
Lawyer, Iraq vet, worse chess player than I should be. Founder of #WiseguyMovieClub. Tweets do not even reflect my own views.
Chicago
Joined June 2011
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Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
Moral Ambiguity in Film Noir
One of the defining characteristics of film noir is moral ambiguity: the erosion of clear distinctions between innocence and guilt, virtue and corruption, freedom and complicity.
Unlike the traditional Hollywood hero, whose moral identity is generally stable, the noir protagonist inhabits a world in which ethical judgment is continually compromised by desire, ambition, fear, or self-deception. His tragedy often lies not in his inability to recognize wrongdoing, but in his willingness to participate in it.
Four representative films:
1. Double Indemnity (1944) Billy Wilder
In Double Indemnity, moral corruption emerges from the intersection of desire, greed, and the illusion of control. Neff’s intelligence becomes an instrument of his own destruction: the very qualities that make him professionally competent enable him to rationalize murder. His moral failure is inseparable from his belief that he can manipulate circumstances without becoming their victim.
Wilder exposes the fragility of masculine confidence and the seductive appeal of transgression. Walter’s downfall is not simply the consequence of a femme fatale’s manipulation, but of his own desire to experience himself as a man capable of defying both moral and social conventions.
2.Out of the Past (1947) Jacques Tourneur
In Out of the Past, moral ambiguity arises from the distance between knowledge and action. Jeff Bailey recognizes deception and anticipates betrayal, yet repeatedly allows desire to override his judgment. His apparent detachment conceals a profound vulnerability: he understands the forces that compromise his freedom without being able, or entirely willing, to resist them.
It complicates the relationship between fate and responsibility. Jeff is pursued by his past, but that past is partly the consequence of his own decisions. His tragedy lies in the recognition that moral clarity does not necessarily restore freedom or erase responsibility.
3. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) Tay Garnett
In this movie, passion becomes the means through which the protagonists attempt to escape the limitations of their ordinary lives. Their pursuit of freedom, however, depends on an act that destroys the possibility of innocence.
The film exposes the contradiction between desire and moral responsibility. Frank and Cora imagine that eliminating an obstacle will allow them to construct a different future, but their transgression transforms the relationship itself. Love becomes inseparable from suspicion, guilt, and mutual dependence.
The central irony is that their attempt to liberate themselves produces a more profound captivity. What begins as a rebellion against circumstance becomes submission to the consequences of their own choices.
4. The Killers (1946) Robert Siodmak
In The Killers, moral ambiguity is inseparable from passivity and the gradual surrender of individual agency. The Swede’s resignation suggests a man who has ceased to believe that his actions can alter the course of his life.
Siodmak presents fatalism not merely as an external force but as a psychological condition. The protagonist’s vulnerability emerges from the collapse of his capacity for judgment and resistance, particularly when desire and betrayal become entangled.
The film also complicates the idea of moral responsibility through its fragmented narrative. The Swede’s identity is reconstructed through the memories and testimony of others, making him simultaneously an object of sympathy, suspicion, and judgment. No single perspective entirely explains his downfall.
What connects these four films is the instability of moral agency.
Their protagonists are neither simply innocent victims nor conventional villains. They recognize, resist, rationalize, or surrender to the forces that compromise them. Their actions expose the contradictions between what individuals believe about themselves and what their choices reveal. #Noirvember #FilmNoir
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
#Bales2026FilmChallenge posting a little early tonight #FilmTwitter Nov 3
Is Inde Navarrette free to do next week's SNL?
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
@JanuaryMovie @FilmsQuirky @fredforthemets
@VaderJaws @BrambleJim @bram_kawa
@ironicteachings
Nov 2-Noir for Someone New to Noir
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
(Lana Turner in one of the canonical films of the 'Wife Gets BF to Whack Husband' genre)
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
@JanuaryMovie @FilmsQuirky @fredforthemets
@VaderJaws @BrambleJim @bram_kawa
@ironicteachings
11/1-Introduction to Bogey/Bacall
The Big Sleep (1946)
(so many great choices, but this movie shows why moviegoers loved seeing these two)
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
@JanuaryMovie @FilmsQuirky @fredforthemets
@VaderJaws @BrambleJim @bram_kawa
@ironicteachings
Hey all you boys and girls out there in Radio Land, just wanted to take a second and thank everyone who participated in October's movie challenge.
Hope you all had fun and got some great movie recs. I know I did. Now excited about @JanuaryMovie taking over in November.
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
You are on topic about the prequels... but I do not grant them the rank of masterpiece.
Why not?
Because, in the final analysis, they were written by a retarded boomerlib. And retarded boomerlibs have a perfectly inverted moral compass. Whatever they call good is actually evil. And they will call evil what is actually good.
Millenials and GenZ are correct to identify in Anakin Skywalker what the boomers have done to them. But the films were not written to point this out.
They were written, instead, as a defense of boomerlib morals and boomerlib theology.
Consider the religion of the jedi. It is lifted, chapter and verse, from a bowdlerized versions of eastern religion sold to the flower children of the 60s by Indian grifters.
Don't want things, do not work to achieve goals, do not have ambitions, do not desire. Instead, empty yourself, numb your passions, achieve nothing, move in no direction, simply exist where you are, content and at peace even if the world burns around you.
Refer to all your responsibilities as "attachments" and seek to shed them. Be attached to nothing. Be an atomized individual with no sense of duty or loyalty.
Your moral worth consists not of your deeds, but your inner feelings.
This is chaos religion. It is religion for people for people in crapsack societies, where everyone is an 85 IQ retard, and the guy who happens to have a triple digit IQ, the guy who's smart enough to invent a religion, just looks around him and gives up. Fuck it, he says, there's no hope of ever fixing this, I'm just going to stop wanting things and veg out.
The sith, by contrast, represent, not any Western religion in particular, but just vaguely Western values in general. Except they represent those values as seen through the eyes of someone who hates them.
So, not just work, achieve, ascend, hone yourself, pursue excellence, be passionate about something, and gain power, but also kick some kittens along the way so George Lucas and his fellow retarded boomerlibs can feel good about hating you.
See, that's the problem with the whole story. It's a story anti-trope called "debate and switch". A work of fiction sets up a moral dilemma or other painful choice, then finds a way to resolve it without actually addressing the issue it raised.
In this case, the Star Wars prequels set up these two opposing philosophies, sith and jedi, but Lucas never actually makes any arguments about why the jedi are right. He just has it pre-inserted into the already-written story that the sith are gonna blow up a planet or two, slaughter some innocent kids, and kick a basket of kittens, therefore bad.
And that is the big problem with the prequels.
The underlying story, if it were tightened, purged of stupid cameos from characters who aren't supposed to be in it yet, had some plot holes patched, and was written by someone with better dialogue skills and without an inverted moral compass, could have been a good Greek-style tragedy.
But the whole point of the story, the whole anvilicious point, inserted repeatedly with all the subtlety of a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar-bears-only nightclub, is that ANAKIN IS BAD, GUYS, MMKAY?
What millenial viewers may not understand, and GenZ viewers certainly won't, is that a lot of the dialogue is actually an extremely hamfisted midwit commentary on the exact political climate of the time.... post 9/11, GWOT, Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
It's all George's stupid boomerlib sentiments that republicans are bad, and muzzie terrorists who blow up our people aren't.
So, the movies sucked, and we all thought so at the time.
The reason you find them relatable now, and you are right to do so, is that George's moral compass is so perfectly inverted that he accidentally wrote everything his generation was going to do to the young men, without even realizing it was a confession rather than a manifesto.
He thought, he still thinks, that everything the Republic was doing was basically fine, with a little unfortunate collateral damage, and everything would have been great if Anakin had just played along.
Just as he and his retarded boomerlib compatriots think that you and your entire generation are acceptable collateral damage in the hippie-Buddhist post-ethnic end-of-history world they wanted to build on the ashes of the West.
The dead giveaway for this is how he models the sith... there are always two, the master and the apprentice. This models how Western civilization works. Elders train up youths and pass on their knowledge, skill, and power. Teacher to student, father to son.
Except Lucas wrote this as the apprentice treacherously killing the master to usurp his place.
In the story, it makes no sense. Why would sith Lords train apprentices, if sith history was one constant stream of murder-succession?
But outside the story it makes perfect sense. To a healthy father, being succeeded, and then exceeded, by his son is the definition of victory. He is proud of his son, he loves his son, his son is the product not only of his hands and care, but of his very selfhood. Any victory of the child belongs also to the father, and there is no greater joy.
But to the retarded boomerlib, such as Lucas, to be succeeded by your son is to be murdered and usurped. Why? Because he cannot stand to take pride in being part of something greater than himself... a lineage, a tribe, a nation, a heritage.
He desires to remain forever the main character.
It is not insignificant that George Lucas did not leave the Star Wars intellectual property as a legacy for his children to manage and develop, writing their own stories.
Instead, he groomed a retarded midwit girlboss for the role, who did not rise even to his modest level of talent. Someone who would never exceed him, would never become more famous and loved for her Star Wars stories than Lucas was for his.
And then he sold the whole thing to Disney to cash in.
And it should not pass without notice that, while some boomers are out there being parents and grandparents, the majority are liquidating every system of prosperity they ever built or inherited, and spending all the money on an old person's definition of hedonism.
Bumper stickers on luxury Airstreams that read "Spending the kids' inheritance".
The Star Wars prequels are just the ravings of a delusional anti-civilization nutter who thinks all this is a good thing.
So by all means deconstruct the prequels. By all means point out that the jedi are evil, because they are. By all means point out that the sith are good, because if the author wasn't making them kick the dog, they would be.
I will cheer for all this.
Hell, rewrite it with AI movie tools built for you by GenX techbros, to point out that Anakin and Palpatine are right all along. THAT will be a masterpiece if you do it well enough.
But don't try to rehabilitate Lucas. He doesn't deserve it.
Peace is a lie. There is only Passion.
Through Passion, I gain Strength.
Through Strength, I gain Power.
Through Power, I gain Victory.
Through Victory my chains are Broken.
The Force shall free me.
Very pleased to see so many young right-wing zoomers finally recognizing just how incredible the Star Wars prequel trilogy really was.
George Lucas, a visionary, created perhaps the most profound piece of right-wing media in sci-fi form.
Anakin Skywalker is the archetypal disenfranchised chud: a young man who genuinely wanted to do good, believed in justice, and trusted a system that presented itself as noble, democratic, and righteous, all to have his innocence, idealism, sense of justice, and vulnerabilities systematically exploited by the very institutions he believed in.
He wanted to make a difference, only to discover that the entire political order he had devoted his life to defending was deeply corrupt, hypocritical, and wicked.
And in his disillusionment, he became vulnerable to the very evil he once sought to destroy.
A cautionary tale for an entire generation of young men who grew up believing the system was fundamentally good, only to discover that the system was never quite what it claimed to be.
George Lucas understood the chud psyche long before the chud was actualized in the zeitgeist.
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
#Bales2026FilmChallenge #FilmTwitter If you’ve never joined a movie challenge before please join this one! Every day there is a movie prompt. Use the hashtag and post your answer. Find fellow movie lovers and make connections. Make new Twitter friends. You can post the night b4.
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
@bales1181
October 30: Favorite Female Performance 1960-1990
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (Martin Scorsese, 1974)
@ithrah69 @ihateclaims @JanuaryMovie
@VaderJaws @WiseguySix
Ellen Burstyn delivers a powerful performance as a widowed single mother who moves to Arizona to start a new life while dealing with a precocious son and serious boyfriend issues.
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
#FilmTwitter🎥
@ithrah69📷
@ihateclaims
@WiseguySix
@FilmsQuirky
@BrambleJim
@JanuaryMovie
@bram_kawa
@VaderJaws
Oct 31: Horror Movie You'd Recommend to Someone Who Hates Horror Movies
"Evil Dead 2"
Funny and gruesome.
youtu.be/7qBGnzz7mPI?si=N2Os…
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
Replying to @WiseguySix
@WiseguySix
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
Oct 31 Horror film for non-fans
The Cabin in the Woods (2011) A smart, meta-satire that pokes fun at every single cliché in the horror genre.
Thanks for a fun month.
Nvidia Head of CounterIntelligence retweeted
#Bales2026FilmChallenge
Oct 29: Female performance, 1960-90
Shirley MacLaine as Fran Kubelik in The Apartment
Funny and heartbreaking, with no false notes
“Shut up and deal.”





























