Product Description

In a striking new interpretation of film noir, Thomas Hibbs mines the philosophy and theology of these dark films to reveal a subtle but profound insistence on the reality of redemption. Properly understood, these tales of spiritual quest assume a new importance amid the nihilism of contemporary popular culture. Repudiating old-fashioned American optimism but never quite succumbing to despair, noir depicts a world of captivating characters who, in the words of Pascal, seek with groans.

Often denounced as nihilistic and even degenerate, film noir seems an unlikely antidote to the hopelessness and banality of modern popular culture, which Hibbs analyzed in his landmark book Shows About Nothing. Yet beginning with films of the classic noir period and continuing with more recent neo-noir and beyond, Hibbs reveals a theme of hard-won, penitential redemption. Despite its roots in the heyday of Hollywood Marxism, noir even displays a deeply conservative bent redemption is personal not political, and the progressive promise of scientific rationalism is sharply limited.
Hibbs s ability to expose a film s philosophical underpinnings gives his analysis a compelling depth. His master stroke in Arts of Darkness is to approach noir through the thought of Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century philosopher of the hidden God whose tragic account of the human condition anticipates the alienation of contemporary culture and explains the power of noir s overlooked religious themes of quest and redemption.
The subject matter of Arts of Darkness what Hibbs calls American noir is expansive. It includes not only the familiar shadowy works of the 1940s and 50s but also many recent films in which Hibbs detects a convergence of noir and the religious quest.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #214011 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

Review
Hibbs makes a unique and valuable contribution to this endlessly fascinating subject, offering an interpretive grid for understanding the neo-gnosticism of so many popular films. Hibbs deserves much credit here for thickening the moral conscience of moviegoers beyond counting the number of dirty bits or blasphemies uttered. He is not afraid to talk religion and thereby give some recognizable content to the concept of redemption: "The religion of a humiliated, crucified God--inconceivable to natural reason--accounts for the paradoxes of human nature." --First Things, April 2008

Once the Sixties generation began its Long March through the institutions, conservatives started to despair of ever being able to counter what they saw as the uniform degradation of American culture. In the past couple of decades, however, more and more critics on the right have looked past the surfaces of seemingly antinomian and relativistic popular art and found serious and often positive meanings in it. One such writer is Thomas Hibbs, a Baylor University professor of ethics and culture, film critic for National Review Online, and author of Shows About Nothing, a 1999 study in which he found Nietzscheanism to be rampant in American pop culture. In Arts of Darkness, Hibbs examines the distinctively American popular art form known as noir.

Hibbs writes that, although noir seems bleak and cynical on the surface, the meaning behind the phenomenon is a good deal more complex and significantly more positive: What is significant about these films is not just that they present a dark and dismal world but that they display their main characters as on a quest for love, truth, justice, and even redemption. What interests Hibbs is the convergence of noir with the religious quest : Noir arises from the same impulses that prompted Pascal to write of the hiddenness of God, and of the faithful believer who seeks with groans.

Hibbs sees noir as engaging and critiquing the two major philosophical dangers of modernity: nihilism and Gnosticism. He writes: Enlightenment theorists promise liberation from various types of external authority: familial, religious, and political. But an unintended consequence of the implementation of Enlightenment theories is the elimination of freedom. The film noir vividly expresses this truth, as the protagonists find themselves ever more deeply enmeshed in the complex, bureaucratized, soulless modern cities and webs of uncaring institutions that are the consequence of the Enlightenment passion for controlling the world through science. In portraying the tragic limitations of the Enlightenment project, Hibbs argues, noir shows liberal modernity as a potential source of nihilism, a human existence devoid of any ultimate purpose or fundamental meaning, where the great tasks of inquiry and the animating quests that inspired humanity in previous ages cease to register in the human soul, a place where the very notion of a soul is suspect. --National Review, Feb 25, 2008

About the Author
THOMAS S. HIBBS, PH.D., established his reputation as a highly original critic with his earlier book Shows About Nothing. His reviews and essays appear regularly in the national media. A former professor of philosophy at Boston College, Dr. Hibbs is now the Dean of the Honors College and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

Customer Reviews

arts of Darkness
This is a great book for those who are seeking a way to a more thoughtful existence. The author uses what some might consider "popular culture" as an entrance into a deeper way of thinking and living that will have you viewing everything in the world differently.

Arts of Darkness
Thomas Hibbs' Book, "Arts of Darkness," is an insightful and enjoyable journey into the world of Film Noir. Hibbs' discusses the themes of redemption in Noir through the vehicle of philosophic minds such as Blaise Pascal.

I would highly recommend this book.

A Rare Gem
I've only read this book in sections, but I wanted to give a brief review. Mainly I wanted to recommend it. Basically, if you're interested in noir and neo-noir films in relationship to Gnosticism, then there isn't a whole lot else even out there. This is a rare gem.

I've looked around quite a bit, and as far as I can tell there is only one other book that is comparable. Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film by Eric G. Wilson covers similar territory as this book. I actually read Wilson's book first and I was happy to discover that another author was actually writing about this convergence of subjects.

Both authors bring together diverse ideas using perceptive insight into cultural patterns. These books go much deeper than most books about movies.