Spoiler: Movie Critic Devoured by Trump Derangement Syndrome

Trump is the bad guy.

I just saved you $30 and 368 pages of reading.

David Thomson is a well-known movie critic, the author of The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition. His new book is A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies.

Thomson is a unique writer, combining sharp prose, funny and iconoclastic opinions, and an encyclopedic knowledge of motion pictures. In A Sudden Flicker of Light, however, what we get is a strange, discursive, and ultimately sickening book, the point of which is hard to grasp until you reach the end. Thomson himself admits that the reader might be wondering what the point of all his ramblings is in this work. It is then that he admits that his own editor advised him not to unveil the big reveal until near the end of the book. 

Then we get the shocker: Movies have made people susceptible to fantasy and vulnerable to the evil spell of one Donald J. Trump. In other words, Thomson, who spent his entire career writing about movies, now thinks that movies may be a malevolent force because they made us passive and receptive to bad ideas, thus bringing us President Trump.