Murder and the Movies
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
How many acts of murder have each of us followed on a screen? What does that say about us? Do we remain law-abiding citizens who wouldn’t hurt a fly?
Film historian David Thomson, known for wit and subversiveness, leads us into this very delicate subject. While unpacking classics such as Seven, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Strangers on a Train, The Conformist, The Godfather, and The Shining, he offers a disconcerting sense of how the form of movies makes us accomplices in this sinister narrative process.
By turns seductive and astringent, very serious and suddenly hilarious, Murder and the Movies admits us into what Thomson calls “a warped triangle”: the creator working out a compelling death; the killer doing his and her best; and the entranced reader and spectator trying to cling to life and a proper sense of decency.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Film critic Thomson devotes an unsatisfying treatise to the theme of cinematic homicide and the guilty pleasures that audiences derive from it. He ponders issues of responsibility tied to the collective infatuation with fictional murder are moviegoers responsible for cinema's obsession with blood and death, or has Hollywood foisted this upon a captive audience? This topic is partly spun off from a chapter in his 2015 book of essays, How to Watch a Movie, which indulged in a similar philosophical bent. Here, Thomson plows through classics including Full Metal Jacket, Psycho, The Shining, and Taxi Driver trying to pin down what makes viewers willing to watch, and even identify with, murderers in movies. Unfortunately, Thomson's writing is short on sustained reasoning, favoring pseudo-profound aphorisms ("We love life, but we gather to contemplate death") that don't add up to a sustained argument. Thomson also puts more credence in the connection between on-screen and real-world violence, and the suggestion that the former gives rise to the latter, than most readers will. He further attempts to link a widespread American experience of loneliness, "in a country that sings all the time about fame," to the fascination with violence, but this idea also remains vague. Thomson's diffuse work never coalesces into anything resembling a thesis.
