Film: When opening any serious book on the American film industry the reader may wonder at which point the author will usher in the inevitable handbasket to Hell.
Some austere critics suggest that cinema lost its purity with the advent of sound. The late professional reactionary Leslie Halliwell felt that the rot set in when the moguls began panicking at the arrival of television. But the current orthodoxy, most forcefully asserted in Peter Biskind's unavoidable Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, is that the success of Jaws in 1975 ushered in an obsession with box-office returns that has ever since hindered creative risk-taking.
"Here in the early 1970s we are at what looks like the last great love affair," David Thomson says by way of agreement in his dense, fecund history of - or, more accurately, meditation on - Hollywood and its hinterlands. He goes on to make mention of Klute, Taxi Driver and Badlands before, shuddering a little I think, preparing the earth for the scorching it was to suffer from Star Wars.
But, though the author does find space to splutter about - these words actually appear - "young people today", he has more profound and disquieting worries about the medium than its current enthralment with the bottom line. Throughout The Whole Equation Thomson, for many the most stimulating film writer in the English language, carries on a fraught debate with himself about the viability of cinema as an art form. Gone With The Wind is "not art, nor anywhere near it". Stephen Daldry's The Hours is, he claims, not only inferior to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, the inspiration for Michael Cunningham's source novel, but film itself is just not up to the task of representing human experience. "Where is the movie that gives us such a feeling of what it is to be alive?" Thomson asks after quoting a particularly busy passage from Woolf's book. This does not sound like a useful attitude to strike when embarking on a study of Hollywood, but Thomson has never been a conventional critic.
His Biographical Dictionary of Film, without which no serious library is complete, revels in establishing bold, sometimes cheekily unsustainable connections between surprising personalities. His 1985 sort-of novel Suspects imagined what some characters from popular movies might have got up to before and after their adventures on screen. The Whole Equation is similarly ambitious. The title is taken from F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon in which the narrator Cecilia Brady, whom Thomson compares to Irene Mayer, the daughter of MGM's founder, Louis B. Mayer, declares: "Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads."
Thomson begins his attempt to devise that equation by looking at the travails of Robert Towne, the author of, among other great things, the script for Roman Polanski's 1974 masterpiece Chinatown.
That film's aghast view of the ruthless greed that helped build Los Angeles and the story of how Towne's career faltered (here comes the handbasket) in the coarse 1980s help establish certain themes that recur throughout the book.
The script, Thomson explains, is a "factory-friendly document"; it is there principally to assist the smooth running of the movie machine. An admirer of the producers who built Hollywood - Mayer and his protégé Irving Thalberg emerge as flawed heroes - Thomson does not necessarily frown on such cool pragmatism. After all, as his remarks about Gone With the Wind make clear, it's not as if we are dealing with art here.
This thrilling book's most audacious chapters attempt to weave the history of the movie industry in with that of the greater Republic.
They do more. Thomson sets out to prove that the nation's collective psyche was bullied by the medium to such an extent that many of the last century's social ills can be laid at the door of the movie theatre. Using Howard Hawks's 1940 farce His Girl Friday as an example of the comedy of remarriage, he argues that the public acquired its taste for recreational divorce while sitting in the stalls. "If we are attached to a medium which in its deepest being urges detachment I am very afraid," he says, reaching for the smelling salts.
We see Thomson at his best and worst in such brash logical convulsions. The passage on divorce is invigorating in its daring, but what are we to make of his musings on the appeal of Charlie Chaplin? "The tramp act is akin to the gestures of rape," he writes. "It longs to win us over, to overwhelm us." Is there any conceivable way in which the first part of this startling assertion might be true? It is a singular aspect of Thomson's writing that for every five dazzlingly brilliant ideas there is one so unhinged that the reader finds his or herself scanning the room for a vacant space at which to hurl the book.
Still, as Orson Welles, the subject of a characteristically eccentric biography by the author, might have agreed, an occasional cost of ambition is failure. David Thomson picks himself up with such grace that any stumbling is quickly forgotten.
The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, By David Thompson, Little, Brown, 448pp, £22.50
Donald Clarke is a critic and feature journalist. His film reviews appear regularly in The Irish Times