White Lull

Point Omega

by Don DeLillo

2010, Scribner

At some point in high school, I read somewhere that Don DeLillo was a very important author. I can't remember where I read it, but I have always had an appetite for consuming and evaluating the so-called culture makers in whatever art I am currently interested in. This often pans out in my favor, discovering artists who represent the height of technical and artistic ability in their crafts. Oftentimes, though, I wind up resenting these supposed masters for failing to meet expectations.

Luckily for Mr. DeLillo, I began with his classic White Noise, a book whose prose bristles and sparks with imagination, gallows humor and inventiveness. White Noise made a profound impact on my thoughts on contemporary literature and its criticisms regarding suburbia seemed directed at teenaged life.

Unfortunately for Mr. Dellilo, I have yet to experience a novel of his that affects me so sharply as did White Noise. While I haven't delved extensively into his work, I was disappoint at approximately two year intervals by reading Mao II, his play The Day Room, and Falling Man. As such, Point Omega is the DeLillo work I've read and once again I am left wanting an experience as encompassing as White Noise.

Point Omega is a very slight novel in length - its ambition is another matter. The novel is marked in its lack of scope; the Museum of Modern Art and a house in the desert are the only locales for the action (a term used loosely in describing this inert novel). Similarly, it is populated by (at most) four characters. DeLillo is interested in mining these characters for as much internal psychological drama as possible while refusing to suggest conventional plotted or interpersonal drama.

The novel begins with a strange solitary man in a dark room in MoMA watching Douglas Gordon's avant-garde film 24 Hour Psycho in which Hitchcock's revered film is slowed down to last an entire day. The man in the novel is watching the ubiquitous shower scene and is lost in contemplation of the artistic (and voyeuristic) implications of the capturing of images on film, the staging and perversion of real life to establish an alternate sense of time and place.

The character scoffs at other people who come and go (two characters who will become the novel's central subjects) and are not as enraptured by the film as he is. The painstakingly detailed analysis of the film as well as the clear disdain for less ambitious viewers demonstrate that Mr. DeLillo is the most attentive and thoughtful of filmgoers. I imagine in another life DeLillo could have made himself a career writing book-length intertextual examinations of Warhol films instead of enjoying them for the absurdly wacky trash that they are.

Mr. DeLillo's observations on the film walk a very fine line between the laughably (borderline masturbatory) self-indulgent

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn't sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. But his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?

and the surprisingly astute

He began thinking of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. The original movie was fiction, this was real... Light and sound, wordless monotone, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not movies.

and even the downright silly:

The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning of this escaped him... But this wasn't truly film, was it, in the strict sense. It was a videotape. But it was also a film. In the broader meaning he was watching a film, a movie, a more or less moving picture.

These observations are not integral to the so-called plot of Point Omega (which centers on a young filmmaker attempting to get a government warmonger to comment on his thoughts about film) but they are integral to understanding Mr. DeLillo's languid pace and reluctance to engage in the more traditionally narrative modes of fiction. These comments regarding Psycho have little to do with sussing out Mr. Hitchcock's vision of the world and instead, like a misguided graduate film studies paper, have significantly more to do with the subject of film as a vehicle for artistic expression.

Similarly, Mr. DeLillo's novel is an excuse to talk about the relationship between life and narrative instead of simply building such a narrative. As such, it is as much of a lifeless indulgent exercise in the mystification of artistic expression as his exploration of Gordon's slow-mo avant-garde epic.

This is not to say that Point Omega is entirely without merit. The character of the philosophical retired general (think Rumsfeld with a PhD) falls entirely flat, but the ambitious young filmmaker is a bit of gem. The young man is reeling from a separation with his wife and becomes somewhat obsessed by erotic fantasies of the general's daughter.

His erotic obsession seems to manifest both his marital frustration and his inability to convince the general to partake in his film. The documentary is a vision of ascetic truth - the general sits in a room and talks about his experience with designing a war and the entire film would be unfettered by stock footage, other opinions, cuts. This desire to express the world in such objectively subjective terms communicate an uneasiness with one's experience of the world - a need to understand the diversity of thought and experience felt by other people, to justify one's own experience of the world with another's.

While this character has a spark of feeling and truth, DeLillo refuses to use the character for anything besides quietly disturbed introspection and does not force his characters into any situation beyond amplified depression. The plot does not so much materialize as de-materialize when the general's daughter disappears at the apparent climax of the novel and then simply remains missing.

One could be led to conclude Mr. DeLillo is attempting to have his fiction more closely mirror life, with its absence of pat character arcs or conclusive narrative threads. But Point Omega, with its dreary, inert narrative fails to realize the more unusual and exciting surprises of daily undramaticized life or the more absurdly funny and horrifying trends of life (as he did in White Noise).