Book Review: "Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire"
David Thomson's new book is an engaging and insightful, though also deeply flawed, look at how film shapes our sexuality
I have a confession to make. Up until I recently read David Thomson’s Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire, I’d never read anything by the man commonly acknowledged as one of the greatest and most perceptive living film critics. It wasn’t out of any purposeful avoidance; it’s just that film scholarship and mainstream film criticism seem to exist in two separate universes, and rarely do the twain meet (at least not in my graduate program). However, I’ve recently made a commitment to reading more of the latter, and this book seemed to be a good place to start.
Now that I’ve finished with it, I’m very unsure of my feelings.
On the one hand, it’s full of sharp, snappy, punchy writing; there’s no doubt that Thomson knows how to craft a sentence that reaches out and grabs you. There were times when I just wanted to sit with his writing and appreciate how lyrical it was. It is, in short, a simple pleasure to read. It’s clear that Thomson’s reputation as an incisive film critic--someone who both loves the medium but isn’t afraid to point out its flaws and its shortcomings. There were times when I was reading the book that I found myself nodding along with his commentary.
On the other it is, frankly, a mess. Critics have noted that it feels as if the book is two separate monographs smashed together, and I think there’s a lot to this criticism. Sleeping with Strangers veers wildly between two discrete (but connected) areas of interest: the gay sensibility of film and the ways in which film structures heterosexual desire. Obviously, there are connections between these two phenomena, but Thomson doesn’t really do enough to help us see them for ourselves.
The bigger problem, from my point of view, is that he relies so much on gossip, innuendo, and rumor as the foundation of his analysis. There were times while I was reading this book that I started to wonder whether it was ever going to rise above the level of being a glorified gossip rag. Time and again, Thomson engages in a sort of prurient speculation about every conceivable star’s sexuality. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the study of classical Hollywood knows that there’s quite a lot of interpretive hay to be made around the gossip surrounding movie stars of that golden age of filmmaking, but the danger of indulging in those rumors, and building an entire argument around them, is that the whole intellectual and interpretive structure starts to feel very unsound.
I also found myself by turns amused and bemused about the experience of reading a straight septuagenarian writing about the queerness of movies. As both a queer man and a film scholar, I’ve known about this stuff for quite a long time, and I couldn’t help but wonder where he’s been the last forty years. This is not to say that I disagree with his conclusions; there is something decidedly queer about even the straighest of movies. Nor do I disagree with him that the movies have played an outsized role in (de)forming how we think of desire, sex, and our relations with one another. However, all of this feels to me like a retread of the last several decades of feminist and queer film scholarship.
Sleeping with Strangers is emblematic, I think, of the divide between scholarly and popular writing about film. Anyone who has spent any time immersed in the world of queer film scholarship knows very well that there’s a gay sensibility or a gay subtext to most of the great films of classical Hollywood--whether that’s Rebel without a Cause or Red River--though whether or not it stems from the creators themselves is often up for debate. Reading Thomson, though, you’d never know that there’s literally an entire field of scholarly endeavor devoted to his key subject. The fact that there are no notes to speak of makes me wonder just how much preparatory work Thomson did. Coming from a scholarly tradition that emphasizes the absolute importance of acknowledging the work of others--sometimes to an absurd degree, it’s true--I found this jarring, even for a work that’s meant to be read by film buffs rather than academics. This isn’t entirely Thomson’s fault, of course, but it is rather irritating to see this rather unoriginal work get so much adoration (not to mention was almost certainly a hefty advance), when the work of many film scholars goes largely unread and unappreciated by both the general public and a large segment of the cinephile community.
More distressing is Thomson’s discussion of sex itself. To be blunt, it’s rather creepy to read an old man’s salivating over women’s bodies on-screen, and it’s equally disconcerting to read his ruminations on the physicality of sex. There’s also far too much hand-wringing about the possibility that the films produced by Harvey Weinstein or those starring Kevin Spacey might be consigned to the wastebin of history (a very unlikely possibility). Like many men of his generation, Thomson is both bemused and alarmed by the Me Too movement and its impact on Hollywood filmmaking and the way that we look back at the history of the movies. It’s very clear that a lot of his consternation stems from his friendship with the filmmaker James Toback, who was accused by several women of sexual harassment. Thomson has a very strange, and off putting, digression on the subject of his friend, and though it occurs near the end of the book, it threatens to poison the rest of it.
Overall, I’d say that Sleeping with Strangers is an intriguing little book. You get the sense that Thomson really is trying to get to something profound about the nature of desire, and queerness, in the movies. While he never quite gets there, and while the book never quite attains the level of intellectual greatness that it’s clearly aspiring to attain, he at least deserves a measure of credit for trying.