in which we absolutely take it for granted that Spike Lee, Barry Jenkins, just to name two, are at the forefront of the most interesting, courageous filmmakers around. You go back to the world in which Birth of a Nation was made, that's an unthinkable thing, and just as we've faced the fact that women can make pictures, so blacks can make pictures, and there's no reason why people of any kind can't make pictures. There's no reason why the women in pictures all have to be slim, glamorous, beautifully costumed, and to use a word that really comes from the movies, sexy women can be themselves in the way that men have assumed they can be for decades, so you know, I've been... I think it's... I think it's crazy to say that progress has not been made, and I would say, for instance, that the great American films of the last 25 years this century are not films that have actually been opened in theaters, they're things like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Ozark, I think that's where more is said about the way real people are living in this country than is made on the big screen.

00:42:21 Andrew Keen: So again, if the tradition exists elsewhere, your critique is more of American culture than of the medium.

00:42:30 David Thomson: It's certainly of American culture, but you cannot separate American culture from the movies, though all the world over still to this day, although it barely exists on the ground in Southern California, people think of Hollywood as an empire, as the fount of an imperial attitude, which it was for a long time. People all over the world understood America as Hollywood.

00:43:00 Andrew Keen: Isn't the preoccupation of Hollywood, its directors, a mirror? I think of Steven Spielberg's new film Disclosure Day. I'm sure you've seen it, a mirror to our anxiety, our fear, or concern about other forms of life doesn't, isn't it? In many ways, just the mirror, just as the new movies of the 60s were a mirror, or a reflection of changing cultural, political realities of that age.

00:43:31 David Thomson: I think this, I think what happened in the late 60s with film was directly because the old empire had broken down, the studio system had lost its power and its authority, its control of the outlets where films were shown, where a whole generation of movie stars, producers, and directors was dying off, and suddenly young people who had felt they could never get into the movies got into the movies and started doing difficult, odd, dangerous things that can happen at any one time, and I think that it would not surprise me at all if within the next few years epic films start to be made on the iPhone, and they are not released theatrically. Theatrical film seems to me to be an antique form now. I think we're going to have new ways of seeing films and new places for seeing them, and I think that there's a generation of young people who are hip to a lot of what I'm talking about. They feel they know how much the nature of the medium is dictating the messages that films are offering. This is what Marshall McLuhan said a long time ago. He came into fashion, he went out of fashion. I think he's going to come back because I think he put his finger on an essential point, that cinema is so profound, so sensational, so much fun, that you need to understand the medium to get a grasp on what is being said.

00:45:25 Andrew Keen: You watch a lot of films, you still write about them. Do you ever watch films on your iPhone.

00:45:31 David Thomson: Absolutely.

00:45:33 Andrew Keen: —rather than the cinema?

00:45:34 David Thomson: If I can't get to see a thing in the cinema, I mean, a lot of old films I will watch on my iPhone, because YouTube has them, and it's convenient, and the image on my iPhone is beautiful, you know. I read [unclear]—

00:45:54 Andrew Keen: Watching in the bath?

00:45:55 David Thomson: I haven't watched in the bath, because I don't take a bath. I take—

00:45:59 Andrew Keen: Direction [unclear] in the garden, and you're sitting outside?

00:46:02 David Thomson: I have done that. Yes, yes, certainly. No, I think I think films on the iPhone are great and perfectly okay, and I have no problem with that.

00:46:13 Andrew Keen: Although you do speak very sympathetically in this book about the experience of being in a theater, oh yeah, a room full of strangers.

00:46:24 David Thomson: I was a child who went to theaters that held 2000 people, and it was 2000 packed, because you couldn't get in sometimes, and I treasure the fact that I grew up with that experience of watching films in a mass of strangers and a mass of cigarette smoke in the air, and that's gone as a big thing. Occasionally you can be in a crowded cinema, but not that often. I learned a lot about the nature of the medium from those days. It's, it's changed, and I don't feel any sort of innate disapproval of people watching on their iPhone in bed at night. I think a tremendous amount can be gained from watching it in that way. It's just it's a different experience, and there again, that is something I would talk to kids about in school, what is the difference between seeing a film at the at the Granada, Tooting — 3,000 seats packed, and watching it alone on your iPhone or on your television screen, same film, different experience, and I think we need to talk about that, and talk about it with people who are young enough to have a chance of growing up better than we've grown up.

00:48:00 Andrew Keen: David, this movie, not this movie, this... this interview will be about 50 or 60 minutes, and I'll probably run it through AI, and they'll come up with some highlights, and I'll put those highlights out on YouTube and TikTok and all the other social media platforms, is that kosher?

00:48:20 David Thomson: What do you mean, kosher?

00:48:21 Andrew Keen: You know what I mean by—

00:48:22 David Thomson: No, I don't.

00:48:23 Andrew Keen: Well, I mean, is it—

00:48:25 David Thomson: Should you be doing it that way?

00:48:27 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, well, or let me redefine the question, is it okay for people to be looking at 30/22 [unclear] clips of The Godfather or Disclosure Day or Vertigo on TikTok? Is it okay to remix them with your own music, your own language?

00:48:48 David Thomson: I think it's, I think it's very dangerous. I think that I'm prepared to trust your taste and your tact, but equally I think that I should be as aware of and as critical of your commercial situation in doing this, as you are yourself, you, I don't know what your commercial situation is, but anyone—

00:49:18 Andrew Keen: That's the problem.

00:49:20 David Thomson: Anyone using this kind of equipment is in a commercial situation, and you've got an audience, and you want to reach the audience to make a living. Totally legitimate. I write books to do the same. I think it's, I think it just behooves us to know what our situation is, not to take it for granted. The trouble of one of the troubles about watching advertisements is that there is a kind of, it's a kind of assumption that a wicked, dishonest God made them all. We know ads are fake, we know they are dangerous, we know they are not truthful, but like the movies, they tend to be very well made and very appealing, and we all have our favorite ads from our history, and I think we just need to be prepared to be critical. Nothing is more important in what I think I'm doing than to say to people, well, I know you had fun. And I had fun too, but can we analyze that fun and can we get something interesting and informative and shaping about ourselves out of that argument. That's really what I do. That's what this book is about. It's what teaching was about when I taught.

00:50:49 Andrew Keen: One final attempt to defend Hollywood, and I'm not really defending this, as I said, someone has to here.

00:50:56 David Thomson: When you say defend Hollywood, what do you mean by Hollywood? You know, Hollywood's not there.

00:51:02 Andrew Keen: No, no, I know.

00:51:03 David Thomson: So, what do you mean by it?

00:51:04 Andrew Keen: What I mean is one way of defending the movies against your critique that has created this sense of unreality in America, which has led to Donald Trump. Again, maybe I shouldn't be using the word Hollywood. The movies, American movies, have been warning us about a character like Trump for generations. One can think of being there, one can think of all the president's men, one can think of network, so movie makers, let's take the H word out, let's leave out Hollywood, but movie makers, directors, actors can say to you, well, David Thomson, you're saying this is created with this unreality, which has led to Trump, but we've been literally shouting from the rooftops in movies like Network that this is about to happen.

00:51:52 David Thomson: You're right in a certain way. I could see that point. It's certainly possible for individual movies to make big critical points about what's going on. They have done that. I don't think that absolves them from the charge that the medium as a whole has sold a pack of lies to make money, and you can't do that decade after decade without a damage seeping in that is all the greater because you barely notice it.

00:52:32 Andrew Keen: Well. Finally, David, I can't resist this, and you can dodge these questions if you want, but you are, as I said at the beginning, perhaps the great authority on movies. You've written so many books about them. You're encyclopedic on every level. The New York Times recently, of course, July 4 weekend coming up recently ran a piece about what is the definitive movie about America. They didn't ask you, but let me ask you, what do you think, for better or worse, the definitive movie about America is? Is it The Godfather?

00:53:06 David Thomson: No, I would say for me it's still Citizen Kane, and what puts the Citizen Kane feeling in a different category from The Godfather is that Welles absolutely understood and was intensely critical of the personality that needed power and authority, and he was afraid of it. I think that the sensibility that made the Godfather films cannot overcome its attraction to that authority. There's a reverence for dark power in the Godfather films, whereas in Kane, I think there is all through the film a terrible ruefulness about what happens to people who seek power. So, for me, it is still the film.

00:54:08 Andrew Keen: And finally, David, I'm probably going to put this out on a couple of days after July 4, but we're speaking on July 3. What are you going to do July 4? You're going to be celebrating what you've lived your life in America, your narrative, your personal narrative, when the movies are bound up with one another. How are you going to be spending July 4? You're going to be celebrating, or are you going to be mourning?

00:54:33 David Thomson: Oh, no, no, no. I mean, the one thing I know my wife and I are going to be doing, and our children will not be with us. We will go walking on Fillmore Street for the jazz festival and the cookout that occupies about 10 blocks, and that's a part of Fillmore where we have lived well longer than I've lived anywhere else, and the jazz is not top line, but it's jazz, and jazz is for me one of the great American achievements. I love it. I love the feeling of the crowd out there. Be a very mixed crowd, but it'll be a peaceful crowd, I think. Think so, that's the one thing I know we'll be doing, and then when the sun goes down, or just around that time, we're going to be watching the movie. I don't know what it is now, but that's what it—

00:55:44 Andrew Keen: Probably should be Citizen Kane, shouldn't it?

00:55:46 David Thomson: Well, I, you know, the thing about Kane is I know it very well, and I, I have been known to doze off in Citizen Kane, because I know it too well. So, I know it'll be, it'll be something different. I do not have great expectations for it, great hopes for it, but if I could get it, I would watch The Odyssey.

00:56:15 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I'm seeing that next week. Have you seen it? You haven't seen it.

00:56:18 David Thomson: No, and you know I'm eager to see it.

00:56:22 Andrew Keen: And we'll have to do some more. We'll have to do some more shows on movies today. Yes.

00:56:27 David Thomson: Okay.

00:56:27 Andrew Keen: I think one thing that we can say for sure about David Thomson's new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light, is that you won't fall asleep reading it. It is a revisionist history of movies, and David Thomson is continually revising himself and his take on movies, which is why he's such an important writer and commentator. David, happy Independence Day. Real honor to have you on the show. Wonderful conversation.

00:56:50 David Thomson: Great, great pleasure to be on your show. And thank you for asking me.

00:56:57 Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms, and I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.