Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from the Exorcist to Seinfeld Book

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Introduction: Beyond Good and Evil	3
1	Nihilism, American Style	10
	Nietzsche and Democratic Nihilism	11
	American Culture and the Unraveling of the Enlightenment	23
	The Films of Frank Capra	24
	To Kill a Mockingbird	26
	Film Noir	29
	Tocqueville and the Final Stage of Liberalism	33
	Perpetual Adolescence	41
	The Revenge of the Dark God	45
	Dead Ends, Ways Out, and Paths Through	50
2	The Quest for Evil	54
	The Quest Begins: The Exorcist	57
	The Aesthetics of Evil	66
	Cape Fear	67
	Silence of the Lambs	75
	The Recovery of Film Noir	84
	L.A. Confidential	84
	Seven	90
3	The Banality of Evil	101
	Arendt's Banality Thesis	102
	The Grandeur and Wretchedness of Evil	104
	Macbeth	104
	Paradise Lost	109
	The Romantic Revival and the Banality of Goodness	112
	Forrest Gump	112
	Natural Born Killers	117
	The Reconstruction of Society	122
	Titanic	124
	The Ice Storm	125
	Recovering the Comic Quest: Pulp Fiction	128
4	Normal Nihilism	136
	Dare to Say Yes: Trainspotting	138
	Beyond the Dysfunctional Family: Seinfeld	144
	The Death of Man--and Woman, Too	154
	Seinfeld's Dark God	159
	Prometheus as Onan	167
	America as a Semiotic Hell	169
	Conclusion: Children of a Lesser God	173
	Notes	185
	Index	189