DISASTER MON AMOUR

The veteran film critic considers Trump-era calamities through the filter of movies.

Thomson is a rigorous critic—see A Biographical Dictionary of Film or nearly any other of his many books—but also an idiosyncratic one, so this book is too slippery to be considered simply as a study of the intersection of film and Trumpish politics. Think of it more as a series of impressions of how film connects with and diverges from reality—and why we take pleasure in cinematic catastrophes while averting our gaze from genuine ones. One chapter weaves observations of a Laurel & Hardy film with Battleship Potemkin, balancing the slapstick nature of our political moment with its dead seriousness. In another, Thomson explores the guilty pleasure of the slick CGI disaster film San Andreas, exemplifying the “new giddy norm” of films that fantasize about mass destruction. Perhaps, he suggests, the way movies put a pleasant glow around disaster made us vulnerable to the rise of Trump, "the worst personal disaster this country has ever faced.” (By this reckoning, Meryl Streep’s star turn in the Holocaust drama Sophie’s Choice was a moral error: "The camps were not an occasion for glorious acting.") Thomson is erudite on how disaster is presented in films like The Road, The Birds, Contagion, and Don’t Look Now, and he’s especially engaging on an episode of The Crown about a 1966 Welsh coal-town disaster that killed dozens of children. All exemplify the “erotic charge in delivered disaster" and the ways "we want our fears of physical ruin rendered as something so beautiful we feel no pain." However, while Thomson’s concern is palpable, he never really arrives at a thesis. His riffs on Rachel Maddow, Covid-19, Goya, and photojournalism are lovely in themselves, but they read like questions anxiously in search of answers.

A cri de coeur about art’s struggle to keep up with reality.