All the World’s a Screen (anti-theatricality’s eternal returns) (cutting up reality)

David Thomson has a new book out, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which he convinces himself that the artform to which he has dedicated his entire life is actually corrupting civilisation and profoundly responsible for the current political hellscape. 

In a New York Times profile titled "Did Movies Ruin Everything?," A.O. Scott, himself a distinguished film critic, gives the nutshell: 

"According to Thomson, movies — especially American movies — have whitewashed history, glorified violence and made role models out of thugs, narcissists and murderers. The consequences shape our public life. Donald Trump “is our movie man,” Thomson writes, meaning that Trump’s presidency, which Thomson sees as a catastrophe, was foretold and to some extent made possible by Hollywood....Turning our humanity upside down and our values inside out is what good movies do. It’s what movies do best. A Sudden Flicker of Light trains its gaze... on certain indelible characters — Charles Foster Kane, Michael Corleone, Hannibal Lecter — who have become icons of charismatic degeneracy. Their ambiguous collective legacy is summed up in the book’s verdict on “The Godfather”: “So much that is grand — and too much that is a disgrace.”

Scott zooms in on key quotes from the book: “attention has become infernal, hopeless, yet unstoppable”...  “we let the lifelike distract us from life” ... "We are no longer the selves we hoped to be. We are not exactly alive any longer.”  And he also highlights a distinction between film / cinema / the movies (with the definite article) and Thomson's use of the word "movie" as an open-ended noun for a blurring of reality and unreality, a sort of indeterminate and borderless state that enfolds the entire social fabric, as opposed to a discrete unit of entertainment: 

"Movie”... refers not to an individual film but to the mode of cognition, the way of seeing and imagining the world, that the medium has imposed on us. Whether or not we go to the movies, most of us live in what he sometimes calls “the condition of movie,” a state of perpetual fantasy and denial."

Thomson is a learned man (not just about his chosen special subject,....which anyway touches on almost everything in the world, the other artforms, human history etc... to write about film with his level of penetration is to write about all things). So is A.O. Scott. So I'm surprised that either of them think these ideas - this reflex of distrust and disquiet - are new. 

"Movie," as Thomson uses it, serves the same function as the Spectacle, as theorized and denounced by Guy Debord and the Situationists. The angle of Situationist concern, though, was less about corruption of the moral core in the audience and more about an alleged passivity and isolation induced by spectactorship (of film, TV, sports, etc) (a questionable idea for many reasons, this passivity and isolation). 

In his later Comments on the Society of Spectacle,   though, Debord's emphasis did shift to the idea of contemporary life as saturated with lies, fictions, propaganda, multiple simultaneous “competing conspiracies in favor of the status quo”.

"Movie" is also similar in tone and tenor to the perspective of Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image, widely read on its 1961 publication and partly inspired by the election campaign of John F. Kennedy. 

Boorstin railed against “the menace of unreality” creeping into every area of American national life and mass culture.  He diagnosed a social-cultural malaise of “nothingness,” in which “the vacuum of our experience is actually made emptier by our anxious straining with mechanical devices to fill it artificially.”  Television, advertising and political theater is more the focus of The Image than Hollywood but to the extent that it is about the world seen through screens, the critique is close to Thomson's "movie" and is still absurdly applicable to our present. Indeed deep fakes and AI bring a dystopian supercharge to Boorstin's warnings about “a new elusiveness, iridescence, and ambiguity” contaminating everyday life.  

But these kinds of anxieties go even further back: there's a current of anti-mimesis running through Western Civilisation all the way back to Plato.  

A particularly vivid eruption came with the Puritan vilification of the theatre. Puritan tracts denouncing the play houses rehearse many of the fears  and doubts that afflict Thomson in A Sudden Flicker of Light. The way stage plays make audiences identify with the strongest characters on the stage, who are usually the most evil.  The way that theatre stirs up violent emotions and irrational passions - and alluringly depict sins and vices of all kinds.  The simple unreality of it all.  During Cromwell's rule, the playhouses were actually closed down and theatre went into the underground, with covert performances in private houses. 

Still I should probably hold off a bit until I've actually read A Sudden Flicker!

For if anyone could squeeze out some interesting new thoughts out of these age-old reflexes, it's Thomson. 

I've had moments like this myself where I've decided that rock music (and its inheritor rap) is the  exaltation of selfishness, recklessness, egomania, impulse, short-term gratification, waste, destruction and risky behaviours etc. And speculated that some future world society organized around egalitarian and conservationist principles, zero growth, duty now for the future, custodianship of the Earth, etc etc will look back on the entire era of youth culture / pop music as a fever of decadence - a disease of late-stage capitalism.  I too have had moments of falling out of love with the genre - or at least there's been the onset of deeply conflicted shame, an inability to reconcile my love of the Stooges, punk, trap, etc with the fully grown-up, responsible, parental, civic-minded person I am now.

Andrew Keen has an interview with David Thomson at Keen On

 

Right from the start, Thomson uses the word "spectators" repeatedly.  

And Andrew Keen says at one point "David, we could have been having this conversation in the Sixties."

Thomson's comments about the violence of the cut in cinema seems again like a belated misgiving to have about a medium that is entirely constituted in editing, composed out of discontinuity, non-linear jumps... 

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Related to this theme is the new book Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber.  Which I do have in front of me and will be reading soon.

In a book promoting piece via her main outlet The Atlantic, Garber claims that "with the rise of screen culture, all the world has stage fright".

The beta-blocker propranolol has been a mainstay of American medicine since the 1960s, when it was regularly prescribed as a first-line defense against hypertension, arrhythmia, and other cardiovascular problems. Recent years, though, have seen a boom in the medication’s prescription rates—in part because as the drug regulates the heart, it also settles the nerves. Off-label, propranolol is used to calm the assorted storms of stage fright: the sweaty palms, the belly churn, the racing heart. Even professional performers have publicly alluded to using it. Robert Downey Jr., accepting an award at the 2024 Golden Globes, said casually, “I took a beta-blocker, so this is going to be a breeze.” Last fall, a People magazine headline asked, “Why Is Everyone Suddenly Taking the Decades-Old Chill Pill Propranolol?". 

One answer is that stage fright, in the world shaped by the internet, is no longer limited to the stage. Smartphones and the social-media platforms installed on them—portable movie studios in miniature—have transformed their users into life’s cinematographers, directors, producers, and distributors. Those capabilities are at this point familiar. But in ways that are steadily becoming more clear, they are also transforming relationships—adding new uncertainty to what were once mundane interactions, tweaking people’s nervous systems, unsteadying their very sense of self.

"They have brought new vulnerabilities and, for many people, new apprehension to the simple act of existing in public, where anyone is at risk of being ensnared in another person’s lens. You might be taken out of context. You might be cast as the star—or as an extra, or as scenery—in someone else’s show. You might be edited, turned into a hero or a villain or a joke. No medication can cure the broader societal ailment: Mass self-consciousness is ascendant. Performance anxiety is becoming a way of life.

She harps on about a term that I also have noticed as indicative of the times: "main character" or "main character energy" (versus non player character).

"Words once reserved for describing dramas on the stage or screen have been repurposed to describe consumers’ ordinary realities....  People now narrate their personal “character arcs” and bemoan those who have “lost the plot” or been “canceled'...  Main-character energy is, in that sense, a turn of phrase that hints at a widespread condition: the ever-more-inescapable demands of performance.

"... Consider the ubiquity of the word performative—which, in its modern use, has come to serve as a description and an all-purpose insult....

" Invoking performativity, people now blithely reject other people’s actions—and, by extension, other people’s claims about their own lives—as fakery made in the service of the show....

"The main character, after all, has one job: to put on a good show. But when the show never ends, the need to stage-manage doesn’t either. And that can be exhausting."

My kids just told me a couple of young people expressions that fit this context:

“Last night was a movie” (to describe a memorably epic night out)

“Screenager” (although that is probably more a journalistic or concerned parental term than one used by actual kids)

Going back to the Thomson critique and its perennial nature, Megan Garber herself invokes Erving Goffman's classic book  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - which was published in 1956 - and she could easily have also mentioned Daniel J. Boorstin and The Image. (And may well do in the book itself - irritatingly it doesn't have an index so I can't tell)

Warhol - another figure from 60 years ago! - is also mentioned: "Celebrities, consequently, are what Andy Warhol once called “half people”: flesh-and-blood humans who function, for their admirers and detractors, not as facts but as fictions. They also function as images to be read, analyzed, and judged."

Crikey, an even earlier figure is cited: "the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, writing around the turn of the 20th century, described the rise of the “looking-glass self,” the tendency to perceive one’s self through other people’s reactions. Phone-based life has made Cooley’s concept literal—and immediate. Never before have we seen ourselves so incessantly. Never has self-consciousness about the way we present been so intense."

Garber talks about how expensive this performance oriented way of living is: cosmetic surgery, the return of sunbed tanning, grooming products, supplements, gyms, looksmaxxing…

Most striking to me is the return of false eyelashes (I went to the doctor recently and every single young woman working at reception had false lashes). 

But then again that too was a mid-Century thing. It was also a time when it was quite common for women to have a wardrobe of wigs. 

In truth, fakery and image-projection, costuming and extreme cosmetics - it's been around forever.  Keeping up appearances, what Goffman calls "impression management" is hardly a recent invention.

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A different kind of "violence of the cut"- Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker on the sinister miracles performed by "aesthetic surgeons" today

"The subtle results of the new facelifts conceal serious invasion—hours of slicing and manipulating fascia, muscle, and fat. A writer for New York magazine observed a deep-plane facelift and described the surgeon’s fingers sliding under his patient’s cheek: “Once all the necessary ligaments have been cut, the features on top move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask.

"This violence produces an outcome that is almost supernatural. Lindsay Lohan, a totemic millennial celebrity, reappeared in 2025 out of relative obscurity with the skin of a toddler, the brow of a person who had never felt worried—a face just like her old one, if it had been assembled by blushing angels at sunrise that very day."

Tolentino contrasts that with the much-discussed Mar-a-Lago face aka MAGlamA - where the point of the work is to be visible and unsubtle, flaunting the expense and drawing attention to the extremity of the modification. 

"Once, plastic surgery seemed garish, its own obvious signs a kind of cost that people paid for refusing to appear old. This blunt artificiality has not vanished completely; it is present, for instance, in Mar-a-Lago Face, a hyper-exaggerated look common among the women of the second Trump Administration, accompanied by a makeup style that signals a lack of interest in the natural. (Like the Administration, Mar-a-Lago Face locates power in the spectacle of dismissing reality altogether.) 

"But the most expensive plastic surgery today is seamless, vaguely Gnostic, suggestive of complex secret knowledge."

Talking of "practical magic", saw this trailer at the movie theater the other night (we were there to see The Invite, recommended until it craps towards the end) and I thought that it resembled a convocation of plastic surgery survivors

Another interesting bit in the Tolentino piece also shows how perennial these practices and the anxiety / contempt they stir: 

"The current media environment is so grim that critique of anything has become radically attenuated. About two decades ago, the feminist website Jezebel, in one of its first posts, offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could provide the original, unaltered version of a recent glossy-magazine cover photo. The images of women in magazines were “essentially female forgeries,” Jezebel argued, “what with all the computer-artistry involving airbrushing, contouring, and, sometimes, outright body-part swapping.” A few months later, Jezebel published unretouched photographs of the country singer Faith Hill, contrasting them with the image that ran on the cover of Redbook, in which Hill’s body had been thinned, her eyes tweaked, her ordinary lines and wrinkles erased....

The following years have entailed chauvinistic backlash and the disappearance of women’s media. The feminist sites have largely shut down, and physical media is vanishing; many of the magazines that Jezebel targeted—Redbook, InStyle, Marie Claire, Glamour, Self—have ceased printing or gone entirely defunct. (The thought of a website criticizing a magazine for Photoshop is almost unbearably quaint.) These were flawed but robust publications, staffed by professionals in dialogue with their audience about the state of women’s lives. They have given way to Instagram and TikTok, where the P.R. operations of celebrities and influencers can propagate the same aspirational imagery without dialogue or substance or investment in anything, really, other than algorithmic success.

The Jezebel critique reminded me of something from a couple of decades before that - the Miss America protest of 1968 staged by the women's liberation group New York Radical Women, in which cosmetics and other feminine accoutrements were thrown in the Freedom Trash Can outside the venue, and later the ceremony itself was disrupted

 It will get worse:

"Kids are growing up at a time when the beauty ideal is upheld, more and more, by completely artificial women—flawless physical specimens generated by A.I., placed in real-world scenarios, in images and video clips, to fool the horny and gullible and torment the insecure. (Recently, a bunch of such videos, purporting to capture spontaneous footage of insanely hot girls in the stands at baseball games, went viral.) Instagram demanded a certain sort of woman and then produced her, deranging broad swaths of the population in the process. A.I., which delivers an experience of absolute plasticity, and which builds on the premise that what is specifically human is inferior, for being imperfect, will do worse."

Perhaps though there will be a Puritan backlash to the natural look. Indeed I can feel my own aesthetic attractions shifting - in reaction to the age of lip plumping, bronzing, eyebrow sculpting etc-  towards thinner lips, pallor, the fainter eyebrow...  

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A New York magazine piece claims that MAGA will lose interest as Trump's knack for Spectacle falters: 

Hours before Donald Trump addressed the nation on its 250th anniversary, the National Mall was in chaos. A storm was on the way, and law enforcement had ordered the MAGA faithful to evacuate — a process that did not go smoothly. People had waited in the extreme heat for hours to celebrate Trump and America; now they argued with the Secret Service and chanted “USA, USA” out of fury.

By now the mess is familiar. The Great American State Fair attracted small crowds; some states even declined to participate. Bret Michaels backed out, and so did Martina McBride. A mock-up of Trump’s triumphal arch oozed a puslike substance, and a robot dog danced alone in the mud. Nearby, the reflecting pool sat green and full of algae, lethal to ducklings and irresistible to protesters, who demonstrated next to it in costume. Two days before the storm, a portion of the stage broke off and nearly struck dancers who were in the middle of a rehearsal.

Trump’s tastes have always been entertaining, if garish, writes Sarah Jones. Lately, though, the seams are fraying. “If Trump can’t throw a good party or make everything golden, what’s left? Loyalists have leaned on MAGA for glitz and a little excitement. Without spectacle, the future of the movement is in jeopardy.”

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Lindsey Graham was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made. - Steve Schmidt