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pessimism of classic noir is hardly congenial to the sorts of comic films that flourished in America during the same time period.

      This does not mean, however, that comedy is utterly alien to classic noir. The depiction of characters as trapped in a labyrinth at the mercy of a hostile fate can transform the tone of the action from the gravely tragic to the absurdly comic. What initially seems serious and ominous can, over time, come to seem humorous. Angst and fear can be sustained for only so long; endless and pointless terror becomes predictable and laughable. But the shift to a comic perspective involves more than the mere passage of time; comedy is more than tragedy plus time. What matters is the passage of time without any prospect of hope or intelligibility. Life in an absurd universe is rife with comic possibilities. Struggle and striving begin to appear superfluous and foolish. A classic noir film such as Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) toys with its main character to such an extent that his continued gravity can come to seem a self-inflicted farce. Similarly, the degradation of affection—the perverse erotic attractions in which noir often wallows—lends itself to wry, detached irony, the dominant tone in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950).

      The baroque sensibility of noir has always contained the seeds of stylistic excess, even of the celebration of style for its own sake. In neo-noir, the accentuation of hopelessness and the overtly self-conscious deployment of artistic technique make the turn to dark comedy nearly inevitable. By contrast with classic noir films, whose style is reserved and less self-conscious, neo-noirs almost inevitably draw attention to their style, going so far in some cases as to make style itself the subject of the film. In the very act of recognizing the artifice, we are in on the joke, on the sleight of hand performed by the filmmaker. The result is amusement, even laughter.

      As Foster Hirsch points out, one of the distinguishing features of neo-noir is a “cavalier amorality” that can steep viewers in a “depraved point of view.”³ Jean-Pierre Chartier's early and negative reaction to noir seems to apply more aptly to certain neo-noir films. Chartier lamented noir's “pessimism and disgust toward humanity.” Devoid of even the most “fleeting image of love” or of characters who might “rouse our pity or sympathy,” noir, he felt, presents “monsters, criminals whose evils nothing can excuse, whose actions imply that the only source for the fatality of evil is in themselves.”⁴

      Nietzsche and Nihilism

      There are, then, important links between neo-noir and nihilism. According to its most trenchant analysts, nihilism involves the dissolution of standards of judgment; for the nihilist, there is no longer any basis for distinguishing truth from falsity, good from evil, noble from base action, or higher from lower ways of life. Nietzsche thought that nihilism would be the defining characteristic of the twentieth century, an epoch in which “the highest values” would “devalue themselves” and the “question ‘why?’” would find “no answer.”⁵ Nietzsche is most famous for proclaiming the death of God. He certainly does not mean that a previously existing supreme being has suddenly expired; instead, he holds that the notion of God, created by humans to serve a variety of needs, is becoming increasingly less credible. But Nietzsche does not limit the effects of nihilism to religion; nihilism undermines all transcendent claims and standards, including those underlying modern science and democratic politics. The great questions and animating visions—those regarding truth, justice, love, and beauty—that previously gave shape and purpose to human life no longer resonate in the human soul. All moral codes are seen to be merely conventional and, hence, optional.

      For most human beings, decline, diminution, and despair accompany nihilism. The bulk of humanity falls into the category of the last man: “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. What is love? What is a star? Thus asks the last man and blinks. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.” The contented, petty last men create a society that is ruthlessly homogeneous (“everybody wants the same, everybody is the same”) and addicted to physical comfort (“one has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night; one has a regard for health”).⁶ These are the passive nihilists, the pessimists, the representatives of “the decline and recession of the power of the spirit.”⁷

      But nihilism is “ambiguous.” If, in one sense, nihilism is the “unwelcome guest,” it is also an opportunity, clearing a path for “increased power of the spirit.”⁸ Active nihilists see the decline of traditional moral and religious systems as an occasion for the thoroughgoing destruction of desiccated ways of life and the creation of a new order of values. Active nihilists, the philosopher-artists of the future, will engage in the “transvaluation of values.” They stand beyond good and evil and engage in aesthetic self-creation, a project that is an affront to society's religious and democratic conventions, rooted, as they are, in moral absolutes or democratic consensus.

      At times, Nietzsche's remedy for the nihilistic epoch, his path beyond nihilism, promotes a particularly virulent form of aristocracy. As he puts it frankly in the chapter “What Is Noble?” in Beyond Good and Evil,

      Every enhancement of the type “man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and so it will be again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or another. With that pathos of distance that grows out of the ingrained difference between strata…keeping down and keeping at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either—the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rare, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states…the continual “self-overcoming of man.”⁹

      What Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance is at work in a variety of neo-noir dramas, from Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) and Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) to The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995).¹⁰ In these neo-noir films, certain characters rise above the noir labyrinth, not by passing through it or learning to navigate its shifting waters but by acts of diabolical will. Impervious to the laws of the human condition, these characters get away with lives of criminality. This shift constitutes a movement in the direction of nihilism and a recoiling from the fundamentally democratic world of classic noir. The human condition is no longer universal; the noir trap is no longer seen as an indelible feature. Instead, it constrains only those who lack the willpower, or will to power, necessary to rise above, and control, conventions. Neo-noir's greatest departure from classic noir consists in a turn to aristocratic nihilism. The most resourceful of these characters are in control of the noir plot, using their cunning and artistry to ensnare others. Were it not so cumbersome, we might call this the nihilistic myth of the American super-antihero.

      Nihilistic comedy has no limits on the targets of its humor; it turns the most atrocious of human acts—rape and beating in Cape Fear, cannibalism in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), and maiming in Reservoir Dogs—into quasi-comic expressions of exuberant amoral energy. It mocks our longing for justice, for the protection of the innocent and the punishment of the heinous criminal, and for truth and understanding. The comic unraveling of the horror genre from within begins with the celebration of the evil antihero as beyond good and evil, as more interesting, attractive, and complex than the purportedly good characters in a story. Once this nihilistic move has been made, it is quite natural to repudiate and mock properly human longing for justice, truth, and love. Nihilism, as Nietzsche saw, entails the diminution of human aspiration to the vanishing point; it involves the death of man.

      These are the consequences of the nihilistic turn in neo-noir, which repudiates justice, love, and truth in favor of aesthetic self-creation. Criticisms of conventional conceptions of justice, truth, and other ideals are not necessarily nihilistic. Indeed, the very notion of a critique presupposes that one has, implicitly at least, an awareness that things are not as they should be, that it would be better for things to be otherwise. As Shakespeare writes in King Lear, “This is not the worst, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’” (4.1). But thoroughgoing nihilism eviscerates any such standards or, what is more to the point, even the intelligibility

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