How the Movies Shaped Desire

"We all of us sleep with strangers in our heads,” David Thomson declares near the beginning of Sleeping With Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire. That sentence as aptly describes the physical experience of dreaming as it does the omnivorous nature of sexual fantasy. Much of Thomson's work over a career now into its fifth decade—he's 78—has dwelled in the ambiguous space where dreams, fantasies, and movies overlap. To call the London-born, San Francisco–based Thomson a film critic isn't quite right. Nor does the label of film historian fit, exactly, though his knowledge of the cinematic past is certainly formidable in its depth and detail. Rather, he's an autobiographical essayist who approaches movies as a psychic toy set to be dismantled and rearranged according to the dictates of his own voluminous memory and florid imagination.