Murder and the Movies

by David Thomson

Overview

A renowned movie critic on film’s treatment of one of mankind’s darkest behaviors: murder
 
“[Thomson’s] analysis of death in Hitchcock movies is gorgeous. His restlessness is palpable. There is an anxiety in this brief, hurried book that suits these political and medical times.”—Lisa Schwarzbaum, New York Times Book Review
 
Included in the New York Times Book Review’s “Best Books to Give” holiday list, 2020
 
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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300220018
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,064,457
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

06/01/2020

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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

[Thomson’s] analysis of death in Hitchcock movies is gorgeous. His restlessness is palpable. There is an anxiety in this brief, hurried book that suits these political and medical times.”—Lisa Schwarzbaum, New York Times Book Review

“It is a pleasure to follow David Thomson through a century’s harvest of movies featuring what Raymond Chandler called the ‘simple art of murder,’ and other kinds of violent death. . . . He successfully throws revealing light on the ways that representations of that hideous crime have captivated and spellbound its movie audiences.”—Lars Ole Sauerberg, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews

“Thomson’s dive into dependency of movies on murder leads to a surprisingly quiet tone, a conversation of lowered voices: a sense of film enacting some fated, circular history.”—Greil Marcus

“Thomson, one of the world’s leading film critics and historians, in his polished, recognizable style (dancing writing, provocative gestures, first person participation), has produced a slim, smart, readable volume on murder, movies, and society.”—Jonathan Kirshner, author of Hollywood’s Last Golden Age

“Completely unpredictable, always surprising, always deeply engaging, and always very entertaining. You never know where Thomson may take you. You just know that wherever he does take you will be a wonderful place he will let you discover for yourself.”—Richard Burt, University of Florida

From the Publisher

07/24/2020

Thomson (Sleeping with Strangers) presents murder in the movies as a triangle connecting the on-screen killer, the storyteller, and the audience. Murder is objectively bad, but why is our entertainment infused with it? The audience bears the brunt of his moral hand-wringing, but Thomson is more concerned than outraged by the pervasiveness and appeal of killing. He himself is complicit, having witnessed an estimated 150,000 cinematic slayings. Dampening his critique is his waving off of Kevin Spacey's, Roman Polanski's, and Woody Allen's off-screen behavior; he doesn't expect artists to be good people. Reading like a book-length essay, the work contains cogent insight into filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, interjects thought experiments (a disturbing one explores a hypothetical scenario in which The Godfather's Michael Corleone bludgeons Kay to death), and pauses for reflections (discussing Joker with his son). VERDICT Thomson leads readers on a meandering path, never successfully reaching a conclusion. However, the journey isn't unpleasant and Thomson is a reservoir of film knowledge.—Terry Bosky, Madison, WI

Library Journal