This creates more than a few wobbles of purpose and tone. The Margo Jefferson who ends her book with an account of the trial, for instance, in which she visits scorn on the media’s brand of “intellectualized gossip … the standby metaphors are the circus and the freak show” might have been well advised to get in touch with the Margo Jefferson who started her book with a chapter entitled “Freaks”—in which she compares Jacko to the sideshow freaks of P.T. Barnum: “From the mideighties on, he turned himself into a ‘What Is It?’”

Her method throughout the book is to pluck some theme, hot and steaming, from the tabloids—transsexualism, pedophilia, albinism—dig around for a couple of paragraphs of historical background, and then affix it to Michael Jackson’s tail in fancier language: “a transvestite [who] masters the art of the betwixt and between … a new kind of mulatto … a postmodern zombie.” So representative of the competing strains of American culture does Michael Jackson become that you wonder why he doesn’t simply give up on this pop-star business and publish himself as a concordance.

On Michael Jackson will doubtless bring joy to the hearts of cultural theorists everywhere. If you’re one of the lucky few for whom all boundaries are there to be transgressed, all identity made mutable, then this is the Michael Jackson book for you. “What’s the exact line between parent-protectors and parent-pimps? Adults as mentors and lovers? Fans as worshippers and predators?” From which the informed reader is invited to guess that maybe there isn’t too exact a line. “Is he a good man or a predator? Child protector or pedophile? A damaged genius or a scheming celebrity … ?” Just a wild guess, but might the correct answer be all of the above? “He is all these things.” Bingo!

The problem with this approach, which tosses everyone like a Caesar salad, is not that it holds true for Michael Jackson but that it holds untrue for no one. “Masters the art of the betwixt and the between” could as easily apply to Beck, Madonna or Shakespeare—or pretty much anybody else in the history of Western culture you care to name. As criticism, it lacks specificity.

Why, then, does this mongrelization of sources reduce the cultural theorist to such a state of uncontainable excitement? Well, one advantage for the critic is that you get to show off your range of reference, as Ms. Jefferson does here, taking a big whiff of Michael Jackson and noting heady infusions of Dietrich, Astaire, Chaplin and Sammy Davis Jr., with distinct touches of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The disadvantage is the lack of human texture to the resulting scarecrow figure. In the stony eyes of the cultural theorist, child stars are merely “archaeological sites, carrying layers of show-business history inside of them.” The draconian Jackson family is “a public-relations construct and a myth in progress,” while Michael’s mother commits the egregious sin of marrying a philanderer—“a country-and-western cliché.” You wonder which Katherine Jackson will find more upsetting in the long run: the fact that she married an abusive brute, or the fact that, by doing so, she committed a cultural faux-pas in the eyes of The New York Times?

You could argue, of course, that with Michael Jackson, a certain waxiness of skin texture is appropriate—and sure enough, Ms. Jefferson pulls that one out of the bag, too: “There is no realism here, only mythology,” she argues in Baudrillardish vein, and quotes a psychologist who points out, “Do you realize this is someone whose inner life is Tom and Jerry?” Which is kind of funny, though not helpful or true—a cultural sneer masquerading as psychological insight. This is a shame, because there are at least two good books to be written about Michael Jackson. One would be by a clinical psychologist, and would settle the debate once and for all as to how certifiable the man is; the other would be a book about his music—equally certifiable genius.

Here, though, is the really bad news about On Michael Jackson: no Quincy Jones. Not even a mention of him. Which means no discussion of Off the Wall, or Thriller, or of that five-year period from 1978 to 1983 when Michael Jackson’s artistry was at its absolute peak. How on earth you can write a book about Michael Jackson and resist the impulse to describe the hustling, contrapuntal fandango that is the first 16 bars of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” I will never know. It’s like visiting Egypt and ignoring the pyramids.

“Ah, but the art!” exclaims Ms. Jefferson at one point, catching herself too deep into tabloid territory—but it turns out she means the album covers, about which she has lots of opinions. Her comments on the music are so much excitable blather, along the lines of “Talent? Deluxe voice? Charisma? You bet.” Or “He created the show; he was the show.” And “Michael Jackson became world-famous because he was a world-class talent.” Oy, oy, oy.

Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press).

This creates more than a few wobbles of purpose and tone. The Margo Jefferson who ends her book with an account of the trial, for instance, in which she visits scorn on the media’s brand of “intellectualized gossip … the standby metaphors are the circus and the freak show” might have been well advised to get in touch with the Margo Jefferson who started her book with a chapter entitled “Freaks”—in which she compares Jacko to the sideshow freaks of P.T. Barnum: “From the mideighties on, he turned himself into a ‘What Is It?’”

Her method throughout the book is to pluck some theme, hot and steaming, from the tabloids—transsexualism, pedophilia, albinism—dig around for a couple of paragraphs of historical background, and then affix it to Michael Jackson’s tail in fancier language: “a transvestite [who] masters the art of the betwixt and between … a new kind of mulatto … a postmodern zombie.” So representative of the competing strains of American culture does Michael Jackson become that you wonder why he doesn’t simply give up on this pop-star business and publish himself as a concordance.

On Michael Jackson will doubtless bring joy to the hearts of cultural theorists everywhere. If you’re one of the lucky few for whom all boundaries are there to be transgressed, all identity made mutable, then this is the Michael Jackson book for you. “What’s the exact line between parent-protectors and parent-pimps? Adults as mentors and lovers? Fans as worshippers and predators?” From which the informed reader is invited to guess that maybe there isn’t too exact a line. “Is he a good man or a predator? Child protector or pedophile? A damaged genius or a scheming celebrity … ?” Just a wild guess, but might the correct answer be all of the above? “He is all these things.” Bingo!

The problem with this approach, which tosses everyone like a Caesar salad, is not that it holds true for Michael Jackson but that it holds untrue for no one. “Masters the art of the betwixt and the between” could as easily apply to Beck, Madonna or Shakespeare—or pretty much anybody else in the history of Western culture you care to name. As criticism, it lacks specificity.

Why, then, does this mongrelization of sources reduce the cultural theorist to such a state of uncontainable excitement? Well, one advantage for the critic is that you get to show off your range of reference, as Ms. Jefferson does here, taking a big whiff of Michael Jackson and noting heady infusions of Dietrich, Astaire, Chaplin and Sammy Davis Jr., with distinct touches of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The disadvantage is the lack of human texture to the resulting scarecrow figure. In the stony eyes of the cultural theorist, child stars are merely “archaeological sites, carrying layers of show-business history inside of them.” The draconian Jackson family is “a public-relations construct and a myth in progress,” while Michael’s mother commits the egregious sin of marrying a philanderer—“a country-and-western cliché.” You wonder which Katherine Jackson will find more upsetting in the long run: the fact that she married an abusive brute, or the fact that, by doing so, she committed a cultural faux-pas in the eyes of The New York Times?

You could argue, of course, that with Michael Jackson, a certain waxiness of skin texture is appropriate—and sure enough, Ms. Jefferson pulls that one out of the bag, too: “There is no realism here, only mythology,” she argues in Baudrillardish vein, and quotes a psychologist who points out, “Do you realize this is someone whose inner life is Tom and Jerry?” Which is kind of funny, though not helpful or true—a cultural sneer masquerading as psychological insight. This is a shame, because there are at least two good books to be written about Michael Jackson. One would be by a clinical psychologist, and would settle the debate once and for all as to how certifiable the man is; the other would be a book about his music—equally certifiable genius.

Here, though, is the really bad news about On Michael Jackson: no Quincy Jones. Not even a mention of him. Which means no discussion of Off the Wall, or Thriller, or of that five-year period from 1978 to 1983 when Michael Jackson’s artistry was at its absolute peak. How on earth you can write a book about Michael Jackson and resist the impulse to describe the hustling, contrapuntal fandango that is the first 16 bars of “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” I will never know. It’s like visiting Egypt and ignoring the pyramids.

“Ah, but the art!” exclaims Ms. Jefferson at one point, catching herself too deep into tabloid territory—but it turns out she means the album covers, about which she has lots of opinions. Her comments on the music are so much excitable blather, along the lines of “Talent? Deluxe voice? Charisma? You bet.” Or “He created the show; he was the show.” And “Michael Jackson became world-famous because he was a world-class talent.” Oy, oy, oy.

Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press).

“Nobody pushed or shoved, nobody shouted or laughed, nobody seemed impatient,” noted The Times. A previously unknown group, the Secret Organization Group of Al Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe, took credit for the bombings on the Internet—“Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters”—although for the majority of people, the only real consequence was a long walk home and a case of blisters.

The next day, it was business as normal. Queen and REM postponed concerts, but the stock market fluttered only briefly, and during the evening rush hour, the very same bus route that had been bombed the day before was filled with people reading about it in their newspapers. At least two newspapers recommended that Londoners listen to Noël Coward songs to help them recover. One columnist even professed to find all the police talk of “serious incidents” “oddly reassuring”—so reminiscent was it of past bomb threats by the I.R.A. “Eight percent of the people in this bar aren't even talking about it,” noted one puzzled tourist from San Francisco. Even nearer the epicenter of the attacks, the mood was much the same: either resolute calm, eerie numbness or frank indifference, depending on how you looked at it. “There is so much police, it's very safe-feeling,” noted one German tourist. “They had it under such control, it almost seemed like a non-event,” chimed another. Not since Jeeves dismissed the First World War to Bertie Wooster as “some slight friction threatening in the Balkans” have Britons made so light of evident catastrophe.

Who would have thought it? After all this time, the British stiff upper lip—long since thought to have gone the way of the droopy walrus mustaches that used to adorn it—was found to be alive and well and ordering itself a swift scotch at the nearest bar.

The last few years have seen several similar retro resuscitations in British cultural life, from Britpop (the Beatles go pop) to New Labor (the old Labor Party goes “Third Way”) to the films of Richard Curtis (English buffoonery goes Hollywood). As for the world-famous stiff upper lip (sang-froid, phlegm, bulldog spirit, call it what you will) nobody quite knows when or why it was supposed to have disappeared—the spread of therapy? The erosion of the class system?—although scholars of emotional constipation point to the death of Lady Diana as the watershed moment when modern Britain first let it all hang out. Even more significant than the displays of grief shown in the streets was the public pressure put on the royals to follow suit. When the queen refused to address the nation, let alone crack a tear at her balcony, the tabloid-fueled indignation was such that Charles Moore, the editor of the conservative Daily Telegraph, was left spluttering, “It simply is not the way that these things are done.”

Last week, the queen had obviously found a cause she could rally to with a little more enthusiasm than bothersome daughters-in-law. “They will not change our way of life,” she proclaimed, while visiting a hospital. But the hero of the hour, now as then, turned out to be Tony Blair, who caught the national mood perfectly, just as he had done after Diana's death. Perhaps mindful of President George W. Bush's goat-story debacle, Mr. Blair flew down from Gleneagles to reassure Londoners the moment he heard of the bombings and returned to the G-8 summit full of Churchillian pith and vigor: “When they try to intimidate us, we will not be intimidated. When they seek to change our country … we will not be changed. When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided. And our resolve will hold firm.”

Elsewhere, journalists scoured high and low for heroes of the hour: men and women who had risen, bloody but unbowed, in the nation's hour of need—a task only slightly hindered by the British tendency to downplay even national disaster as something of an embarrassment. “People started to scream because there was a burning smell, and everyone—to cut a long story short—thought they were going to die,” said one passenger. It's that Fawlty-esque “to cut a long story short” that is so heartening: It's what British people say when they're worried about being a frightful bore.

The closest the press came to finding a hero was an AOL employee named Paul Dadge, whose ghostly face, as he helped a survivor of the Edgware Road explosion, was plastered all over the front page of The Times. Inside, he dismissed the attack as “nothing more than an inconvenience.” “The atmosphere was extremely calm,” he noted. “It was quite surreal, in a way, because in the Metropole Hotel, there were people having business meetings who didn't know what had happened.” His comment called to mind Auden's famous poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” in which he noted that even “dreadful martyrdom” runs its course in “some untidy spot / Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.” When it comes to getting on with one's doggy life—not to mention scratching their innocent behinds—nobody does it quite like the British.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, one army captain handed out four soccer balls to his regiment and offered a prize to the company that could kick one closest to the German trenches; both the captain and his regiment were mowed down instantly. One of the balls now sits in London's Imperial War Museum—whether as a tribute to British bravery or foolhardiness is hard to say. Britain seems to delight in blurring the distinction. What the rest of the world might be tempted to call denial, or displacement activity, or a straightforward death wish, the British immortalize as part of their national character, as celebrated in such films as London Can Take It—a nine-minute documentary about the resilience of British citizens during the Blitz—and the famous broadcasts from London by Edward R. Murrow, CBS's bureau chief in London, about “you know, stiff upper lip and all that sort of thing.”

Some were stiffer than others. Portly litterateur Cyril Connolly was dragooned into service as part of the Home Guard and asked to patrol blocks, marshal civilians indoors and extinguish fires—only to fail magnificently in all three tasks. After the war, Evelyn Waugh sent a copy of one of his books to Connolly with the inscription: “To Cyril. Who Kept the Home Fires Burning.” More typical, perhaps, was M.P Harold Nicolson, who wrote in his dairy after an air raid: “I am nerveless, and yet I am conscious that when I hear a motor in the empty streets I tauten myself lest it be a bomb screaming towards me. Underneath, the fibres of one's nerve-resistance must be sapped.” This stratified reaction to terror is exactly what psychologist Melitta Schmideberg noted when she concluded in 1942 that “the majority of the population adapted itself to the new Blitz reality … by acquiring new standards of safety and danger and by gradually learning to take the bombing as an unpleasant but unavoidable part of life.”

We do not want for contemporary correlatives of this. In Israel, the damage from café and bus bombings is typically cleared within hours, while a recent report found that tourism had actually increased in Madrid since the bombings. In London, thanks to the 116 bombs set by the I.R.A. between 1971 and 2001, every child knows to keep an eye out for suspicious packages, and Londoners have learned to accept the miniaturization of public trash receptacles and the lack of coin-operated lockers in train stations. Since 9/11, they have been repeatedly reminded that they would almost certainly become the targets of an attack. “When, not if,” they were told by the head of counterterrorism—words echoed by Tony Blair himself. In this alone, perhaps, were the events of last week like a movie: It had to be the most keenly awaited terrorist shock in recent history.

"Now the disaster was upon us, it had an air of weary inevitability, and it looked familiar, as though it had happened long ago,” wrote Ian McEwan in The Guardian. “How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?” One survivor of the bus blast said she felt “relief” that London had finally become the victim of a terrorist attack: “People are really upset, but some people are glad it's happened, because we've been waiting for so long.” All of which rather blunted attempts to sharpen up the knives of controversy. One Guardian columnist intoned direly that “the bloody trail of blame leads straight to 10 Downing Street,” while George Galloway, an outspoken critic of Mr. Blair, said that, “tragically, Londoners have now paid the price of the government ignoring” all the obvious warnings. But when Mr. Blair insisted that “all the surveillance in the world” couldn't prevent determined terrorists from attacking Britain, most Londoners appeared to believe him. An online survey eliciting the opinions of 1,854 adults across the country found that Mr. Blair's' approval rating had flipped from negative to positive for the first time in five years, up from a mediocre 32 percent at the beginning of this year to a creditable 49 percent last Friday. The proportion wanting British troops brought home quickly had fallen, and the proportion wanting Britain to retain its close ties with the U.S. had risen.

Perhaps most tellingly of all: The proportion fearing that they themselves or a close family member or friend might be killed or injured in such an attack hadn't risen significantly. Just 1 percent of respondents expected to make big changes as a result of the bombings and most—88 percent—intended to make few changes or none at all. As one Times writer reasoned: “In a large city the odds are very much in your favour: it will almost always be somebody else who gets unlucky.” Here, then, was the slightly more callous truth behind all the talk of Blitz spirit and stiff upper lips: Most Londoners had performed a quick bit of mental calculus and decided that if it was going to happen again, it was probably going to happen to some other poor sod.

The British people “won't be terrorized by terrorism” said Mr. Blair, although the rather less palatable truth was that they weren't terrorized by terrorism because the terrorism in question wasn't very terrorizing—not just in scale, but in conception. Sept. 11 came out of a clear blue sky in spectacular fashion, but the hell that was loosed by the terrorists in London unfurled, for the most part, 70 feet below ground. “We've been kind of lucky with only 33 dead, when you look at New York and Madrid,” said one survivor. One newspaper columnist even thought “it was a good thing” that the bombs had gone off in Britain rather than in the U.S., where it would have been “used by the Bush administration as an argument for locking people up indefinitely, taking away Americans' civil liberties, and perhaps even for invading some other unsuspecting country. One bomb in an American city, and it would have a free run down to 2008.” The debt owed the British people for swallowing this particular grenade may be greater than we thought.

The house in question has a few problems-blocked toilets, mysterious drafts, self-slamming windows and an abnormally large indoor fly population-but nothing a little D.I.Y. wouldn't fix. Into the breach step Margot Kidder, her three kids and new husband, played by James Brolin, who bears a striking resemblance to the bearded guy in the Joy of Sex illustrations. Of more pressing importance, though, is the striking resemblance he bears to the mass murderer who lived in the house before-and as the film progresses, Mr. Brolin starts chopping wood with strange intensity, staring distractedly into the fire, and taking on the sort of waxy pallor that normally indicates imminent possession by the unquiet dead, although Ms. Kidder suspects a case of "the flu that's going around."

Not a bad guess, actually, given the number of people in this movie looking distinctly green about the gills. Viewers hoping to revisit a great shocker from yesteryear may be surprised to find that the film's body count is shockingly low-the dramatic emphasis falling not on the matter of who will first lose their life, but who will first lose their lunch. The local priest comes to bless the house and promptly vomits. A nun follows up with a house call only to barf, too, before she can make it back to her car. Ah, the 70's: What a great decade it was for onscreen hurling! It all started with The Exorcist (1973), of course, whose gouts of projectile-vomited pea soup prompted audiences to barf right back-a touching instance of call-and-response. The same thing happened with Jaws, whose audiences could retch along with the retching cop, and squirm sympathetically as Richard Dreyfuss attempted to keep his breakfast down during the autopsy scene.

One of the great things about watching these classic horror-movie franchises on DVD is the chance to carbon-date the clichés of a bygone era. You can tell, for instance, that The Amityville Horror was released after Jaws because the town mayor from Steven Spielberg's film is on hand to represent the forces of silencing bureaucracy; and you can tell it was released post- Exorcist because the priests wear trilby hats and debate church doctrine.

Not that Amityville wasn't without the odd original flourish of its own. There's the startling creative freedom shown by Ms. Kidder's wardrobe, for example-kilt, knee-socks and loosened tie for that rapacious schoolgirl look-and it's with the pleasure of old acquaintances long forgot that you establish that the film was the first to use spooky child choirs on the soundtrack and the whole Indian-burial-ground subplot. One of the more endearing things about the film is the way it suggests a whole raft of dramatic possibilities (possession by dead Indians, by mass murderers, by Satan himself)-then boldly forgets to follow through on any of them. When the film was first released, there were cries of hoax, although only reality could be this dramatically piecemeal-surely someone fabricating the whole thing would have dreamed up a slightly more terrifying bogeyman than buzzing flies.

Zip forward three years to The Amityville Horror II: The Possession, and the special effects have improved, after a fashion: We now have fireballs in the cellar, and some of those pulsating body parts that started showing up everywhere after An American Werewolf in London (1981). Here, they appear on the teenage son of the house, now our dramatic focus as the producers-not content with the first film's glancing similarities to The Exorcist-decide to flush them right out into the open. But there are signs, too, of a new era dawning: The priests are still barfing, but thanks to Steven Spielberg's appearance as the new magnetic north of the filmmaking universe, we have an assortment of flying toys and even a demonically possessed Sony Walkman. As the Amityville sequels unfold, in fact, they tell an altogether different story, equally rich in panic: a story about the makers of a dopey horror-movie franchise who, terrified of failing to attract teenagers, find themselves diabolically possessed by the spirit of Hits Past, Present and Future.

By 1983, we have Amityville 3-D, and the horrifying transformation is complete: The teenagers have multiplied, the body count is ticking along nicely, and the house has now expanded its powers to include long-distance fly attacks as well as the ability to flambé speeding cars or propel rotting demons from the basement, all in 3-D. Not only that, but we have Meg Ryan, who hardly needs 3-D to stand out: She strolls into the house as if it were an ice-cream parlor, chews on her lines like bubble gum and smiles sweetly while the film deflates, gently, around her. Put her cameo together with Tom Hanks' similar walk-on part in He Knows You're Alone, just three years earlier, and you're left with the satisfying thought that America's future sweethearts were, even then, wading towards each other through rivers of blood, bound for their date atop the Empire State Building.

This heartbreaking essay-easily the most moving piece of prose ever written on the subject of Star Wars-appears in a new collection of Mr. Lethem's essays, which bed down into a surprisingly cohesive book about cultural obsession, about what it's like to identify with a cultural artifact so strongly that you're willing to lose friends and alienate your family in the process. (And what it is to wonder, on the long walk home, whether losing friends and alienating your family wasn't, at least in part, the point of the exercise.) Mr. Lethem's tastes runs to the cosmological and cultish-Philip K. Dick, Marvel artist Jack Kirby, David Bowie in his The Man Who Fell to Earth phase-but he isn't above executing the odd switch-back into the more earth-bound and reactionary, just to keep the waiting world guessing. The book kicks off with a wonderful episode, a mesmerizing set piece of aesthetic tantrum-throwing in which Mr. Lethem berates an entire cinema for not liking The Searchers enough.

Naturally, he'd never seen the film before ("this was the film that meant so much to … who was it? Scorsese? Bogdanovich?"), but this was at Bennington, where Mr. Lethem ran the film society, employing himself as projectionist, and where a cynical urbanity was the order of day. An old-fashioned, sun-roasted film like The Searchers thus shapes up as the perfect tool with which to beat his generation around the head for their soul-impoverishing irony; and Mr. Lethem readies himself for the screening "like a man who suspects his first date might become an elopement." The film itself lets him down miserably, of course-not least when the projector breaks down. Mr. Lethem rises up to defend the film and doesn't stop for a decade, while friends and girlfriends crash on the rocks around him: "What was it with this film? Would I ever get to watch it without yelling at someone?" he asks, although, as he notes, by far the worst thing about these conflicts was that his opponents were "casual snipers, not dedicated enemies-like D., or the audience at [Bennington], they take a potshot and wander off, interest evaporated."

This observation-so frank and funny in its assessment of the obsessive, peeking out helplessly from the doomed mass of his own obsession-is typical of this book, which alternates the blinkered intensity of the cultural mole man with the agility of a writer at full stretch of his lucidity, a beguiling mixture that pushes it to the very forefront of that burgeoning modern genre, the self-aware nerd confessional. Like such masters of the form as Nick Hornby and Sarah Vowell, Jonathan Lethem specializes in a form of smuggled autobiography: Speak, Memorex! With a few deft strokes, the reader is left with a vivid image of Mr. Lethem's childhood: raised by hippie parents in a quasi-commune in Brooklyn with a painter's studio (his father's) at the top and a dense fug of dope smoke and infidelity down below, where "like an autistic child I wanted the human volume turned down." He makes initial forays into liking Godard and Dylan, finding them baffling and enrapturing-but "I was at a point where I couldn't trust art that baffled and enraptured me. I needed to feel like I'd encompassed it." What he needed was "art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the non-believers." Specialists in cultural substance abuse will have recognized all the tell-tale signs, from Mr. Lethem's early portentousness cravings to the final jittery uneasiness in his own skin: We're talking a hard-core Pink Floyd addict here.

And a Talking Heads freak. And a Philip K. Dick nut. And a Brian Eno bonehead. And a Lord of the Rings dweeb. And-after watching 2001: A Space Odyssey three times in one day-a recipient of the Stanley Kubrick–Arthur C. Clarke Fellowship for visiting teenage aliens. That's nine hours of devotion to a film which Mr. Lethem found blissfully "clean of the paint-drippy, hippie-drippy, Bob Dylan-raspy-voiced, imperfection-embracing chaos surrounding me everywhere." With its glinting monolithic surfaces, 2001-like Pink Floyd's The Wall and much else that Mr. Lethem adored-offered a pleasingly perverse respite from the sort of thing that children are supposed to be enjoying. It's exactly the sort of film, in fact, that an intelligent child might imagine the state of adulthood to consist of, culturally speaking: back-to-back space operas of gnomic impenetrability. Mr. Lethem's rejection of childish things-which he characterizes, marvelously, as a "you-cant-fire-me-I-quit" approach to childhood-leads to a desire to vacate himself so desperately that he ends up with vacancy as his prime aesthetic objective.

You can see what's coming, of course. The stage is set for a series of gargantuan disappointments, as one by one the chrome-plated impassivity of his idols proves insufficient to support the emotions that propelled him onto their Teflon surfaces in the first place. His love of the Talking Heads-a love "so complete that I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me"-stumbles when he wakes up one morning to find out, heartbreakingly, that they are not quite as good as all that. But then, "no band is as good as I'd claimed Talking Heads were in the years I adored them." Hence his title: The Disappointment Artist.

This is a gem of a book. I can't think of another that captures so well the livid warmth-later curdling into embarrassment-that characterizes the jejune, impassioned and borderline-pretentious tastes with which we first find, and then lose, ourselves; and it comes illuminated with an adult's forgiving fondness for the cultural Mussolinis we once were, age 15. Seeking to patch up a rift with his friend Karl over the merits of Spider-Man artist Jack Kirby-an argument "which had seemed to me loaded with the direst intimations of the choices we were about to make, the failures of good faith with our childhood selves we were about to suffer"-Mr. Lethem finds instead, soberingly, that the argument had been conducted largely in his own head. Says the adult Karl, now living a few blocks down from Mr. Lethem: "I just never liked the way he drew knees."

Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press).

The title of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Line of Beauty, refers to, amongst other things: Hogarth's theory of pictorial composition; the line of cocaine snorted by the book's hero, Nick, from the back of a Henry James novel; and the snaking line traced by the body of Nick's gay lover as they engage in punishing sessions of sexual make-believe beneath Guardi's Capriccio and S. Giorgio Maggiore. Mr. Hollinghurst's novel-his fourth-won the Booker Prize earlier this year and was judged a worthy winner, if only because it meant that at some point in the awards ceremony, the great and the good of literary London were required to hoist themselves up from their tables, champagne flutes in hand, tuxes bulging, to toast a novel which hymns the joys of al fresco anal intercourse: "His middle finger pushed into the deep divide, as smooth as a boy's, his fingertip pressed a little way into the dry pucker so that Leo let out a happy grunt." I wonder what everyone had for dessert.

The novel is bookended by the elections of 1983 and 1989, the prime Thatcher years, and any American reader worried that they may have a hard time unraveling the warp and weft of Thatcher's Britain-lovingly inventoried, from its property market spirals to its newfangled "Talkman" portable phones-will find instant connection with Mr. Hollinghurst's summary of the Tory re-election in 1983: "The men did something naughty, and got away with it, and not only did they get away with it but they'd been asked to do it again, with a huge majority." Oh, that kind of re-election.

Our hero is Nick Guest, self-proclaimed aesthete and Henry James fan, who, after graduating, moves in with the family of a college friend, the Feddens, in their Notting Hill townhouse. A social butterfly eager to show off his wings, Nick is soon drawn into the orbit of father Gerald, a blithely brutish Tory M.P., at whose dinner parties and fund-raising soirées he encounters all manner of social climbers, clingers, creepers and other assorted human foliage. "What would Henry James have made of us, I wonder?" one of Gerald's guests inquires of Nick. "He'd have been very kind to us," comes the reply, "he'd have said how wonderful we were and how beautiful we were, he'd have given us incredibly subtle things to say, and we wouldn't have realized until just before the end that he'd seen right through us."

Which is pretty much what we get here: beautiful, wonderful people, who are given lots of incredibly subtle things to say, and who realize only too late-or, in some cases, not at all-that we can see right through them. Mr. Hollinghurst's great gift as a novelist is for social satire as sharp and transparent as glass, catching his quarry from an angle just an inch to the left of the view they themselves would catch in the mantelpiece mirror. Here's a fat-faced M.P. "pop-eyed already from the tussle between pompous discretion and a natural love of scandal." Here's a gaggle of graduates "rowdy and superior at once in the Oxford way." And here's Nick's lover, the fabulous Antoine Ouradi, descended from the cloud strata of the international rich-France? Beirut?-to hold forth at the dinner table: "His technique was to hold a subject up and show his command of it, and then to throw it away in smiling contempt for their interest in it."

Ouch. In fact: double ouch. This sort of compounded disdain-Antoine's for his listeners, Mr. Hollinghurst's for Antoine for disdaining them-is so wonderfully beguiling that it may be some time before the reader plucks up courage to ask if this is all the novel is going to be: a thousand deft flicks of the knife, carving one of those glittering, heartless ice sculptures that command our admiration rather than our love. If you put this novel down, unpraised, what might it say about you behind your back? Better to go on reading. Something of the same queasy gravitational pull keeps Nick bobbing at the Feddon's dinner-table, registering his delicately modulated disapproval, only to return and start his ascent up the greasy pole all over again. The reader may well find himself tiring of the Feddens a little sooner than he does, however, and longing for some breath of fresh air beyond the rococo gilt frames, damask curtains and Louis Quinze tables. How adequate a response to snobs is it to feel subtly superior to them? Isn't it like teaching a thug the error of his ways by beating him up? Just like Waugh's Brideshead Revisited before it, The Line of Beauty can at times feel queasily caught in its own honey trap.

It might have been written, in fact, in order to illustrate the proposition that aesthetic snobbery and social snobbery are two sides of the same coin. Jamesian aesthete turned Tory stooge, Nick's sensibility settles on and conforms to the shapes and surfaces of this world as beautifully, and limply, as gold leaf. When Maggie Thatcher herself puts in a cameo appearance-"her whole head, beaked and crowned, which he saw was a fine if improbable fusion of the Vorticists and the Baroque"-you're not sure whether to give him an A in art history or a D in political science. It's hard to pin down the tone here: a kind of bitchy rapture, half in love with the political kitsch of the Thatcher years. As a record of such, The Line of Beauty is unlikely to be surpassed-whether as exhibit or exposé is for the reader to decide.

Tom Shone, author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Oh, to be P.G. Wodehouse! There aren't many authors whose life one actually covets-not really. To come up with a Dorothy Parker witticism might seem like fun for a millisecond, but you'd also be the one to take that multi-bladed brain home at night and try and find a comfy spot for it on the pillow. From a distance, the life of Hemingway takes on a certain action-packed glamour, but up close it soon palls, and even the most ardent fan would opt out before the morning drinking and shotgun-loading stage. But Wodehouse! "A breeze from start to finish" was how he described his life, much of it spent pipe in hand, flanked by a small squadron of Pekes, nurturing internal-contentment levels that verged on the Buddhist. "Plum lives on the moon" was how his wife Ethel put it. Arriving in Hollywood in 1930-an event capable of causing even the most robust moon to wax and wane-Wodehouse soon settled into Hockneyesque bliss: "I can still picture him," recalled his stepdaughter Leonora, "floating motionless and happy in the pool, looking at his toes, or at the deep blue California sky, while presumably working out the next bit of writing complexity." Aren't writers who go to Hollywood supposed to end up face- down in the pool?

The dangers of such a life to the potential biographer are obvious enough: This "breeze" of a life might just blow right past, leaving the gorilla paws of biographical inquiry clenching and unclenching in thin air. One searches in vain through Wodehouse's private correspondence for any reference to intimacy, or love, reports Robert McCrum in his new biography; a "deafening silence" surrounds his (largely nonexistent) sex life, and his romantic entanglements appear "tantalizingly opaque." Mr. McCrum is, however, possessed of the patience of a man stalking deer, and the portrait that emerges, slowly but indelibly, is easily the best to date.

The product of the sort of mid-ranking colonial household that caused an entire generation of English upper lips to stiffen and draw shut, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of 3 and 15. He was raised instead by a small flotilla of nannies, grandparents and aunts. (Aunts outnumber parents in his fiction, at a rough estimate, by 10 to 1.) At age 12, he was sent to a boarding school, Dulwich College, which would remain Wodehouse's abiding template for heaven on earth: a girl-free idyll of muffins, cricket, cocoa and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle serials, into which Wodehouse fitted exactly and where he excelled at sports-particularly cricket, rugby and boxing. As surprising as it is to find so many contact sports in the biography of any English writer (most of whom are to be found quivering in the showers, towel clamped chastely around their midriff), it makes perfect sense for Wodehouse, whose work is as enlivened as it is horrified by the prospect of human contact, the burly scrum of our affairs with our fellow beings.

The Jazz Age finds Wodehouse holidaying on Long Island with the Fitzgeralds and sweeping up Broadway with Jerome Kern and Cole Porter, but for all his affability, Wodehouse remained something of a bolter, socially. As he confided to a friend: "It's surprising how few people in the world one actually wants to see." Another friend, Denis Mackail, referred to what he called "the Wodehouse Glide"-the progenitor of the small subset of verbs ("glide," "shimmer," "hove," "materialize") that announce the arrival and departure of Wodehouse's best known creation, Jeeves. "I might hear him saying Goodnight, from the middle of the traffic I might catch a glimpse of his rain-coat swinging across the road," said Mackail. "But the general effect was that he had just switched himself off." No writer has been as funny on the subject of withdrawal-or as adept at watermarking the plush interior of consciousness from which we are winkled only under extreme duress. The great joke about Bertie is that a man who finds himself so drawn to the thick of the action should be so magnificently incurious about his surroundings. How often the books pit solipsist against solipsist, to see who dawns on who first: Distracted by their respective idées fixes, they run in ever tighter circles, their conversation sputtering and finally short-circuiting in mutual dumbfoundment.

The only other equal he had in this regard was Samuel Beckett, admittedly not the writer who springs unbidden to mind when Wodehouse is under discussion, but a writer equally haunted by boredom and energized by the clickety-clack rhythm of derailed trains of thought. When Wodehouse woke up one morning, aged 78, he was heard to exclaim, "What? Again!" Remove the exclamation mark and you have pure Beckett. Like Beckett, too, was the startling fixity-bordering on abstraction-with which Wodehouse organized and reorganized the elements of his fiction. Or, as Mr. McCrum puts it, "no other 20th-century English writer of consequence evolves in his mature work as little as Wodehouse." He wrote over 100 novels in under 90 years, with minimum variation along the way, producing ink rather more in the manner of a squid than a writer. Mr. McCrum performs his critical duties as best he can-noting that Bertie Wooster grows slightly more scheming sometime in the 1920's, and the girls slightly less doll-like-but otherwise, is quite happy to pay tribute to the eternal verities of the Wodehouse world, a sun-dappled Eden untouched by literary fashion, or sex, or war, which had the benefit of anachronism even when Wodehouse started out. (By the 1920's, butlers were already old hat, and Edwardian England a distant memory, which is why Jeeves keeps such a tight lip on the First World War: "some slight friction in the Balkans" is how he glancingly reports it to Bertie.)

Having missed him the first time around, geopolitics came back for another pass at Wodehouse in 1940, when, marooned in France during the German occupation, he found himself taken prisoner, interned and then shuttled to Berlin, where he made a series of disastrous broadcasts, on Nazi radio, reassuring his readers that he was O.K. and that internment suited him fine ("it keeps you out of the saloons and gives you time to catch up on your reading"). The broadcasts led to accusations of treason, from which Wodehouse's career took a long time to recover. Mr. McCrum tops and tails his book with the incident. "[T]he second world war finished Wodehouse," he writes; it was "the defining moment of Wodehouse's life," although it's arguable whether it was anything of the sort, since it illustrated only a pre-existing tendency on Wodehouse's part-rampant naïveté-which it also did nothing to change. To his dying day, Wodehouse never did see what all the fuss was about; his shows of contrition were entirely reactionary, like a child's.

You can easily forgive Mr. McCrum his one Big Incident, however, for Wodehouse's life was otherwise free of false dramatics. When Ethel confronted him about his sole extramarital affair, Wodehouse responded, "Who told you?"-an answer so free of bluster that you somehow just know that that marriage was destined to last. Wodehouse, it seems, was one of those quiet souls, happiest when left to till a private furrow, as alarmed by the blandishments of success as by the shame of failure. My favorite story has Wodehouse doing the rounds of Magdalen College with Hugh Walpole, just weeks after the writer Hilaire Belloc called Wodehouse the "best writer of English now alive."

"He said to me," Wodehouse remembered, "'Did you see what Belloc said about you?' I said I had. 'I wonder why he said that.' 'I wonder', I said. Long silence. 'I can't imagine why he said that,' said Hugh. I said I couldn't either. Another long silence. 'It seems such an extraordinary thing to say!' 'Most extraordinary!' Long silence again. 'Ah, well,' said Hugh, having apparently found the solution, 'the old man's getting very old.'"

Tom Shone is the author of Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press).

Needless to say, your average moviegoer could have told you this long ago. In June of 2002, just as President George W. Bush was addressing an audience of graduating cadets at West Point, assuring them that "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish," what were most of the nation’s youth flocking to see? Attack of the Clones, the second of George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, which have long since abandoned Luke Skywalker and his band of merry rebels in order to tell the tale of Darth Vader and Senator Palpatine as they struggle to pull a faltering republic into fine imperial shape. Episode II found Palpatine conspiring in the Senate to exaggerate the outside threat to the republic in order to boost his own powers and build up the republic’s war machine, waging war on a series of ever-more-phantasmal enemies. Remind you of anyone? "Infinite Justice," "Shock and Awe"—even the titles of Dubya’s wars sound like the titles of bad blockbusters.

Imperial stirrings may be at their strongest in Mr. Lucas’ pop-Homeric saga, but they’re everywhere in American movies at the moment, from the pomp and circumstance of Ridley’s Scott’s Gladiator, which revivified the whole ancient-epic genre back in 1999, to this year’s Troy, to the small army of Alexander the Greats waiting around the next bend (Oliver Stone’s version, starring Colin Farrell, and Baz Luhrmann’s, starring Leonardo DiCaprio—a fine face-off between cinema’s leading purveyors of grunting machismo and feathered exoticism). Put it down to the advances in digital technology, or the Oscar success of Lord of the Rings, but even an average summer-franchise flick like Vin Deisel’s The Chronicles of Riddick these days comes bedecked with vast hornet swarms of warring armies, English actors and noble speechifying—and this the sequel to Pitch Black, if you please.

The Empire has struck back, and this time it’s no bad thing. Time was when audiences trooped along to Spartacus to root for Kirk Douglas’ band of renegade slaves as they dared oppose the might of Rome. Now we have Gladiator, in which Russell Crowe does much the same, but with one important difference: No lowly slave, he’s in fact a deposed Roman general, seeking only what was taken from him. No opponent of imperial Rome, he simply wants his fair share. He wants in. It’s not too hard to see what the Hussein family so liked about the movie: According to his translator, interviewed in The Boston Globe, Saddam’s son Uday was "going mad" to find a bootleg copy of the sword-and-sandal epic three days after it was released in the United States. His father, meanwhile, was more of a Mel Gibson man, favoring the sword-and-shaggy-hair of Braveheart. "If I had such a worthy opponent like that man," he was said to have commented, "I could not bring myself to kill him." No guesses as to who the evil empire was, in the Husseins’ reading of those movies. Hollywood’s anti-imperialist parables have been turned on their head and are boomeranging back to the point of origin. American audiences used to watch such martial epics and boo and hiss the evil empire for the facsimile of Britain that it normally was, but the current crop of sword-and-sandal epics are deliberately angled to catch a resemblance to the new world, not the old.

"In those days, there were huge factories that manufactured arms, oil, weapons, artifacts, decorations, fabrics," said Ridley Scott of Gladiator. "You name it, they had it. And they had endorsements—you would have a gladiator endorse oil or endorse wine. They were the Michael Jordans of the day. You have management, and the gladiators could actually buy his way out of his contract. He buys his freedom and becomes more famous than he was as an athlete. So he becomes lord of his own domain. It’s very similar to what happens today." When Troy was released earlier this year, German director Wolfgang Petersen said something similar: "It’s as if nothing has changed in 3,000 years. People are still using deceit to engage in wars of vengeance. Just as King Agamemnon waged what was essentially a war of conquest on the ruse of trying to rescue the beautiful Helen from the hands of the Trojans, George Bush concealed his true motives for the invasion of Iraq." This is more than just a slick top spin of topicality, applied post-9/11, by filmmakers angling for a buck. The scene in Mr. Petersen’s epic in which Achilles (Brad Pitt) drags the body of his enemy, Hector (Eric Bana), behind his chariot reduced New York’s audiences to a chastened hush, and to real tears when Priam (Peter O’Toole) begs Achilles to return Hector’s desecrated body: "I do what no man has done before—I kiss the hands of the man who murdered my son." It was the week of the first Abu Ghraib photos.

Hollywood’s empire-building instincts are nothing new. Nowhere has America’s fascination with the trappings of imperial power been given greater play than at the movie theater—those modern-day pleasure domes. "The Paramount Theatre stands at the Crossroads of the World wherein the Aladdin Lamp of the Camera, and the magic carpet of film, have built an Empire of Delight, and its boundaries are the limits of the earth," proclaimed the New York Paramount when it opened in 1926. From its inception, Hollywood drew audiences with visions of imperial splendor, preferably at its last gasp— Quo Vadis?, The Last Days of Pompeii —seeking high-brow historical dressing for its destructo-fests: "Lava flowing! Houses crumbling! Villages burning!" ran one breathless ad for The Wrath of the Gods (1914). The precise degree to which American audiences were being invited to revel in the glory of empires past, censure them for their hubris, or simply dig the special effects, is hard to determine, although the failure of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in 1916—whose images of Babylonian hellfire reached audiences, with spectacularly bad timing, on the eve of the First World War—suggests that they were not much in the mood for a chastening lesson in How the Mighty Fall.

It was the coming of sound which spelled doom for the genre, dispatching it into a middle-brow marshland from which it has been struggling to escape ever since: In the films of Cecil B. De Mille, a generation of American actors were encouraged to abandon their natural speaking rhythms for a style of diction suggesting they had just been hit around the head with a small, pointy miracle. But like Christ (not to mention De Mille himself), the genre had a second coming, in 1949, when Samson and Delilah sparked off a second pass at the grand historical epics of the silent era: another Ben Hur, another Quo Vadis, another Ten Commandments and Stanley Kubrick’s version of Spartacus —although this time with better production values—making mincemeat of the audience’s moral allegiances: American audiences may have been ethically joined at the hip to Kirk Douglas and his gladiator rebels, sensing a replay of their own country’s origin myth, but thanks to the cool symmetry of Kubrick’s compositions, the film was more in love with the empire it opposed than many would care to admit. Kubrick’s was the old journey: Hollywood may have set out decrying the tyranny of Ancient Rome, but it always ended up digging its Doric columns. The traditional take on these 50’s historical epics is that Hollywood was trying to combat the influence of TV with eye-stretching epic, but another is that in the wake of the Second World War—flush with the military and economic success that war brought—America was seeking out a meet and fitting image of itself. Here, amidst all these splashy colonnades and polished marble, amidst all those orating senators and swishly buckled generals, was the type of film America deserved: world-beating drama for world-beaters.

What brought the genre to its knees for a second time was not just the internal economic dynamics of the overstretched studios, brought to a symbolic head by the $10 million indulgence of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963), or the threat of TV, but Vietnam, its attendant social upheavals and the routing it administered to American self-belief. At the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations in Boston, protesters dumped packages marked "Gulf Oil" and "Exxon" into the harbor and hauled a Nixon effigy about the bay. When official re-enactors cried "Down with King George!", the shout came back: "Down with King Richard!" An official report into the incident concluded: "We entered the Bicentennial year having survived some of the bitterest times in our brief history. We cried out for something to draw us together again." But how? How could the nation celebrate its youth as a scrappy rebel republic when all around it sat all the signs—Vietnam, Exxon, Nixon—that it had transformed into the very empire it once opposed?

The answer came one year later, in 1977. George Lucas’ Star Wars was a watershed moment for Hollywood and for America, a decisive convulsion in the country’s dream life. For audiences, it offered nothing less than virtual patriotism—flag-waving without any of the embarrassment that then clung to the Stars and Stripes, a chance for audiences to cheer on the scrappy rebels once again, boo the evil Empire and see their founding myth play out in the harmless vacuum of space. Mr. Lucas didn’t just give America a hit film: He gave the nation something of its youth, and at a time when it was feeling, if not its age, then certainly a little middle-aged spread. To most Americans in the mid-70’s, the sight of more Americans meant one of two things: 1) anti-Vietnam demonstrations, or 2) queues for gas. But the queues for Star Wars were probably the only form of benign mass congregation America had seen in a decade, outside of a sports stadium. In San Francisco, the manager of the Coronet on Geary Boulevard reported scenes that looked like outtakes from the film’s alien-cantina scene: "I’ve never seen anything like it. We’re getting all kinds. Old people, young people, children, Hari-Krishna groups. They bring cards to play in line. We have checker-players, we have chess-players. People with paints and sequins on their faces. Fruit-eaters like I’ve never seen before. People loaded on grass and LSD. At least one guy’s been here every day."

With Star Wars, Mr. Lucas succeeded in summoning a note that was at once wholly American—a "jaunty, wise-ass, fast, very modern, sort of a teenaged thing, a polished chrome kind of feel," as screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan put it—and wholly exportable at the same time. It was a pan-nationalistic imperial epic. It went down a storm in Russia, where, as one diplomat put it, "R2D2, whatever he speaks, it isn’t English." In Britain, audiences could politely ignore the fact that the Empire sounded British and concentrate instead on the fact that they looked German; in Germany, the reverse. In Italy, critics found the film an allegory for communism, while in France, critics denounced it as "crypto-fascist": The Death Star resembled nothing so much as Albert Speer’s models for Berlin, they pointed out; and even the rebel ceremony at the end was clearly modeled on the 1933 Nuremberg rally. "The effect, which was both solemn and beautiful, was like being in a cathedral of light", wrote one British ambassador of Speer’s light show, thus confirming your suspicion not only that few were immune to fascism’s glint, but that there was probably no period of world history that so calls out for the tender ministrations of Industrial Light and Magic. "After a lapse of 21 years, I was struck by the resemblance to a Cecil B. DeMille set," wrote Speer from his prison cell in Spandau, years later. "Designs of such scale naturally indicate a kind of chronic megalomania …. Perhaps it was less their size than the way they violated the human scale that made them abnormal."

He could as easily have been talking about the next 25 years of American film, for, amongst the ranks of dead Nazi architects, none has had as big an impact on modern Hollywood production design as Speer. It would be Speer’s designs that Anton Furst aped when designing Gotham City in Batman ("Speer could have designed the Met and would have loved the Rockefeller Center," he commented), and also Ridley Scott’s images of Rome in Gladiator ("We copied the Nazis copying the Romans," said his set designer, Arthur Max), while Speer’s ghost has cast a suitably long shadow over the dizzying perspective and endless vanishing points of the Star Wars prequels, in which the Empire is now heading toward triumph under the stewardship of Darth Vader—the third installment, due for release next summer, may mark the first time that a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster has slammed the sympathies of a teenage audience into the side of fascist dictatorship.

"I’d wanted to make it much bigger than it was," said Mr. Lucas of his saga, "much more out there in terms of creatures and aliens and the environments and all that stuff, and I had to really restrict my imagination to a very, very thin line that I could make work …. I was forced constantly to write something very, very small—even though Star Wars seems very big, it was an illusion, it’s technically very small: I was always going, ‘I wanna do this; oh, I can’t do that.’" By the time of the second film, Luke had been revealed as the son of Darth Vader, his connection to the saga no longer accidental; it had been seeking him out all along. The democratic offer of adventure to audiences was subtly rescinded; the Force, previously open to all, was now merely a matter of good breeding. By the time of the third film, it had changed again; Luke was now revealed as not just the son of a lord, but the brother of a princess; the Force was now by royal appointment only. And so the saga became less American, more European and dynastic in tone, more hermetically sealed from outside interference. As Han Solo, always the voice of reason in the series, says, "I’m out of it for a little while, and everyone gets delusions of grandeur." These delusions are given the rule of the roost in the prequels, which feel firmly planted in the old world, not the new, what with their faux neoclassical architecture, their flurry of honorifics ("the Princess," "your honor") and their obsession with dynastic pedigree: Anakin Skywalker’s immaculate conception revealing the Force, previously open to all, then by royal decree only, to be exercised by divine right alone.

"I’m a big history buff," said Mr. Lucas, "and one of the things that fascinated me was how certain republics, certain democracies, don’t get overthrown, which is sort of how we think of it today. They are given up to a tyrant. The people vote the tyrant in and then leave him there. That happened with Augustus Caesar, Augustus, it happened with Napoleon, it happened with Hitler. You can see very easily the frailties of a democracy, and how the people ultimately have the psychological need for a father figure just to tell them what to do, and there are a lot of machinations that go on behind the scenes, where the people in power are manipulating the people, like Hitler did. You can actually see there’s a lot of similarities going on today." So now we know: The evil galactic Empire turned out to be not Britain, though they sounded British, nor German, though they looked like Nazis, but America itself.

Mr. Lucas’ gifts as a filmmaker may have atrophied, but his skills as a popular-pulse-taker clearly have not, for the prequels’ problems with plot are wholly representative—good guys who are too invulnerable to be interesting and a set of villains too phantasmal to snap into any shape: asymmetrical plotting for the era of asymmetrical warfare. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that with the prequels, Mr. Bush’s America has in a way gotten the Star Wars movies it deserves: otiose, confused, landlocked by their own scale. If there’s a single problem besetting American movies right now, it’s the implications that being global top dog have on a film culture that’s geared, right down to its last molecule, towards singing the praises of the underdog. The late 70’s may have been the last time when audiences could cheer on a tiny X-wing as it took on and defeated the vast Death Star, or a leaky boat as it battled a Great White. Now, we have the equally matched combatants of the Spider-Man or Matrix movies, where Agent Smith just keeps replicating and Neo simply downloads whatever skills he needs—resulting in perfect deadlock, complete dramatic stasis, infinitely restageable and endless war. Hollywood has seemingly lost the fine art of presenting the unequally rigged battle that drove its blockbusters in the 70’s and early 80’s. This may be due in part to the dizzying ease afforded its superheroes by digital technology, which has gradually snipped away at American audiences’ instinctive feel for the underdog, but it also has an uncanny echo in the predicament America found itself in after Sept. 11, when the nation found itself playing on the world stage the role usually meted out to the dastardly Brits or Nazis on the big screen. Al Qaeda versus America, funnily enough, is a story America is used to telling, but from the opposite angle—from the point of view of David, not Goliath—and for the moment, at least, it has left Hollywood’s moral gyroscopes spinning.

"Look at where we are right now," said Mr. Scott, "where for the first time we have someone who is so literally, physically powerful—the U.S.—in terms of their hitting power, and they’re suddenly no longer able to say, ‘We’re the police force of the world’—because they’ve found a new enemy, and that new enemy doesn’t care if it lives or dies. That’s unique—and therefore all your policies have to be much, much more carefully thought out. You’re talking about a new enemy; you’re dealing with a world that’s expanding out of its frustration and fury."

The real question for Hollywood, as for America, is not whether the empire can strike back, but how.

Tom Shone’s Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer will be published by the Free Press in December.

Do you wish that you’d found the time to have sex with Frank Sinatra? Is it a source of eternal regret that—in between bouts at the dry cleaner and walking the dog and the gym—you never did squeeze a young Marlon Brando between your sheets? If so, then Gloria Vanderbilt’s book, It Seemed Important at the Time, might seem just the tonic. Billed as a "romance memoir," this is Ms. Vanderbilt’s third pass at her life story—after Once Upon a Time (1985) and A Mother’s Story (1997)—testimony, at the least, to quite heroic levels of editorial patience. I mean to say, two whole books, from proof to page to printer, before someone at Simon & Schuster finally snapped: "Look, give us the dish, will you?" And what dish: "[E]yes like steel found me, made me sense that I could be the stream to feed the roots, for his love seemed like a tree, needing a strange alchemy from my eyes—green moss, absorbing his eyes that shut me out …. All he needed was me to ease his dark-blue pain. But was it dark blue? Or simply dark gobbledy-gook?" How nice of you to ask.

That’s Lawrence Tierney under all that compost, although he sounds more like Bilbo Baggins in an off-moment, but then pen portraits are not really Ms. Vanderbilt’s thing. She moves too fast for starters, whisking us from school, to moonlight serenades at the Waldorf-Astoria and her first engagement, to Catalina Island on the arm of Howard Hughes, in the space of the first 20 pages. It wasn’t to be with Howard. What was to be was her marriage to "world-famous" conductor Leopold Stokowski ("archangel come to earth, entering my body, possessing me as I breathed, in and out, out and in"), although Leopold is just a tap of the baton before the full orchestra unleashed by Marlon Brando ("If Leopold was God, here was Zeus"), who calls her up one day and flies her out to L.A. for dinner and a digestif. "We were alone at last. Sounds like a romance novel doesn’t it?" Possibly, although Gloria can’t help but notice that Brando keeps a picture of Marlon Brando on his bedside table, and she spends the next week waiting for him to call. "He didn’t. Instead it was Gene Kelly dancing in, singing in the rain of my heart, so to speak …. We drifted off into another room and started kissing." Onward and upward! Occasionally her iron discipline wobbles: "From now on I’d give myself only to my work," she announces on page 68, putting Gene behind her, only to hear the telephone ringing again two pages later: "ringie ding-ding …. Frank Sinatra was in town and wanted to meet me." Dagnabbit!

Sinatra, too, departs without so much as a goodbye, leaving Gloria’s "secret heart"—of which we hear much—still intact, although somewhere along the line, somewhere between Leopold and Marlon, Gene and Frank, the exact nature of Ms. Vanderbilt’s achievement begins to dawn on the reader: It Seemed Important at the Time is a memoir written without the slightest hindrance from anything resembling self-knowledge—written from within a ground zero of complete bafflement. Sure, it comes decked out with the usual self-help clichés on such matters as surviving divorce ("Try not to think of its as ‘failure’ … bring some yoga into the picture"); and there’s an awful lot of "searching" and "seeking," but these airy, absent-minded verbs only strengthen the impression of a life lived at the behest of drives way beyond their owner’s comprehension, like Wittgenstein’s leaf, fondly imagining itself lord of its fate as it’s blown hither and thither down the street: "I think I’m going to go this way … wait … no, how about this over there …. "

This need not be a reprehensible thing, or even anything worth remarking upon—who can honestly claim otherwise, particularly after midnight? The crosswinds of unfettered sexual ego can make for quite a ride, as long as you keep your eyes open and your wits about you; but you finish Ms. Vanderbilt’s book thinking how damn unobservant these sexual narcissists can be as they bump up against one another, lightly smacking foreheads in the night: "What did we talk about at dinner? I haven’t a clue," she writes of dinner with Marlon. Again and again, Ms. Vanderbilt achieves intimate physical congress with someone, only to write about them in such a way as to suggest a quick five minutes spent in the company of their press clippings: Sinatra is "On the one side Mafia-dark, on the other Clark Kent light"; Howard Hughes is "handsome as a movie star," while Ms. Vanderbilt has repeated recourse to italics in order to convey the unique quiddity of the soul in question: "It was him …. Him and me." I don’t wish to cast any doubts on Ms. Vanderbilt’s credentials, but is she absolutely sure she slept with these people? Only once does a resonant detail slip through, princess-and-pea fashion, when she spies John Huston on a plane, and—more importantly—the tongue of John Huston: "so pink—pink as a Popsicle, and I couldn’t stop looking at it." Truman Capote is on hand to administer the killer quip: "Honey, that’s because it’s had a lot of practice!"

It was Capote, of course, who did for Gloria and her gang in Answered Prayers, and it says something for Capote’s book, whose neat drafts of vitriol can be hard to take on an empty stomach, that it now reads just slightly less unfairly than it did. By comparison, Ms. Vanderbilt’s is a much more tepid read, its matte surfaces dulled by self-absorption and further scored by the prose equivalent of wire wool: It seems light and fluffy enough, but it’s brittle to the touch, and beneath all the fluttering talk of "secret hearts" and "Que Sera, Sera" sentiments, it’s not too hard to catch a glint of something a lot more hard-hearted. When one ex-lover, the movie executive David Begelmann, commits suicide, Ms. Vanderbilt remarks that he left 20 suicide notes, but "not one for me, boo hoo!" It’s hard to know what to say.

Tom Shone’s Blockbuster: Or, How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer will be published by the Free Press in November.

It looks unassuming enough, just like any other reference book: weighty, blockish and solid as a brick. The author, too, sounds foursquare: a couple of film biographies under his belt, now occasionally writes for The New York Times ; originally British, now "lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two sons." He sounds a doughty enough citizen, this David Thomson, and could easily pass for any one of the harmless drudges who litter the world of film scholarship, lining it with their waddings of prose and papery opinions. Until you read the man, that is. Then you hit upon this kind of thing:

"He was the squat, wild-eyed spirit of ruined Europe, shyly prowling in and out of Warner Brothers shadows, muttering fiercely to himself, his disbelief forever mislaid." (That's Peter Lorre.)

Or this: "Imagine a film about Harvey Keitel, the actor so good, so persistent, yet so regularly denied at the highest table; ceaseless in his fury, his bitterness, forever hurtling forward in that cold, determined aura that is a mix of menace and resentment. What a role! And De Niro would probably get it."

Encountering David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film for the first time can be a little disorienting, like coming on a peacock in a coal mine. I can remember when I first stumbled upon it, in a bookstore in London almost 10 years ago. I sat down to find out what he thought about Fred Astaire and Stanley Kubrick. He found Astaire "clinching evidence of the medium's potential." On the other hand, all the chilly Kubrick "gives us, finally, is the chance to serve." I was hooked and haven't stopped reading the book since, but then Mr. Thomson hasn't stopped writing it either. He began it in the 70's, updated it in 1980, then again in 1994, and now-the number of entries swelled to 1,300-it stands before us again, as grand and eccentric as Samuel Johnson's dictionary, or one of the madder, more imaginary encyclopedias you'll find in the pages of Borges.

As a work of pure reference, Mr. Thomson's book is never going to be your first port of call. Some entries boast biographies, others don't; sometimes you get a filmography, sometimes not. And if it's the usual wan career overview you're after-the opinions both thinned by summation and pinched for space-think again. Mr. Thomson writes as if filling the sky. Here is Harry Dean Stanton, his face "like the road in the West." Here is Sam Peckinpah, "like Monument Valley at magic hour seen in the rearview mirror." Here, in similarly geological vein, but rather less happily, is Richard Gere, like "a wind tunnel at dawn, waiting for work, all sheen, inner curve, and poised emptiness."

A great put-down, I guess, although as with the best of Thomson, you do have to guess, for his bejeweled similes often leave you too dazzled to know for sure. What about this, of Astaire, who acts like "a philosopher at a bingo session"? Or this of Hugh Grant: "an incipient sneeze looking for a vacant nose"? The first is praise, the second a put-down, although I had to look it up again to be sure. This is as it should be, of course, for the only real trick with film criticism is to forget about the criticism and tend to your powers of description: successfully evoke, and the judgments will look after themselves. When Mr. Thomson writes that Jacques Tourneur's " Out of the Past is terrific-and not good enough: it is like a brilliant palace made of matchsticks, by a prisoner on a life sentence," you're halfway to wondering what the prison food is like before you notice what a strange world you have unwittingly entered, where a film can be "terrific" and yet still "not good enough." What slippery, silver-backed Wonderland is this?

The world according to David Thomson, of course-a fine place to be if you're Cary Grant, or Robert Mitchum, or Mae West ("intrigue an audience, and then pause, and they are yours forever"), but a harsh and exacting environment for directors, particularly of the young and brilliant variety. Lars von Trier, for instance, is found to be "brilliant in a way that gives that term a bad name." Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is "beautiful in ways that make beauty the first thing one notices." This is Mr. Thomson's way: He leads you up the path with some obvious virtue like "beauty" or "brilliance," then cuts you loose to fend for yourself. So you think you hanker for "genius"? Mr. Thomson puts the term under house arrest and slaps it in the handcuffs of quotation marks. John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola and Frank Capra, he writes, are "storytellers capable of … well, 'genius' is the word Hollywood would use. But that genius is not enough. There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic …. There is something in the best of American films that is not good enough, and that is dangerous."

Cool. I haven't a clue what he means, but I get the feel of it-the rhythm of that exalted ascent up standards of truly Alpine height. For Mr. Thomson is an unabashed greatness freak, and if he guards the term "genius," he does so jealously, like a lover. He's at his most penetrating on the likes of Welles and Mr. Coppola, those great Falstaffian burnouts, scalded by the medium they touched, nursing their wounds in semi-retirement: "As if Welles knew that Kane would hang over his own future, regularly being used to denigrate his later works, the film is shot through with his vast, melancholy nostalgia for self-destructive talent."

There is a lot of Welles in Kane , and a lot of Thomson in Welles, particularly the Welles of the 70's-the Welles of the velvety voice-overs and amused self-exile. Mr. Thomson is, I think, the last of the great film writers, up there with Graham Greene and Pauline Kael-not least because he has the courage to wonder aloud whether film is greatness' proper medium, the medium where greatness can truly strut its stuff and get on with the business of being great. How ruthlessly Hollywood cut down Welles and Mr. Coppola, and how accommodating it is to more efficient talents like Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. Hence the melancholy that envelops the book from its introduction, where Mr. Thomson is to be found wondering "whether I am heavier, or less 'passionate'-or are the movies less?" Spoken like Norma Desmond herself.

As with Desmond, the pose can't sustain itself; the melancholy wilts in the California sun. This new volume finds Mr. Thomson grinding his teeth aplenty, but also breaking into a big, bright smile at the thought of Jim Carrey, Wes Anderson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jude Law and Christina Ricci ("our Shirley Temple on leaving the asylum where Frances Farmer was ruined"). Again the snarl and rueful backwards glance at wrecked talent, but nothing can disguise the fun he had writing that. David Thomson is here to sing the multiplex blues-sitting there, at the back of the cinema, amid the torn velour and spilled Pepsi-but this book is the most beautiful of torch songs, and more than bright enough to light up the gloom.

Tom Shone is a film critic for the London Daily Telegraph.