Campbell Andrews’s Reviews > Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire > Status Update

(also, I know I’ve conflated Thomson w/ Bordwell)

You buried the lede, David. sheesh.

about 80% of the time he should replace “gay” with “ambiguous”

he’s better on #metoo but he’s ignorant of the pervasiveness of porn

Bordwell invokes today’s sexual mores, but he has otherwise forgotten about sin; this, among other deficits, blinds him to the lasting power of the gangster film. He imposes a sexual reading that diminishes camaraderie and plain ol’ friendship.

oh wow is he ever bad on Scorsese

but then this: "Most of us lead lives of limitation, hardship, disappointment, and a lack of glory. So sex can be our relief and release—we feel it's what we deserve and event the best time we will ever have. We have glorified it as a flag of freedom." This is exACTLy right; and yet he does not even imagine it can be otherwise. there is a moral hole at the center of his vision.

Bordwell asserts the movies give us “a deeper sense of our reality but a growing uncertainty over our psychic integrity” this is bullshit, albeit fertilizing; has anyone ever engaged with their senses, over the course of their life, and not been simultaneously enraptured and disoriented?

There's enough trenchant insight and historical recovery to overcome the ridiculous stuff— like Thomson positing the Oceans movies are gay. first, who cares if they are? second, on the evidence that they feature men who admire each other? Thomson, like our reductive dominant culture, assumes "gay" now means "Men who aren't f*cking women."

Thomson is good because he makes moviegoing personal. but he often misreads culture because he takes too short a view. trends don’t make civilizations; sad as it makes me too, the movies now look like a blip. a glorious blip.