Pixelated and Pulverized War and History in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega

Abstract

This paper examines the thematic functions of Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark in Don DeLillo’s Point Omega to highlight the ways in which they show the ubiquity and power of image in propagandizing the War on Terror. Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho stretches Hitchcock’s Psycho from its original 2 hour running time to create a 1440-hour video installation. By radically slowing down time, Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho recuperates the jarring noise between images which is imperceptible when played at normal speed, whereas Sokurov’s Russian Ark rejects the idea of editing altogether by making a film shot with one long take. DeLillo features these moving image art as a parable of American war and history. Together, the two films in the novel entail the self-critique of the post 9/11 American society by taking the manipulation of image to the extreme. The novel foregrounds a war documentary project of Jim Finley, a filmmaker, who envisions a kind of visual haiku, shot in one long take. The documentary features an interview with a retired political spy named Richard Elster who did propaganda and lobbying for the Pentagon during the Gulf War. As the interview frequently forestalls plot development, the novel illustrates how the teleological progress of American civilization is in fact regressing on itself, which is also reflected in the title of the novel which reverses the “omega point,” the zenith of human progress. I construe this paradoxical double movement of possessing history and becoming possessed by it as something akin to Derrida’s concept of “archive fever.” Conflating the murder plot of Psycho with the disappearance of Elster’s daughter Jessie, Point Omega eventually exposes the suturing process occurred in real life war propaganda. Coupled with DeLillo’s persistent themes of the clash between individual and history, the rise of mass and paranoid/conspiracy theory, Point Omega shows how DeLillo disrupts the smooth procession of everydayness in order to examine the lasting effects of war, be it personal or political, by delaying release of them.