Murder and the Movies

June 1, 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.