Many attempts to define cult movies and to describe their appeal are characterized by notions of doubleness, contradiction, and introjection. For example, J. P. Telotte finds in the “etymological underpinnings of ‘cult’” (14) a complex of potential meanings pointing to a dialectical impulse to possess and to be possessed, to express selfhood through surrendering to an external other. Thus, he suggests, the cult movie transgresses norms, enabling the cultist “to fashion a statement of difference” (14), even as it establishes “a stable ground from which to make that assertion, a ground within the very boundaries” that are being transgressed (15). Sam Kitt suggests that cult audiences “need to identify with something” external to themselves that is nonetheless “emblematic of their feelings” (qtd in Telotte 15), while Timothy Corrigan depicts the movie cultist as embracing certain public images and making them part of his or her private space (26). The cultists, as he says, “wrench representations from their naturalized and centralized positions” and relocate them within a personal and “glorious[ly] incoheren[t]” cultural repertoire (28). Although Corrigan considers this effect specifically as a variety of audience activity, it resonates strongly with our post–structuralist understandings of textuality (albeit retaining a greater sense of agency than normally survives the putative death of the author). Furthermore, it suggests the extent to which an authoring agency such as the Coen brothers, the partnership responsible for a cult text like The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), might be understood not merely as objects of cultist fascination but as cultists themselves.