Cinematic consciousness and time images: Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist and Point Omega

ABSTRACT

This article reads Don DeLillo’s two novellas The Body Artist (2001) and Point Omega (2010) as highlighting the relationship between cinema and time. The novellas are examined especially through the lens of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2 (first pub. 1985). Caught up in the Deleuzian time image as they sift through “sheets of past,” the characters Lauren Hartke in The Body Artist and Jim Finley in Point Omega emerge as fictional filmmakers, living imaginatively in the interplay between “virtual” past and “actual” present. In The Body Artist the mysterious figure of Mr. Tuttle personifies both the Deleuzian time image and the putative present tense of cinema. In Point Omega techniques like point-of-view and doubling are seen to be subsumed by the power of the time image. In sum, the two novellas offer excellent examples of cinematic literary writing, a promising field in which cinema is above all a way of thinking which persistently engages with time images.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a quite detailed treatment of Godard’s influence see Osteen (1996) and Sheehan (2021): 1688, 1690, 1692–93, 1699.

2. The adaptations are Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012 and a French adaptation of The Body Artist directed by Benoît Jacquot entited À jamais which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2016.

3. Deleuze was greatly influenced by Henri Bergson, especially Bergson’s notion of durée which as discussed in Creative Evolution (1907) involved the idea of a “continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.” Bergson’s description of the past, however, as “follow[ing] us at every instant” and as “leaning over the present which is about to join it” (7) may suggest a Bergsonian prioritizing of the past over the present which is different to Deleuze’s “peaks of present..”

4. These and other possible interpretations are listed by di Prete 2005, 484 n1.

5. Of course not everyone would agree with this. German film director Werner Herzog, for instance, has recently prioritized the past and questioned the substance of present time. “We settle ourselves into a grand fiction of present time,” says Herzog, “It is a fiction. Technically present time does not exist. Our sense of present time is technically impossible, because when you lift a foot from the ground, lifting it up is already past, setting it down on the ground is already future” (in Alter).

6. The idea of time slowing down stands in contrast to what DeLillo calls “the [contemporary] craving for time itself to move faster” (qtd. in Gander 129).

7. Given that both Tuttle and Esther are resistant to clock time, we may wonder whether DeLillo himself was aware of the famous debate between Einstein and Bergson triggered by a lecture delivered by Einstein at the Société française de philosophie in Paris in 1922. While Einstein presented a physical, scientific interpretation of time Bergson would object to Einstein’s conflating “clock time” and “time in general” and would insist that time always involves us. (Canales 24, 42).

8. Mathew Shipe describes Elster as “a man out of time” who has completely relinquished “his faith in time and in the future” (20).

9. Describing his installation Gordon himself brings up the question of time: “I was concerned above all with the role of memory. While the viewer remembers the original film, he is drawn into the past, but on the other hand also into the future, for he becomes aware that the story, which he already knows, never appears fast enough. In between, there exists only a slowly changing present” (qtd. in Gander 151).

10. On the use of SAS, see Deamer 25–29 and Brown 98.

11. It should not surprise anyone that in Point Omega Finley’s wife complains about her husband’s monomania: “Film, film, film” (27).

12. It is surely no coincidence that in the 1990s after writing The Body Artist DeLillo was working on a screenplay. This became the film Game 6.

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Nicholas O. Pagan

Nicholas O. Pagan is a visiting professor of English at the University of Malaya, who specializes in literary theory and writes about literature (particularly American literature) in relation to philosophy, mind, and spirituality. His publications include Theory of Mind and Science Fiction (2014), and he has published in journals including Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal; Religion & Literature; Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture; and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory.