Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire Audiobook (Free)

With this wholly original work of film criticism, David Thomson, celebrated author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, probes the many ways in which sexuality has shaped the movies—as well as the ways that the movies have shaped sexuality. Discovering the tangled notions of masculinity, femininity, beauty, and sex that characterize our cinematic creativity—and drawing on good examples that range from marketing to pornography, Bonnie and Clyde to Call Me by Your Name—Thomson illuminates how film as artwork, entertainment, and business provides historically been a polite cover for a kind of erotic séance. By doing this, he casts the artwork and the artists we like in a fresh light, and unveils how film can both expose the fault lines in regular masculinity and stage the way previous it, toward a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be always a person with wishes.