"Evil," stated Hitchcock once in an interview, "is complete disorder." That his villains were overcome in the end is the price he had to pay to Hollywood's moral code. His happy endings are often injected with humor, as if to say, "The world really isn't so well run." He believed that we live in a fundamentally amoral universe in which good succeeds only by accident, in which good is a human action practiced successfully by a few whose survival is by no means sure, and in which chaos is the laws of nature itself. The tone of this passage is __