Categories: Opinion and Editorial

Review of Don Delillo’s “Videotape”

Over the years the musical, architectural and literary movements have gone from one extreme to the other. From once being restricted to the boundaries given by authorities, mostly that of the Catholic Church, to the complete rejection of those same restrictions in modernism. Post-modernism can be better understood as a branch of modernism. It has kept most of the modernist qualities such as irony and the elimination of rigid genre distinctions, just to mention a couple, and yet it has rejected others. It differs mainly in the sense that modernisms lamented our daily suffering and confused way of living while post modernism celebrates it and tries to understand it. (1) This literary movement doesn’t intend to define the human subject instead it tries to concentrate on the “anonymous experiences” of an utterly confused group of individuals.(2) Like in “Videotape”, by Don Delillo, this type of literary movement plays with the way it is narrated and makes the reader figure out who the protagonist is and what the story is actually focused on, or, like it said in the article Defining Post Modernism, “dissolution of the distinction”. In the story a little girl innocently videotapes a crime but the focus is actually on the narrator who is watching the tape being broadcasted over and over on the television. This switching back and forth of different points of view is another characteristic of post modernism. Dr. Mary Klage of the University of Colorado English department defines it as “fragmentation and discontinuity especially in narrative structures”. (3)

So up to now one has a story with mixed up perspectives and an undefined focus of what is what and who is who which ultimately leads us to another characteristic of post modernism, ambiguity. This story could definitely be interpreted in more than one way. On one hand the story presents the little girls’ perspective and the focus could be on the incredible coincidence of the crime happening while she innocently tapes the man in the car. On the other hand the story presents the fixed narrator that can’t seem to unglue himself from watching a horrible death scene on the television. In other words, post modernism wants to make the reader think for himself and does it mostly by the structure of the literature, which is so different from others.

“Videotape” includes many of these characteristics, as it has been pointed out, and most certainly makes the reader think more than once about the point of the whole story. There is one characteristic the author used that one could attribute to realism, and that is the fact that the author presents the story in a realistic manner or every day life. One could associate themselves to the situations that occurred to the characters very easily because it has happened to everyone. Not necessarily the part of recording a crime but the part of watching it on the television.

By using the cultural studies questions one could very easily understand the meaning of the whole scenario the author has presented to the readers. “Videotape” is actually part of an opus created by Don DeLillo in 1997 called “Underworld: we simply appreciate death”). (4) The short story discussed here represents that same idea, society is fixed on death and/or horrible scenarios unless they themselves are included in it. A couple of examples come to mind when reading this such as 9-11-2001 and the many times, over the many weeks, that the television stations showed when the towers collapsed. Everybody kept saying how horrible it all was but nobody turned the television off. Of course this is one of the points the story wants the reader to think about, why can’t someone stop himself or herself from watching it? Is it disbelief? Is it curiosity? Another example can be given of on the scene situations. Here in Puerto Rico gawking is a traditional hobby and car accidents are a favorite. After living here for a couple of years one can ultimately infer that if there is a traffic jam there is an accident and a bunch of people who parked there cars to watch the dead body on the floor or the person pinched in the car.

After much research on society and post modernism it is no wonder why this author chose this style of writing and why he wrote about this subject. Having been born in 1936, Don DeLillo lived through the war and the many changes society made after it including post modernism. The American society and it’s disbelief of the nuclear bombs had a lot to do with it. But the author also lived through the Vietnam war. Both of these made society wonder about death and of course they saw a lot of it because the Vietnam war was basically the first war to be broadcasted to many home viewers. Like it is stated in the biography, De Lillo said that his own personal preference is for “fiction that is steeped into history, that takes account of ways in which our perceptions are being changed by events around us. Global events that may alter how we live in the smallest ways.” (5)

I can personally relate to this story in many ways especially by the 9-11-2001 occurrence. I was in Syracuse, N.Y. at the time it happened and I had actually just come out of a physics class when I heard the news. I became the narrator described in the story. I was fixed to the television and the scenes shown were utterly unbelievable, yet I never stopped watching. Of course at first it was because of the disbelief that something like it could happen but it took me a few days to finally stop watching the news. The story is very interesting and the authors way of presenting it to a general audience in a clever way is perfect for trying to get the many messages of self realization across. I say self realization because we need to realize that we are the ones who choose to watch or not to watch and if the issue of violence comes up all those who chose to watch are equally responsible for encouraging it.

[http://www2.sfu.ca/english/Gillies/engl207/pomo.htm] (25 Sep. 2004)

Keep, Christopher. McLaughlin, Tim. Parmar, Robin. “Defining Post Modernism” 1993-2000 .The Electronic Labyrinth [http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0242.html] (25 Sep. 2004)