Sleeping With Strangers

How the Movies Shaped Desire

By: David Thomson

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Paperback | 14 January 2020

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368 Pages

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20.1 x 13.1 x 2.1

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From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, an original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies, and of how actors and actresses on screen feed our desire.

Movies can make us want what we cannot have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and memoir, David Thomson examines how film has found the fault lines in traditional masculinity and helped to point the way toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person desiring others. Ranging from advertising to pornography, Rudolph Valentino to Moonlight, Rock Hudson to Call Me By Your Name, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Phantom Thread, Sleeping With Strangers shows us the art and the artists we love under a new light. Here Thomson illuminates the way in which film as art, entertainment, and business has been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. And he makes us see how the way we watch our movies is a kind of training for how we try to live.

Industry Reviews

"David Thomson is the finest film critic at work today." --John Banville, The Wall Street Journal

"[Sleeping with Strangers] contain[s] more original insights, provocative asides and thought-inducing speculations than several volumes of a less talented writer's efforts . . . Thomson, a stylist extraordinaire, has written an unaccountable and irresistible book." --The New York Times Book Review

"[An] ambitious and feverish exploration of sex and sexuality on celluloid, and of the way that Hollywood's vision of desire has seeped into the spaces behind and beyond the camera." --The New Yorker

"A typically concentrated paragraph of David Thomson offers more fervent ideas and intellectual sustenance than many--most?--books. Sleeping with Strangers is a pinwheel of delight revolving around the variegated signals of sexuality and gender identification communicated by the movies and the figures inhabiting them. Thomson makes the two dimensions of the movies three-dimensional, and you don't have to wear those ridiculous glasses." --Scott Eyman, author of John Wayne: The Life and Legend

"This, I think, is Thomson's most powerful book and one of the smartest ever written about sex and the movies. . . . A fearless, personal, revealing and wildly original account of how men and women in American movies have affected the sexual desires all the rest of us have. This is a brand new way of looking at movie history--and a brutally frank one, too." --Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News

"Another essential volume from an essential writer. . . . Thomson pulls no punches and takes no shortcuts." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Did Hollywood turn all of us into voyeurs? Thomson, one of film writing's smartest and most iconoclastic thinkers, says 'Oh yeah, ' in this thought-provoking history/critique/memoir." --Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Move over, darling film books, and make room for another irresistible beauty from David Thomson. No writer makes better love to his subject." --Patrick McGilligan, author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane

"Thomson is at his best when he's mining . . . hidden veins of meaning, noticing a detail in a familiar film that helps you see the movie in a new way." --The Atlantic

"Part personal moviegoing memoir, part deeply informed film history. . . . Thomson deploys his encyclopedic knowledge of film so genially and dexterously that readers who are movie aficionados will want to rewatch their favorites through his eyes." --Publishers Weekly

"Discerning and provoking." --Esquire (UK)

"Unfailingly provocative. . . . Thomson is pretty much a walking encyclopedia of film history, and this is the kind of subject he can really sink his teeth into. Fascinating and illuminating." --Booklist

"David Thomson never fails to dazzle me with his striking, original, and evocative prose. . . . Sleeping with Strangers is a beautiful, mysterious book, both learned and wickedly entertaining. It is an intimate, passionate interrogation (and celebration) of how cinema has shaped our erotic imaginations and, ultimately, both our secret and public expressions of desire." --Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document

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