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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 val- ues” 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 sud- denly 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 tran- scendent 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

30 Thomas S. Hibbs

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 Sus-

pects (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 con- dition 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, cannibal- ism in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), and maiming in

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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. Criti- cisms 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 of the quest for such standards. Gravity cannot be sustained. Audiences are entertained by the demonic superheroes who put on a good show and are much more clever and wittier than other, conventional characters. A character such as Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs is at first terrifying, then entertaining, and finally humorous as, in the film’s final frames, he responds to a question as to his plans by saying, wryly, that he’ll be having an old friend for dinner.