Disaster Mon Amour

by David Thomson

Overview

A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world
 
“In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends—how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original.”—Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist
 
“Erudite. . . . Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art’s struggle to keep up with reality.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its aftereffects.
 
Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the intimate Don’t Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal why we love watching disaster unfold—but only if it happens to others.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300246940
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	01/25/2022
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Thomson is one of the great living authorities on movies. He has written more than twenty books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Murder and the Movies, and biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles.

Table of Contents

Overture for Two Staircases 1

In San Andreas 15

Vag 35

File Under "End of the World" 41

In Aberfan 67

Onlookerism 79

All the News 91

Pandemia Pandemonium 105

Missteps in the Dark 121

Across the Street 133

The Numbers 143

Our Road 155

"Fuck Off, Disaster!" 169

Necessity 181

The Table 187

Acknowledgments 199

Index 203

Editorial Reviews

Erudite.”—Publishers Weekly

“Erudite. . . . Engaging. . . . A cri de coeur about art’s struggle to keep up with reality.”—Kirkus Reviews

“In this brilliant book, David Thomson tells the story of how we came to make disaster and catastrophe our best friends—how we let terror cocoon and take over our imaginations to avoid seeing the things that really frighten us. Riveting and totally original.”—Adam Curtis, BBC filmmaker and political journalist

“David Thomson is, I think, the best writer on film in our time. He is our most argumentative and trustworthy historian of the screen.”—Michael Ondaatje, author of The Cat’s Table

“With bracing prose and intensity of feeling, this book will rivet any serious reader concerned about the world—climate change, COVID, war, and other menaces. A grim but burnished book.”—Diane Johnson, author of Lorna Mott Comes Home

“David Thomson’s Disaster Mon Amour is a piñata of literary pleasures: acid thoughts, film lore, historical meditations, and astute observation, especially about the culture’s gourmandizing of despair. His high-stepping book is informed, alert, full of fury and fun.”—John Lahr, author of Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

“Any book that takes Laurel and Hardy and Rachel Maddow as prophets of doom—and makes you want to see a Laurel and Hardy movie with Rachel Maddow as much as you want to see Laurel and Hardy as guests on her show—is going to be read at least twice.”—Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train

From the Publisher

2021-10-26
The veteran film critic considers Trump-era calamities through the filter of movies.

Thomson is a rigorous critic—see A Biographical Dictionary of Filmor 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 Choicewas 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 Crownabout 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.

Kirkus Reviews