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Disaster Mon Amour
A deep—and darkly comic—dive into the nature of disasters, and the ways they shape how we think about ourselves in the world
Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its aftereffects.
Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the intimate Don’t Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal why we love watching disaster unfold—but only if it happens to others.
Audiences swell with the scale of disaster; humans have always been drawn to the rumors of our own demise. In this searching treatment, noted film historian David Thomson examines iconic disasters, both real and fictional, exposing the slippage between what occurs and what we observe. With reportage, film commentary, speculation, and a liberating sense of humor, Thomson shows how digital culture commodifies disaster and sates our desire to witness chaos while suffering none of its aftereffects.
Ranging from Laurel and Hardy and Battleship Potemkin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and from the epic San Andreas to the intimate Don’t Look Now, Thomson pulls back the curtain to reveal why we love watching disaster unfold—but only if it happens to others.
- GenresNonfictionFilm
224 pages, Hardcover
Published January 25, 2022
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59 people want to read
About the author
David Thomson
66 books154 followersDavid Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 16, 2022
People have a remarkable relationship to disasters. On the one hand, they are devastated by an ever increasing number and variety of them. On the other, they are enamored of the spectacles and the stories, and disaster films in particular. Make one well, and it is all but guaranteed to earn big money. David Thomson examines this intersection in Disaster Mon Amour.
Thomson is a film historian, with over 20 books to his name. He lives and breathes cast and crew, author and director. But he is also alive, which means he sees real disasters unfold daily, as we all do. Hardly a day goes by without one being reported. His job in this book seems to be separating romance from fact and ensuring he -and we- understand what is important in the world and in life.
Disasters can be a matter of perception. Thomson dwells lovingly and unexpectedly on The Music Box, an Oscar winner for best short subject in the early 30s. Laurel and Hardy are charged with delivering a player piano, and disaster after disaster roll over them until they end up trashing the very home where it is to be installed. A small disaster, compared to California falling into the ocean or burning to a crisp, or the Earth being overtaken by aliens, or disease, or even by power-hungry humans. There are so many disasters, real and imagined, they are making us numb to them. A lot of people can only appreciate their impact from Hollywood films where the idea is to make them up close and personal, completely overwhelmed by special effects and stunts.
So should we try to separate fact from fiction? I'm not sure the book even answers the question. It's a lot of reminiscences, often with nothing to do with films and disasters. For example, there are laments over Thomson's relationship with one of his sons (to whom he dedicates the book). If I read it correctly, whatever it was was Thomson's fault. But we never learn what it was, only that it is difficult to repair. Maybe that's a personal disaster? If so, how does it play out, and if not, why is it even in the book?
As the book progresses, we find Thomson actually visiting disaster sites. He spends a lot of ink on Aberfan, a Welsh town that lost an entire school full of children when the coal slurry above it slid into and over it. The coal detritus was not supposed to be 110 feet high. Authorities knew it was limited to 20 feet by law. But jobs were scarce, and nothing bad had ever happened, etc etc., so it grew like Topsy into headline-making disaster the whole world focused on for weeks in the 60s.
He examines a number of films that we wouldn't automatically classify as disaster like we would for, say, Titanic. Films like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is as much dystopian as disaster, for example. Or one of my all time favorites, Don't Look Now, by Nicholas Roeg, which leaves everyone who sees it agitated and uncomfortable, and it's really difficult to express why. For Thomson, it is a disaster on a very personal level, while I have always thought of it as a horror film. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie list from one disaster to another, never thinking they are the problem. Even when things get better, they are actually worse. There is tension in every scene, even innocent scenes. And when disaster strikes, it strikes hard. But armies are not decimated, volcanoes don't smother the nation, and hurricanes don't erase any trace of civilization. It's just this couple. Is everyone so important to the universe that these personal setbacks are disasters?
For comparison, an editor of Thomson's was given a new manuscript (as a young man) of Hemingway's to read, and he left it on the subway train. His whole career seemed to end right there and then, and he was a wreck. But he took a chance and checked Lost & Found the next day, and there it was. He went on to an illustrious career. Not so much a disaster as a nice reminiscence, at least to me. Maybe a tip of the hat to a more responsible era, when people would actually take an envelope of papers to the Lost & Found. But a real life disaster?
As entertaining as the book is, it is hard to deconstruct. The chapters detail different disasters and films, but it's not always obvious how they fit together in a chapter. Outside of say, Aberfan, it is not obvious why there are chapters at all. If the book rolls it all up, it is in the perspective that real life disasters are generally far scarier, more serious and life-changing than anything that has come from Hollywood. Read the news, and be shaken to your roots.
Thomson spends a great deal of readers' time on COVID-19, for example, which was rolling out while he was writing this. The figures he cites are laughable now, but they were frightening enough at the time. Connected directly to that is the disaster that was the Trump administration. He considers Trump himself a oneman disaster, expressed remarkably diplomatically all things considered.
Then, unaccountably, in the midst of it all, appears a section praising the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. It seems she is hard working, sincere, thorough and has a great team, which Thomson can name. She has zero connection to the disaster film industry, and is not a reporter, but more of a political pundit, very much of the left side kind. What she and MSNBC have to do with the rest of the book remains a mystery.
Mostly, we've seen so many disasters in recent years, both natural and manmade, it is difficult for Hollywood to top reality. With thousands wiped out in a tsunami, or two million held in a refugee camp for 50 years, there is no shortage of depressing news. Thomson's message seems to be to take the reality more seriously than we do. Get the priorities straight. And he says this as a lover of film. Disaster, he says "was our epic once, but our context now."
David Wineberg
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November 27, 2021In many respects a continuation of Thomson's previous book, Murder And The Movies, with the same queasy determination to pick at the way that we can be fascinated, thrilled or even amused to see on screen that which we would find horrific in real life – and then asking whether, after all, it might affect our reactions in real life. And often it has the same insights and juxtapositions which make Thomson such stimulating reading, not least because he doesn't fall for the lazy assumptions which animate so many soi-disant serious film critics. No kneejerk anti-blockbusterism here, instead the observation that the vast teams who worked on the special effects for San Andreas should be considered in the same way as the forgotten master-craftsmen who together built mediaeval cathedrals, the comparison of the film's setpieces of disintegration to Fred Astaire's dancing. And I'm not sure anyone else could have got away with the passage which cross-cuts between Eisenstein's Odessa steps and Laurel & Hardy taking a piano up stairs.
Now, bearing all of that in mind, and remembering also that expecting David Thomson to stick to the point is entirely missing the point of David Thomson, there is also a bit of a tendency for the book to wander off into other territory altogether. To some extent, if you conceive a book about disaster in 2019, and then write it in 2020, it would be perverse not to incorporate that reminder of how much less fun they are to live through than watch in action-packed 90-minute highlights reels which – most crucially of all – are happening to someone else. On top of which, yes, we all went a bit strange from the Event; and if you have got a reasonably solid excuse to incorporate your journal of the (first) plague year into something you're publishing and being paid for, well. But in places there's more than I found illuminating about eg the specifics of US news channels, most bafflingly in the assertion that "If you're reading this book (or any book?), you know who Rachel is". That's one Rachel Maddow, who apparently is on MSNBC. Sounds like a reasonably good egg from what Thomson says but no, I could sit next to her on the bus and not have a clue. I'm past being surprised by this unthinking universalism from actual Americans, but from Thomson, born this side of the fishpond, it's an odd lapse.
Too often the book carries on in this vein, trying to take on everything from systemic inequality to marital breakdown under the heading of 'disaster' where, yes, they all have some claim to sit, but especially as the link to cinema fades out, the centre cannot hold. Sometimes it is still enlightening - Thomson is very good on Aberfan, on how we might feel guilty about having forgotten it, but that same year there were landslides in Brazil where not even the Brazilian government knew how many died, and which were never really regarded outside the region; on how The Crown dressed it up for TV; on how the money raised by the appeal afterwards was sufficient that, spent beforehand, it could have prevented the catastrophe (this in turn foreshadowing the big, once-avoidable disaster of climate collapse which looms over the whole book); on the inhumane disbursement of that money, which spookily popped up in the news right after I'd been reading about it here. But elsewhere, this was the first time I ever found myself wishing Thomson had been reined in a bit by his editors - who, curiously, are thanked before the book proper has even quite ended, like a gig which incorporates introducing the band into the last song.
Also, yes, obviously: title of my sex tape.
(Netgalley ARC)
Now, bearing all of that in mind, and remembering also that expecting David Thomson to stick to the point is entirely missing the point of David Thomson, there is also a bit of a tendency for the book to wander off into other territory altogether. To some extent, if you conceive a book about disaster in 2019, and then write it in 2020, it would be perverse not to incorporate that reminder of how much less fun they are to live through than watch in action-packed 90-minute highlights reels which – most crucially of all – are happening to someone else. On top of which, yes, we all went a bit strange from the Event; and if you have got a reasonably solid excuse to incorporate your journal of the (first) plague year into something you're publishing and being paid for, well. But in places there's more than I found illuminating about eg the specifics of US news channels, most bafflingly in the assertion that "If you're reading this book (or any book?), you know who Rachel is". That's one Rachel Maddow, who apparently is on MSNBC. Sounds like a reasonably good egg from what Thomson says but no, I could sit next to her on the bus and not have a clue. I'm past being surprised by this unthinking universalism from actual Americans, but from Thomson, born this side of the fishpond, it's an odd lapse.
Too often the book carries on in this vein, trying to take on everything from systemic inequality to marital breakdown under the heading of 'disaster' where, yes, they all have some claim to sit, but especially as the link to cinema fades out, the centre cannot hold. Sometimes it is still enlightening - Thomson is very good on Aberfan, on how we might feel guilty about having forgotten it, but that same year there were landslides in Brazil where not even the Brazilian government knew how many died, and which were never really regarded outside the region; on how The Crown dressed it up for TV; on how the money raised by the appeal afterwards was sufficient that, spent beforehand, it could have prevented the catastrophe (this in turn foreshadowing the big, once-avoidable disaster of climate collapse which looms over the whole book); on the inhumane disbursement of that money, which spookily popped up in the news right after I'd been reading about it here. But elsewhere, this was the first time I ever found myself wishing Thomson had been reined in a bit by his editors - who, curiously, are thanked before the book proper has even quite ended, like a gig which incorporates introducing the band into the last song.
Also, yes, obviously: title of my sex tape.
(Netgalley ARC)
November 29, 2021
David Thomson's latest book on film and history (not just film history) is about disaster, not apocalypse. Since covid-19 arrived, it seems that half the writing published has been about apocalypse in some form or other.
This book includes a diary of the virus, too, but it is more about what kind of disaster stories we tell ourselves.
By focusing on disaster rather than apocalypse, Thomson evokes films from the golden age of seventies disasters movies: Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Towering Inferno, back to the 1936 Spencer Tracy movie San Francisco.
Is there a difference between apocalypse and mere disaster? Is it possible to speak of degrees of destruction?
Besides the movies there was reality: Guernica, the Blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
There was disaster on a personal scale—again, both real and cinematic. Thomson often returns to a particular tragedy—Marion Crane stopping off at the Bates Motel.
There's universal disaster, on and off-screen. For example, the Great Depression that touched everyone in the thirties, and the Vietnam war, which was fought by cinematic proxies throughout the seventies.
While writing this book, David Thomson was preoccupied with the Camp Fire near the town of Paradise, California, one of the conflagrations that consumed California in recent years.
The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 (a disaster we lived through in Daly City, California) seemed more like a TV movie of the week with low production values than the kind of planet-destroying superhero movie they make now. Watching the horror of September 11, 2001, one of Thomson's children asked what movie they were watching.
Thomson begins his book with Sergei Eisenstein and Laurel and Hardy.
In the comedy, Stan and Ollie are furniture movers who lose control of a piano down outdoor stairs in Los Angeles.
Thomson tells us disaster is comically inevitable.
Or maybe not.
In the Eisenstein film, there are also steps, where victims of revolutionary violence are shot.
Thomson uses the recent film San Andreas, starring the Rock, to show how disaster movies can be hopeful. The city is destroyed at the end, but the family is together.
(Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital review copy.)
This book includes a diary of the virus, too, but it is more about what kind of disaster stories we tell ourselves.
By focusing on disaster rather than apocalypse, Thomson evokes films from the golden age of seventies disasters movies: Earthquake, Poseidon Adventure, Airport, Towering Inferno, back to the 1936 Spencer Tracy movie San Francisco.
Is there a difference between apocalypse and mere disaster? Is it possible to speak of degrees of destruction?
Besides the movies there was reality: Guernica, the Blitz, Dresden, and Hiroshima.
There was disaster on a personal scale—again, both real and cinematic. Thomson often returns to a particular tragedy—Marion Crane stopping off at the Bates Motel.
There's universal disaster, on and off-screen. For example, the Great Depression that touched everyone in the thirties, and the Vietnam war, which was fought by cinematic proxies throughout the seventies.
While writing this book, David Thomson was preoccupied with the Camp Fire near the town of Paradise, California, one of the conflagrations that consumed California in recent years.
The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 (a disaster we lived through in Daly City, California) seemed more like a TV movie of the week with low production values than the kind of planet-destroying superhero movie they make now. Watching the horror of September 11, 2001, one of Thomson's children asked what movie they were watching.
Thomson begins his book with Sergei Eisenstein and Laurel and Hardy.
In the comedy, Stan and Ollie are furniture movers who lose control of a piano down outdoor stairs in Los Angeles.
Thomson tells us disaster is comically inevitable.
Or maybe not.
In the Eisenstein film, there are also steps, where victims of revolutionary violence are shot.
Thomson uses the recent film San Andreas, starring the Rock, to show how disaster movies can be hopeful. The city is destroyed at the end, but the family is together.
(Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a digital review copy.)
December 7, 2021
My thanks to NetGalley and to the publisher for a advanced copy of this work on film history and cultural studies.
This book might have started as another book on film history, the idea of studying why moviegoers enjoy watching movies about disasters and cataclysms, and why these movies also seem to come in cycles. However the world became a disaster first with the 2016 election, followed by COVID, a situation where in all the films on contagions, experts, government and common citizens unite to fight this disease, are like most movies just a big fairy tale. And film historian and critic David Thomson seems just at a loss as everyone else as he writes in his book Disaster Mon Amour.
The begins with the Battleship Potemkin with it's large civilian massacre and Laurel and Hardy delivering a piano, and all the travails that happen . One of the final movies mentioned is the Dwayne Johnson movie San Andreas. A hopeful movie to end on for it ends with the characters discussing rebuilding the shattered city they find themselves in. In between are movie comments, politics and Mr Thomson facing some of the disasters he has left in his wake. Age is mentioned quite few times. Age gives that ability to look back at what seem horrendous at the time, but was not, and what seemed trivial at the time resounds through the decades. I'm not sure if it is the fact that social distancing made introspection more of a thing, but while a lot of Mr. Thomson's film books were personal, this has to be his most exposure in book form.
The idea was to prove that filmgoers enjoy a good disaster movie, because the idea is so huge, so back that there is nothing to do but watch the CGI and hang on. Unfortunately most disasters are not huge, but start small and grow exponentially. I would like to have seen what this book would have been like without Trump or COVID. We shall never know. Mr. Thomson has given us a fascinating and different kind of book, a novelization of the end times with a cast of billions.
This book might have started as another book on film history, the idea of studying why moviegoers enjoy watching movies about disasters and cataclysms, and why these movies also seem to come in cycles. However the world became a disaster first with the 2016 election, followed by COVID, a situation where in all the films on contagions, experts, government and common citizens unite to fight this disease, are like most movies just a big fairy tale. And film historian and critic David Thomson seems just at a loss as everyone else as he writes in his book Disaster Mon Amour.
The begins with the Battleship Potemkin with it's large civilian massacre and Laurel and Hardy delivering a piano, and all the travails that happen . One of the final movies mentioned is the Dwayne Johnson movie San Andreas. A hopeful movie to end on for it ends with the characters discussing rebuilding the shattered city they find themselves in. In between are movie comments, politics and Mr Thomson facing some of the disasters he has left in his wake. Age is mentioned quite few times. Age gives that ability to look back at what seem horrendous at the time, but was not, and what seemed trivial at the time resounds through the decades. I'm not sure if it is the fact that social distancing made introspection more of a thing, but while a lot of Mr. Thomson's film books were personal, this has to be his most exposure in book form.
The idea was to prove that filmgoers enjoy a good disaster movie, because the idea is so huge, so back that there is nothing to do but watch the CGI and hang on. Unfortunately most disasters are not huge, but start small and grow exponentially. I would like to have seen what this book would have been like without Trump or COVID. We shall never know. Mr. Thomson has given us a fascinating and different kind of book, a novelization of the end times with a cast of billions.
March 2, 2022
Disaster and our fascination with it is a very compelling subject matter, which was what drawn me in to this book. However, I feel like it wasn't completely explored as it could have been which left me feeling a bit lukewarm overall. The tone is very fun, it's well written and some essays are very interesting which made it very much worth reading.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an e-arc copy of this book!
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an e-arc copy of this book!
May 20, 2025
DNF'd. Unparseable nonsense, the kind where you read a paragraph or page and realize you took nothing from it. Two stars because he comes close to some good ideas but flits too much from topic to topic for anything to strike.
March 24, 2023
The sections on Don't Look Now and San Andreas are 4-4.5. 2020 diary sections are a 2.
July 28, 2025
Too artistic for me - references a lot of films and books I'm not familiar with. Very Americanised and I felt it was quite self-involved.
January 3, 2022
A look into modern day disasters and movies that highlight them. Honestly it wasn’t that interesting to me but not everything is for everyone. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
November 26, 2022
Not the book I thought it would be, but still decent. I was expecting it to be more about disaster movies, but it was a hell of a lot more than that. Thomson focused on his real-time processing of the beginning of the pandemic, weaving in extended references to Hemingway and a Welsh coal disaster, plus seething diatribes about Donald Trump. It was a very good and lonely read.
July 23, 2022
My interview for The Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/david-t...
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