Screentime

Everywhere you look in DeLillo characters are looking at screens: cinema, TV and computer screens; screens on phones and watches, radars and ATMs; windscreens and window screens; silk screens in an art gallery; and rood screens at church. This diverse collection of screens in different settings produces wildly divergent responses from aesthetic exhilaration and spiritual ecstasy to deathly eroticism and existential despair. The middle chapters of this study offer a deep dive into the DeLillo screen starting with cinema, then TV before moving on to the computer. In this chapter, we begin with the remarkable density of cinematic allusion in DeLillo’s work and the frequency with which film-makers and aficionados feature in the fiction. His first novel, Americana , is explored as a case study which introduces the power, potential and problems associated with movie cameras and cinema screens.