Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Apropos of Nothing: Or, What Does It Mean to Be "Blood Simple"? -- Blood Simplicity -- The Deadlock in the Coens' Critical Reception -- The Supplement at the Origin -- Screen/Play -- A Sign! -- Raw Intelligence -- The Criminal and the Commonplace -- The Eruption of the Real -- Beyond the Metaphysics of Presence and Absence -- Everything You Always Wanted to Know -- 1 All-American Nihilism -- The Ballad of Sheriff Bell -- The Film That Wasn't There -- The Question of the Meaning of Being -- Being-in-the-World -- mr.loser.com -- Yo' Ass! -- Anxiety Has No Object -- The Grim Reaper in West Texas Denim -- Resoluteness -- True Love and True Crime -- 2 The Symbolic Object and the Subject of Fantasy -- Assuming the Worst -- The Subject of Fantasy -- The Divided Self-Image -- Why So Uptight, Osborne Cox? -- Narcissistic Aggression and Existential Negativity -- The Instance of the Letter -- The Dialectics of Demand -- Seducing Surveillance -- The Dude Supposed to Know -- The Vacuous Truth -- 3 Jouissance, the Real -- Dirty Little Secrets -- The Sublime Ass of Impossible Enjoyment -- Anxiety Is Not without an Object -- Unbearable Enjoyment -- Enter the Real -- Lack of Lack -- Beyond the Undecidability Principle -- The Plural Logic of the Aporia -- Reassuring Aporia -- Hell Is the Other's Jouissance -- (Divorce) Courtly Love -- Razing Big Dave's Annex -- The Patter of Little Lawyer's Feet -- 4 Superego Overdrive -- Mattie's Law -- Beyond the Hermeneutics of Desire -- The Drive's Circuit -- The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse -- As if by Chance -- Glen Jr., Gale Jr. -- Smooth Smooth -- Call It, Friendo -- The Unconscious Sense of Guilt -- Mark It Zero, Dude! -- The Conspiracy of Car Dealers -- Ozzie and Harriet -- Swedish Meatballs -- Force of Law -- Jerry's Jouissance -- 5 Ex Nihilo -- Reinventing the Wheel.

Anamorphosis -- The Dignity of the Thing -- A Man Chasing His Hat -- Sublimation, Superego -- Are You in Pictures? -- Traversing the Fantasy -- Pastiche, Surrealism, Realism -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.