Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire

From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, an original, seductive account of sexuality in the movies, and of how actors and actresses on screen feed our desire.

Movies can make us want what we cannot have. But, while sometimes rapturous, the interaction of onscreen beauty and private desire speaks to a crisis in American culture, one that pits delusions of male supremacy against feminist awakening and the spirit of gay resistance. Combining criticism, his encyclopedic knowledge of film history, and memoir, David Thomson examines how film has found the fault lines in traditional masculinity and helped to point the way toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a person desiring others. Ranging from advertising to pornography, Rudolph Valentino to Moonlight, Rock Hudson to Call Me By Your Name, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant to Phantom Thread, Sleeping With Strangers shows us the art and the artists we love under a new light. Here Thomson illuminates the way in which film as art, entertainment, and business has been a polite cover for a kind of erotic seance. And he makes us see how the way we watch our movies is a kind of training for how we try to live.