All the World’s a Screen (anti-theatricality’s eternal returns) (cutting up reality)

David Thomson has a new book out, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, in which he convinces himself that the artform to which he has dedicated his entire life is actually corrupting civilisation and profoundly responsible for the current political hellscape. In a New York Times profile titled "Did Movies Ruin Everything?," A.O. Scott , himself a distinguished film critic,…