Watching movies from inside books.
By Vadim Rizov on 02/09/2010
Filed under: Odds
Don DeLillo’s new novel “Point Omega” is narrated by a documentarian and begins and ends with a description of Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho,” a 2006 MoMA installation in which Hitchcock’s film was slowed down to stretch over a day and night.
Maybe that’s why everyone writing about the book seems more focused on DeLillo’s obsession with movies than with how it ranks in his canon. At the New York Times, Geoff Dyer, who knows more than most about art criticism (check out his own recent novel “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi,” set during the 2006 Venice Biennale) sees DeLillo’s take on “24 Hour Psycho” and raises him with Gordon’s “5 Year Drive-by,” which played “The Searchers” in “real time” — one frame every 20 minutes.
At the Boston Globe, Mark Feeney‘s interested in DeLillo’s ongoing relationship with more mainstream movies — he points out that DeLillo’s voracious cinephilia is all over his work, with references to a meat-and-potatoes studio release like “Act of Violence,” fake Eisenstein movies and Robert Frank.
Trying to think up a systematic list of other novels that include interesting invocations of film is surprisingly hard. The movies that characters watch seem to me to mostly get used for banal texture, like in Jhumpa Lahiri’s stupefyingly dull “The Namesake,” where the kind of films being invoked tell us something about class in New York City (they go to see an “Antonioni double-feature” — do they even have those anymore? — and a revival of “Alphaville”).