Bewitched, Part II

In a letter in this week's New York Times Book Review, David Thomson responds to my review of his latest book. He's not pleased:

To the Editor:

Lawrence Levi, reviewing my book “Nicole Kidman” (Sept. 17), declares that it is “inane.” I know that authors are expected to turn the other cheek and pass on, but something prevents me this time. I told a friend that I had never read Levi’s book — “The Film Snob’s Dictionary” (did it really take two people to write it?) — and the friend replied that Levi clearly hadn’t read mine either. I can assure you that this author doesn’t have it in him to spend two years on a mash note to an actress. I was trying to get at some deeper points about acting, film, power and so on — but alas, I fell short of Levi’s snob standards. So let me share with your weary readers (the Book Review is so often caught between spite and boredom) that The San Francisco Chronicle has just called “Nicole Kidman” “a book that has guts and brains.”

David Thomson

San Francisco

Who's right? You decide.

Comments

[Rob]

Now Thomson expects us to believe that he has a friend?

[IClavdivs]

I was very excited when I read that Thomson was writing a book on Kidman. I ordered the book weeks before it was released, got it and was so disappointed. Even as a "love letter", it was mindnumbing, it was a whole lot of suppositions, gossip, speculation, "I believes" and "I thinks". I just returned the book and got my money back. No wonder that when Thomson was promoting the book, he used gossip and even went to the point of slander. There were headlines upon headlines regarding what he said about Kidman in his interviews, he called her self-obsessed, powerhungry, vain, etc., funnily enough, there was nothing like that in the book. So what was all that about?

In the last chapter of the book where he wrote about Fur, he wrote this:

"It is the venture of a great, dark, headstrong actress who has no expectation and not too much need for everything to turn out tidily or happily. This is from her black book, the one with demons on the cover to keep innocent readers away. This comes from a woman who lives with lions and wolves."

How he arrived at this conclusion is missing from the entire book that would have been alot more interesting if he'd concentrated on showing this woman who lives with lions and wolves but what and all we got was this sub-par endeavour.

[ray Pride]

You, sir, are correct.

[Tram]

Hot diggity damn.

You don't have to be a snob to not "get" Thomson's book.

I actually like some of Thomson's writings (I still think Biographical Dictionary of Film is a keeper). And I think Richard Dyer's concept of "movie stars as auteur" is v. refreshing and something that should be expanded upon in film studies.

But "Nicole Kidman" is just a mess. One moment, you're reading about how Nicole climbed her way to the top via the Tom Cruise machine. The next, a more cogent analysis of her work in To Die For and Dogville. And then, suddenly, there's a section devoted to Nicole's impeccable fashion taste and how she has deservingly made multiple appearances on Mr. Blackwell's best list.

Like WTF?!

[The Hours of Boredom]

You're in the right. And I normally like Thomson, but his rabid, slavering crush on Kidman has led him to make a fool of himself. He thinks his graphic, endlessly drawn out fantasies about Kidman are interesting, but they're not. His bio tells the reader nothing of importance about Nicole Kidman, and more than he ever wanted to know about David Thomson.

To be perfectly blunt, Thomson absurdly overestimates his own skills as a writer. He's like Dante obsessing over Beatrice (bewildered and angry that any man might not share his reverence for the object of his affection), only without an iota of Dante's genius: ergo, the result is not a divine comedy, but an unintentional, unreadable farce.