Suspects

"This is a novel. Well sort of a novel. Somewhere between a novel and a film history book. David Thomson is a very eminent historian of film and his Biographical Dictionary of Film is one of those vast seminal texts everyone knows about in film studies. But this is a novel and what’s really important about it is that it allows you, the reader, to finish the story of people in big films and find the connections between them. It’s written as a series of short biographical sketches of fictional characters as though they were real. So, for example, you find out that Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard is the mother of Julian Kaye, the American Gigolo . You get this connection between the two films. It’s completely right and brilliant. He has a chilling end to the story of what happens to the Diane Keaton character in The Godfather . Whenever I see The Godfather on rerun now, I always think of that after-the-end-of-the-film story that he includes. What I really like about the book is that it gives you a sense of how the audience can finish off the story for themselves. It’s not what the people who were making it thought, it’s about what a movie or piece of television means to the audience too – the people who take it up, and makes it into their special thing. You can see this in people passing clips of David Brent around the office, you can see it in the way Lost became a huge talking point on the internet, the whole phenomenon of people creating parodies of things, and connecting them up to their own world. It relates to some pretty complex film and television theory about how you really have to understand the totality of any kind of creative work. David Thomson’s book is just a perfect illustration of that. I’ve lost count of how many copies of it I’ve given to people over the years."