Earticle

초록

영어

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.

목차

I. Introduction
 II. Parables of Post-9/11America and the War on Terror
 II. Archival Violence in Representing War and History
 IV. Conclusion
 Works Cited
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• Ju Young Jin [ Sogang University ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  미국소설 [마크 트웨인 리뷰]

• 간기

  연3회

• pISSN

  1738-5784

• 수록기간

  1991~2020

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 843 DDC 813