Disaster TV

Whilst ‘Commercial TV’ is a disciplinary tool which erodes social difference and threatens to subsume the self into a ‘universal third person’ ( Americana , p. 270), ‘Disaster TV’ in DeLillo is seen to promote a ghoulish voyeurism and moral atrophy. Disaster is rarely absent from the TV screen in DeLillo: accidents, acts of terror, assassinations, force majeure, violent crime and war. Over the course of DeLillo’s career, western culture has witnessed a spectacular increase in the screening of disasters. Popular culture has been flooded by what for many spectators appear to be oddly therapeutic fantasies of destruction (movies and video games and TV franchises entertaining different end-of-the-world scenarios) whilst news media has devoted ever more extensive coverage to natural disaster and human-made calamity. In his fiction, essays and interviews, DeLillo has returned to the complex symptomatology and consequences informing the contemporary imagination of disaster. This chapter explores these issues through a series of case studies: accidents in White Noise; assassination in Libra ; serial murder in Underworld ; trauma and 9/11 in Falling Man ; empathy and the female gaze in Mao II ; financial disaster in ‘Hammer and Sickle’; and the media apocalypse of blank screens in The Silence.