Wit & Attitude Quote by Dewitt Bodeen

Bodeen writes like a noir cinematographer with a theologian’s hangover: fog in the valleys isn’t just weather, it’s a moral special effect. The line turns geography into psychology, insisting that “low places” are less a map feature than a human pattern. Valleys collect mist because of physics; “depressions in the world consciousness” collect “ancient sin” because of habit. That parallel is the intent: to make wrongdoing feel less like individual choice and more like an atmospheric condition that settles where it’s easiest, where vision is already compromised.

As a screenwriter, Bodeen is also smuggling in blocking and lighting. Fog softens edges, blurs accountability, makes distances deceptive. Put that in the moral register and you get a worldview where evil persists not by roaring but by lingering, by being hard to see and easy to step into. “Ancient sin” is a pointed phrase: it suggests inheritance and recurrence, the way old stories of violence, shame, and power replay with new costumes. This isn’t confession; it’s diagnosis.

The subtext carries a faintly elitist chill: the “low” isn’t just topographical, it’s social and spiritual. Sin “clings” to depressions the way stigma clings to marginalized places and people, implying that certain zones are treated as repositories for what the broader culture refuses to face. “World consciousness” widens the scope into something nearly Jungian, a collective mind with its own blind spots.

Contextually, it reads like mid-century American gothic-moralism filtered through cinema: metaphysical dread translated into an image you can shoot. The line works because it makes abstraction visible, then quietly accuses the audience of living in the valley.