Thomson himself has trouble keeping the disparate elements of his book in his head, or under control. His chapters are like different camera angles on the same landscape, each one taking a subject and attempting to develop a new theme--Chaplin's loneliness and narcissism; the saga of Erich von Stroheim's 1924 epic Greed; the influence of studio budgets; Thomson's (incredibly fanciful) connection between movies, which allow you to fall in love with a stranger, and the rising rate of divorce. Yet the particularity of each chapter dissolves in a blurry haze of aperçus that could appear in any other chapter.

The Whole Equation purports to offer a history of Hollywood, but this little epic of a big American business seems to consist mostly of random thoughts jotted down on cocktail napkins at Spago. Vapid generality--"Very subtly, a democratic society begins to be treated as an audience or a mass, and so it goes"--alternates with sentences that make Derrida at his most opaque look like Newsday--"And the concentration camps are often spoken of as factories of death, places where the urge toward genocide, or unkindness, was subjected to modern ergonomics, the search for greater efficiency." Never mind that unkindness is a less than apt description of what took place in Auschwitz, or that in the concentration camps the urge to genocide was not subjected to anything. No one responsible for planning the Final Solution ever said anything about making a better office chair. This book can be maddening.

Which is a shame. To go from The Whole Equation to Thomson's classic Biographical Dictionary of Film is to experience two different categories of writing. The earlier book is magnificent and necessary. It's like a great novel about Hollywood; all it lacks is a plot. On Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair: "He looked like a stick being toyed with by a lush cat." And on Billy Wilder, whom Thomson appreciates, but appraises with his characteristically cool, worldly, weary eye (and with a sly allusion to Wilder's Sunset Boulevard): "As it is, too often I feel he's dead, or lost, to the life of his films, a grinning corpse floating on top, preserved by sardonic fluids and voice-over." Make that a devastating weariness.

Just released in a revised edition as The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Thomson's Dictionary is a masterpiece of rich insight into the culture of movie-making. That's not to say the book isn't full of bizarre judgments. About Marlon Brando's ontologically pure performance in On the Waterfront, Thomson writes, "Today...it is hardly possible to be moved by [Brando] in On the Waterfront for noticing the vast technical trick he is performing." That seems just plain cuckoo. And what "trick" might that be? Thomson never says.

But then Thomson's idiosyncratic brilliance asserts itself. Reflecting on Brando's famous scorn for film, Thomson wonders if there was "something in Brando that found so much pretending unwholesome or dishonorable? In his withdrawal, as much as in his best work, he has altered the way we think of acting." It's such a simple-seeming question to ask about Brando, obvious even, but no one thinks to ask it. And Thomson's suggestion that Brando's discomfort with artifice has swayed our conception of acting resonates broadly. Was Brando's distance from his craft even as he practiced it responsible for an evolution in American irony? Did his calculated eccentric embellishments of a character--an English accent here, a woman's dress there--undermine his famous naturalism, and certify American audiences' innate mistrust of art's attempt to imitate life? Maybe Stanley Kowalski lurks behind reality television. Thomson has a poet's inferring touch.

The best parts of The Whole Equation lie in such suggestive formulations. Thomson beautifully writes, "what is film noir but the night with shadows?" He turns a phrase about the "crusty moral realism that kept Lillian Gish from being glamorous," which sets you thinking. The British philosopher T.E. Hulme once said that romanticism was spilled religion; glamour is spilled romanticism, and there is something morally depleted about glamour. Yet vast numbers of people across the world sit rapt before glamorous images. Is glamour, therefore, a world problem? As I write these lines, AOL news presents its readers with this top headline: "Pitt, Aniston Split; Stay Friends." Under that comes the section "More News," where the headline reads: "Tsunami Toll Tops 150,000." That is a kind of sickness. Or is it elitist, antidemocratic and smug to say so?

It would be good if mainstream movie reviews took up those questions about the nature of moviehood, good if they cast into a new idiom Dwight Macdonald's old categories of masscult and midcult. Your highly influential newspaper film review really should not, in fact, be a review at all, but a reflection on the vastly extended culture of movies and movie celebrity. Film critics working for powerful newspapers could approach a movie the way a good reporter approaches a political figure or event, with detachment and dogged skepticism. But, as Thomson gratifyingly points out, newspapers are too dependent on revenue from movie-industry advertising to publish too many honest considerations of film.

Thomson is far more lenient toward Hollywood's own pursuit of the buck, and he's right to be so. Art has never been disentangled from commerce, and from the beginning Hollywood was about commerce before it was about art. For Thomson, the "whole equation" of Hollywood is, simply, the aspiration "to be show business and art at the same time." Or, as he also puts it, "the urge to tell [movie] stories is inseparable from the wish to make money." Maybe, in the end, the desire to camouflage that wish behind the pretense of an idealized populist decency is what is responsible for all those Hollywood movies about the hard-pressed little guy up against plutocratic big guys.

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