Rather than, let's say, a critic or a connoisseur. Concepts such as taste, wisdom, and maturity don't play much of a role in this project.

Some years ago, while driving through a wealthy neighborhood around Christmas time, I noticed that several of the houses were decorated with strings of small bulbs that were uniformly white. A few years later I went through again, and nearly all the lights in the neighborhood were white. Same thing happened in a similar neighborhood in a different town. Apparently, with the arrival of all-colorless lighting, the neighbors using red, blue, and green came to realize that their own displays were garish by the standards of their caste; and over the course of two or three years, good taste prevailed.

In certain quarters of movie criticism - where the heart is never worn on the sleeve and where words like "precocious", "gothic", and, Lord knows, "sentimental" have decidedly garish connotations and where good taste abounds - an over-the-top piece along the lines of Angel Heart is not to be encouraged. But the grunge of Angel Heart or Decoy brings a sense of delirious impulse to the filmic struggle with fear and death that all the carefully tutored sensitivities of a civilized soul can't express - not, at any rate, within the bounds of good taste, not in such a way that words like wisdom and maturity have much relevance.