"According to [David] Thomson, movies — especially American movies — have whitewashed history, glorified violence and made role models out of thugs, narcissists and murderers."

"The consequences shape our public life. Donald Trump 'is our movie man,' Thomson writes, meaning that Trump’s presidency, which Thomson sees as a catastrophe, was foretold and to some extent made possible by Hollywood. Not just bad movies.... Turning our humanity upside down and our values inside out is what good movies do.... 'We are no longer the selves we hoped to be,' Thomson concludes. 'We are not exactly alive any longer.' It’s the movies that condemned us to this limbo."

Writes A.O. Scott, in "Did Movies Ruin Everything? How the film writer David Thomson found himself in a lover’s quarrel with cinema — and America" (NYT).

"What if he’s right?... For most of this century, I was employed by The New York Times as a full-time movie critic, which means that, like Thomson, I had a professional commitment to movies and also a belief in them — in their cultural impact and artistic merit, in their importance as vessels of human meaning. At a certain point that faith began to falter.... [T]he longstanding habit, among critics and other devotees, of holding movies apart from and superior to all the other screened content may involve a crucial category error. Could it be that, instead of being distinct from television, streaming, TikTok, A.I. slop and all the other screen forms, movies are actually their common ancestor, their home planet, the H.R. Giger alien xenomorph that has replicated itself across the universe of human consciousness?"