The Void at the Center

Peter Rainer’s commentary on film noir (“Out of the Past, Darkly,” April 8) is welcome recognition of an emerging post- noir crop of films and pays overdue homage to this unique American style. However, he overlooked the core noir theme: no moral center within the characters.

Whether it was a result of postwar knowledge of man’s inhumanities or anxiety that their jobs were being stolen by women, the returning soldiers brought subliminal paranoia and feelings of alienation back with them that permeated the culture and created a vacuum of values.

With a post-Contragate/Jim Bakker awareness that each soul contains the seed of corruption, this lack of moral center again becomes valid. It is not merely our reaction to the material quest or mistrust of the industrial/commodities complex that strikes fear into the collective heart; it’s the knowledge that we too could fall from grace.

MARK BOYD

Pasadena