SPOILER: MOVIE CRITIC DEVOURED BY TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Mark Judge reviews A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson. As Judge writes, “Trump is the bad guy. I just saved you $30 and 368 pages of reading.” At the conclusion of his book, Thomson completely lets his TDS freak flag fly:

July 13, 2024, a day so bright outside Butler, Pennsylvania, that you could miss a flash of light. This is photographed live, soon after 6 p.m. local time, as he takes the stage to speak. This is what he lives for, the being on and seeing how he will play. For years now, he has sounded bored, or lethargic, in a stupor with the words he repeats, masturbating his close-ups. He is growing older, you see. But in July 2024, his opponent had gone dead on camera, staring into an abyss in which we felt the nausea of utter loss. He knows this vacancy will come for him, too. But will anyone notice? He feels himself congealing. Then, outside Butler, there is a tiny crack in the air and he flinches. There are more shots as he is surrounded by the bulk of Secret Service, as if they have nothing to do with the “security” that is supposed to stop a shooter shooting. There is a huddled confusion from which his golden head arises. This is not being critical or unsympathetic: A boy wants to stand up after a splinter of something has stung him in the ear. But what is so striking about this victim is his mix of pathos and bravery—such a movie trope—that understands how thoroughly he is on and how the image of him with his fist upright, and “Fight! Fight! Fight!” will play on T-shirts and posters for a while. This is not to say the Butler shooting was designed or directed—he’s not competent enough for that. But the immediacy with which he took his movie moment, that was destiny and our disappearance. Little happens now that is not like a movie. Our seeing has been trained in the habit. Being spectators has undermined the spectacle. Some anxiety in us understands that everything may be a trick.

So there it is. Trump is the devil, manipulating us with theatrics.

“From time to time in this book,” Thomson writes,

considering the glamour of the moving train that will not stop at our station, and the haunting way in which Charlie Kane and Michael Corleone and so many other fellas have been gang leaders who secured Donald Trump’s rapture at the movies, I have realized that he is our movie man.

Thomson didn’t want to spoil the ending, he insists, writing: “I held back, urged on by my editor: Not yet, keep it for a big finish.”

Finally, he had to go there, because “any theory of seeing had to know that this was as hideous as Germans telling themselves they really could not smell what was coming down the country road.

A couple of questions. First, there was the 1912 assassination attempt on Teddy Roosevelt:

On October 14, 1912, former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt survived an assassination attempt by John Schrank, a former saloonkeeper, while Roosevelt was campaigning for the presidency in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Schrank’s bullet lodged in Roosevelt’s chest after penetrating Roosevelt’s steel glasses case and passing through a 50-page-thick (single-folded) copy of his speech titled “Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual”, which he was carrying in his jacket pocket. Schrank was immediately disarmed and captured; he might have been lynched had Roosevelt not shouted for Schrank to remain unharmed. Roosevelt assured the crowd that he was all right, then instructed the police to take charge of Schrank and ensure he was not harmed.

As an experienced hunter and anatomist, Roosevelt correctly concluded that since he was not coughing blood, the bullet had not reached his lung; he declined suggestions to go to the hospital immediately. Instead, he delivered his scheduled speech. His opening comments to the gathered crowd were, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

The movie industry was still in its infancy in 1912, with the forerunner of Paramount Pictures being founded that year, but Thomas Edison’s studio in the Bronx still a going concern. Did Edison’s pictures inspire Roosevelt to rally himself to finish his speech after being shot?

And how does Trump compare to all of the previous Hitlers who have come before him?