The hero of “The Power of Movies” (Pantheon, 210 pages, $24) is a middle-aged academic full of neuroses. He has an overpowering disgust for the human form, “all armpits and bodily fluids – hairy meat, basically.” But he is nonetheless a creature of animal desires; when he goes to the movies, he loves to watch “almost anything with vampires in it – or Denise Richards suitably attired.” In a nightmare, he arrives at an Oxford high-table dinner dressed inappropriately and is unable to find a clean glass for his drink. In another dream, he complains that dating is hard because he is “not Brad Pitt.” The highbrow and lowbrow do daily battle in this man; he lectures on philosophy and – just like Wittgenstein, as he consoles himself – escapes whenever possible to a “mindless movie” to satisfy his “base self.”

This characterization might suggest that “The Power of Movies” is a novel, perhaps by Philip Roth or Richard Ford, whose title ironically comments on a man’s weakness, or corresponds to the title of the opus at which he toils. In fact, it is a book of film theory, and the hero is its author, Colin McGinn.