Most of the great American directors in activity during the past twenty years or so cannot stand to look to the contemporary world. They’re entirely blind it. What emerges is a trend of expensive period pieces focused on some sort of nostalgia (even if critical) for the American civilization, all but gone.

Film noir’s fatalism is of a strange kind. It is not religious (as in some Christianity), nor is it metaphysical or cosmological, much less aristocratic (as in Homer). It is, as it were,  technological.

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly duels do not reveal any historical or social reality. Duels are, rather, the allotments, deadly attributions of fate to eternally wandering heroes. It’s a characterological necessity: these characters can only become who they are in a duel.

Out of the Past masterfully intertwines fatalism and metacinema to reveal the constrained reality of its characters. The film serves as a poignant commentary on the nature of genre and the limits it imposes on storytelling. Like a Greek tragedy, Out of the Past is a meditation on fate and inevitability, showing how characters are trapped by the very conventions that define them