David is a historian and perhaps the greatest living film critic. He’s the author of more than 20 books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His new book is called A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies. It’s a wonderful extended rant in some ways, a love letter and a searing indictment of cinema. I was a little intimidated talking with him, but it was a lot of fun.
An auto-transcript is available above (just click “Transcript” while logged into Substack). For two clips of the episode — on the uptight genius of Hitchcock, and the authoritarian nature of cinema — head to our YouTube page.
Other topics: born in South London in 1941 and his home damaged by the Blitz; his father leaving when he was born; his boyish mix of fear and delight at the cinema; the shower scene in Psycho; how film denies you the chance to stop and think; the directors who relish white space (e.g. PT Anderson); Birth of a Nation and Triumph of the Will; newsreels before TV; real nuke explosions on screen; Oppenheimer; from communal theater viewing to solo smartphone viewing; Game of Thrones and the insane production value of TV these days; Breaking Bad; Trump the ultimate product of TV; his telegenic Cabinet; the danger of deepfakes; Paul Schrader’s First Reformed; the audience’s love of car crashes and villains; Godfather I and II; contrasting Hitchcock and Malick; Tree of Life; nature in Thin Red Line; Fincher’s Seven; Robert Bresson’s religious films; Scorsese’s Silence and Last Temptation of Christ; the vulgarity of Spielberg (e.g. the red dress in Schindler’s List); ep. 3 of Adolescence; and Nolan’s new Odyssey.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: John O’Sullivan on conservatism, Azam Ahmed on terrifying new drugs, Robby George on natural law, and Megan McArdle on pretty much anything. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
From a fan of last week’s pod with Stephen Grosz: “Absolutely loved this conversation about why psychoanalysis is useful.” Another:
Just last week I wrote this long email about how much I appreciate the Dish, so I feel silly writing again this week. But I wanted you to know: I listened to the podcast with Stephen Grosz as I was driving to and from the trailhead where I do my Saturday “long run,” came home, took a shower, and went online to purchase Mr. Grosz’s book. I love to read, but I have never — not one time in my life —bought the book after listening to any podcast.
From a subscriber who’s renewing this year:
I don’t agree with everything you say, but I agree with a lot of it and particularly appreciate your courage around this LGB/T stuff. I say that as an evangelical Christian woman who feels like had I grown up now, rather than the ‘70s and ‘80s, I would have been convinced that I am “really” male, simply because I am an assertive woman. The trans stuff is offensive; it feels like blackface to me. It deals in all the worst stereotypes about what it means to be a woman.
You have also introduced me to so many good people on your podcasts. I listened to the one with Rod Dreher and thought, “This lunatic thinks exactly like I do” — and then I subscribed to him.
More doctrinally orthodox nut-jobs, please! Maybe Wes Huff? It would be really interesting if you interviewed a conservative but intelligent evangelical pastor like JD Greear. UNC history professor Molly Worthen would also be good. She has written some interesting things about charismatic leaders, but her personal story of conversion is really fascinating and it was incredibly influential on my own transition from the Episcopal Church to a more orthodox Bible church after 50 years, which has been a wild ride.
I’m happy to renew again. Hang in there. The photo of you with your pup makes me happy. God bless you.
Back at you. Here’s a reader on my column on the dangers of the DSA:
I wasn’t sure exactly why I objected to this piece, even though I share a lot of your opinions. I think some of the new lefties like Darializa Avila Chevalier are genuinely dangerous, but I also think these objections won’t matter. I couldn’t figure out why, but then I came back to a point you’ve quoted a great deal in regard to Trump and immigration: if liberals don’t get a handle on the issue, then fascists will step in and do it.
We are at a similar process here. If establishment Democrats won’t do anything about the rampant “Epstein class” corruption that Trump exemplifies, then the wannabe commies are going to. We need SOMEBODY to address what’s going on in this country, and it looks like “the democratic socialists” are in fact going to be the Left Tea Party, if only because they’re the only ones in the country with both strategy and balls.
(In that regard, I refer to the liberal writer Mike Brock, who wrote a piece on Peter Thiel at the Aspen conference that eventually got to Brock’s thesis that Thiel represents why the socialists are taking over.)
I agree with you on corruption. I intend to emphasize that more in the coming months. Yes, if liberals don’t confront this, leftists will. Another writes:
I want to offer another explanation for the left/Democrats’ embrace of socialism: center/center-left pundits completely dismissing people’s concerns about monopolies, oligopolies, and increasing corporate power, often seemingly embracing libertarianism as the only viable economic policy. These centrist pundits mock concerns about the economy (saying things like “the left just hates the rich,” “billionaire is a slur”), ignoring very real concerns, often with a very know-it-all tone.
But the facts aren’t on their side and, at this point, their denial of reality reached levels of gender-ideology misinformation. That’s a big claim, but just look at egg prices.
A few years ago, egg prices shot up, and the neo-Brandeisian/anti-corporate-consolidation view was that the three major egg companies were fixing prices. Basel Musharbash wrote an excellent article on it. In response, centrists mocked concerns about price-fixing and eggs, including Jason Furman in the NYT, along with Megan McArdle, Josh Barro, and Noah Smith mocking Kamala Harris’ call to investigate price-gouging. Yglesias called it “slopulism”.
Sure enough, completely under the radar, the same week those DSA extremists won their elections, the Trump administration reached a settlement with the three largest egg producers, providing clear evidence that they fixed prices, since they emailed each other about it.
Did you read any mea culpas from those pundits? Anyone admitting what they got wrong? Heck, McArdle double-downed on her assertion on Twitter, which feels insane. At this point, it’s identical to far-left gender-ideology denialism. These people have a philosophy — no government intervention in the economy — and no amount of evidence will change their mind. This is how Jonathan Chait can write an article taking down the neo-Brandeisians without mentioning Google or TicketMaster. Seriously, read his article and tell me where he once actually addresses corporate consolidation in America; instead, it’s all nut-picking bad quotes.
But you can only deny reality for so long. Increasingly, the economy is consolidating and consolidating, ruining the free market. If you read the right people every week — like Matt Stoller, Pat Garofalo, and Justin Stofferrahn — you can read well-researched, evidence-backed, nuanced, non-hyperbolic stories about antitrust and consolidation. To mention just one: how railroads will be more consolidated than the era of robber barons.
To be clear, what I am arguing for is pro-market policies. I want lots of buyers and lots of sellers in markets. I want to regulate the anticompetitive, anti-consumer policies of companies. I don’t want giant firms to erect barriers to entry to markets— literally, what they call “moats”! If centrist pundits like Yglesias, Barro, and Jerusalem Demsas don’t embrace any pro-market reforms, then yes, Democrats and the left will increasingly turn to socialists and socialism. Ironically, the so-called centrists/moderates need to moderate their policies. They should co-opt much of the far left’s policy ideas on antitrust, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Thanks for listening to my rant, and hope you had a great vacation!
I hear you. I really do. Sadly, I spent much of the July 4 break in bed with bronchitis. Bad timing! But better now.
Here’s a view from abroad, in Tbilisi:
You just wrote that the radical politics of the Democrats makes it very hard “to rebuild a sane center.” From my vantage point far away from the United States — and this also relates to your recent piece on the trans/queer threat to lesbian and gay rights — woke radicalism does “pull up the ladder” more globally.
Here’s one of the arguments that authoritarians use (as in Georgia, the country in the Caucasus): “if you give gays proper rights, who knows what craziness it will end in.” It’s more difficult to credibly push back against that view when you have to explain cultish and extreme behaviour — to the point of extreme and irreversible surgical intervention — now driven forward under some guise of “rights” in the US. So radical illiberalism there also harms a broadly progressive cause internationally.
Absolutely. The cost of Western queer self-indulgence is continued persecution of gay people across the developing world. It’s an insight into the narcissism of the woke, and indifference to the costs of over-reach and hubris.
Here’s a dissent over an aside in my latest column:
There you go again on misstating basic empirical facts on transgender rights. On Friday, you wrote that the marriage equality movement “had almost nothing to do with [trans people].” Have you ever looked at the old law journals or political science journals? There are numerous pieces on that very connection. Here’s one I did back in 2007. While it is a broader trans piece, there is a fair bit on marriage laws, given the way that trans people were very much caught up in that.
Please get the facts straight while taking down transgender people and their rights. On the subject of trans rights, the decision in West Virginia v. BJP is going to be far more reaching than sports, and few people are talking about that. My colleague Andrew Flores and I did a piece in The Advocate pointing that out.
The Court also signaled in footnote 1 that very soon, blue-state laws offering transgender people nondiscrimination protection are likely to be neutered where there is conflict with federal law (which is clearly going to align with the BJP interpretation). As Gorsuch notes in his concurrence, dress codes based on biological sex are not blocked by Title VII. I expect that soon, we are going to have red-state policies that have bald and bearded transgender men forced to wear women’s business attire at work, and blocks on trans women wearing a bra in the workplace.
Sorry, but trans people were not “very much caught up” in the marriage fight, and your article doesn’t change that. You’re the one inventing facts to justify the trans movement’s hostile takeover of the gay rights infrastructure — like the invention of trans people at Stonewall. And again, you say I am “taking down transgender people and their rights.” You can repeat that as often as you like, but I’m not. I favor protecting trans people from discrimination and full adult rights to transition. I oppose denying the sex binary, wrecking women’s sports, invading intimate same-sex spaces, and medical experiments on children with gender dysphoria. So do most sane Americans.
This next email is titled “So Long, and Thanks for All the Dish”:
When I went on Substack to discontinue my automatic renewal to the Weekly Dish, it asked me to give a reason. Instead of giving a one or two-word response on a form, I thought it best to send an email.
First, a sincere “Thank You!” I’ve enjoyed the Dish since it was written with white letters on a blue background. Your blog, magazine articles, and now, Substack, have informed and challenged me throughout most of my adult life.
I retired about a decade ago, but my last 15 years of work was with a legislator. We spent our most fervent energies fighting the battle for gay marriage. You have no idea how much your reasoned arguments helped me to successfully inform and convince a skeptical and culturally conservative constituency against attacks from the Phelps family and the others of that time.
You published three of my View from Your Window submissions, including this one:
Monona, Wisconsin, 6.40 pm
From the start of the Weekly Dish, I’ve happily paid over the minimum dollar amount, as I wanted to support your ability to make a living expressing views unchecked by previously crazy woke media staff. I am happy knowing that you have built a following on Substack sufficient to sustain you and Chris.
I leave not because I disagree with you on any singular issue. Lord knows we’ve disagreed on many. I remember you clapped back hard when I emailed you a “hang on a moment” thought or two when you initially went gung-ho for the Iraq War. After that, I realized that I preferred reading your thoughts passively rather than engaging you and risking the rough edge of your tongue.
In fact, it was a difference of opinion that drew me to your writing in the first place. I saw an article in a gay magazine (gay not queer — remember those?) containing your argument against hate crime laws. As a young gay attorney in LA, I was aghast. I initially thought your position was so idealistic as to be naïve. Then I read the article again. And again. I liked the way you approached an issue to make a point. So, I went to your blog and I was hooked. To learn that you could be gay, Christian, and conservative, against all popular cultural pressure, was a place to which I had just not yet been able to leap.
Since starting the Weekly Dish, you have been marvelously articulate about the absurdities and dangers of wokeness and DEI. Your arguments against the trans-queer perversion of the gay rights movement are some of the most impressive you have made since the marriage and military debates.
But, aside from the occasional pro-gay/anti-queer Dish topics, it appears your focus now tends toward anti-everything-Trump. I also realize my disinterest in parsing every detail of whatever is going on with Israel makes me an outlier among your subscribers.
With age I have learned that sometimes people initially in sync can grow to have different interests and that it’s best to leave it — with a smile and nod to good memories, lest annoyance irreparably mar a happy past. You are a fabulous writer and I wish you every success. May God bless and keep you well.
And we’re still getting cancellations along these lines:
I really did enjoy my subscription and was sorry to let it go, but I found your unbalanced hostility toward Israel simply intolerable. The Free Press’s TGIF is now my beloved Friday read, and it doesn’t stab me repeatedly in the gut with the sort of anti-Zionism that is this era’s version of antisemitism. I respect your right to your opinions even when ignorant, and do not expect any exodus of readers to change them. So I’ll miss you and thank you for many good years.
Well, if you want uncritical coverage of a foreign country, you’re smart to pick The Free Press — a public relations vehicle for Israel financed by the Ellison family. You will never read anything unsettling or sharp on Israel there. But I notice you use the term “unbalanced”. Have you seen the sheer volume of criticism on Israel we publish here every week? The pod episodes where Israel’s defenders get their say? The to and fro on Notes? I have a view on Israel but it is always balanced by alternatives — in ways you won’t find at The Free Press. I also notice you use the word “ignorant” despite reams of fact and evidence and opinion I have aired here. Those adjectives reveal to me a completely closed mind.
The truth is: some diehard Israel supporters simply do not tolerate debate or dissent on the subject. I’m not a queer for Palestine; I reject the genocide canard; I have no time for Hamas and their evil pogroms. But still I’m no different for many of these Israel supporters than Nick Fuentes. Which is why they really shouldn’t subscribe to the Dish. And why I’m sorry but in no way troubled by your departure.
For those of you who want to support a site immune to pressure from audience capture, committed to airing every argument, and not shrinking from judgment when necessary, please keep subscribing or join us. It’s called liberal democracy. It’s not always pleasant, but it’s worth the struggle! Dishness forever!
And have a wonderful summer weekend...
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