Showing the Scars

Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, by Thomas S. Hibbs (Spence, 336 pp., $27.95)

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.

About the Author

S. T. Karnick

Mr. Karnick is the director of research for the Heartland Institute.

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Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, by Thomas S. Hibbs (Spence, 336 pp., $27.95)

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.