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Don DeLillo's Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein

CATHERINE MORLEY

Journal of American Studies / Volume 40 / Issue 01 / April 2006, pp 17 ­ 34DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806000715, Published online: 19 April 2006

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How to cite this article:CATHERINE MORLEY (2006). Don DeLillo's Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein. Journal of American Studies, 40, pp 17­34 doi:10.1017/S0021875806000715

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Don DeLillo’s TransatlanticDialogue with Sergei Eisenstein

CATHERINE MORLEY

There are only connections. Everything is connected. All human knowledgegathered and hyperlinked, this site leading to that, this fact referenced to that, akey-stroke, a mouse-click, a password – world without end amen _ Everything isconnected in the end.

Don DeLillo, Underworld, 1997

If I were an impartial researcher, I would say of myself : this author appears to beconstantly fixated with one idea, one theme, one subject.Everything he has thought up and done, not only within the different films, butthrough all his plans and films, is in each and every one case the same thing.Almost invariably, the author uses different periods, different countries and peoples,different social movements and processes within the shift toward different socialforms, as different masks covering one and the same face.This face is the realisation of the ultimate goal – the attainment of unity.

Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, 1946

‘‘Everything is connected in the end. ’’ Indeed, if such a massive work could

be whittled down to a single-sentence pitch it would be fair to say that Don

DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) concerns itself with a search for synthesis and a

clarification of the connections which underpin the individual life : connec-

tions between people, private moments, public events, emotions, encounters,

language, literature, technology, media, waste and history. DeLillo’s grand

scheme in Underworld is to chart these undercurrents, the undisclosed matrix,

by unravelling the invisible thread that knits together human experience. The

moment at the core of the novel is a moment that unites American and

Soviet history. It depicts, as far as American cultural memory is concerned,

BobbyThomson’s triumphant two-out ninth inning, hitting the game-winning

three-run homer that lifted the New York Giants to victory over the

Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1951 National League pennant. Yet this game, the

Catherine Morley is Research Fellow in the Cultures of Modernism at the Institute forHistorical and Cultural Research, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP. She is also aResearch Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford.

Journal of American Studies, 40 (2006), 1, 17–34 f 2006 Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0021875806000715 Printed in the United Kingdom

so-called ‘‘ shot heard round the world, ’’ is doubly faceted. It has a dark

‘‘counterhistory. ’’ It is also the moment when the Soviets tested their second

atomic bomb at a nuclear test site in Kazakhstan – a moment then noted by

the White House as unmasking dark ‘‘Soviet pretensions ’’ of peaceful atomic

development.

The pairing of the American moment with a Russian counterpart is

significant, highlighting the entrenched and deeply interconnected nature of

US–USSR relations at the time. It negates the language of Us–Them which

characterized the national imagination of the Cold War era and even suggests

a mutual co-dependence in terms of the formation of myths of national

identity. Shortly before the publication of Underworld DeLillo, in an article

entitled ‘‘The Power of History, ’’ related the impulsion behind the novel as

derived from the microfiche records of the New York Times front page on 4

October 1951. The writer claims to have ‘‘entered the narrative ’’ by virtue of

a pair of mated headlines, top of the page, same typeface, same type size.

Each headline was three columns wide and three columns deep: ‘‘Giants

Capture the Pennant ’’ and ‘‘Soviet’s Second Atom Bomb. ’’ For DeLillo, the

American mythological game had found its ‘‘dark and awful symmetry ’’ in a

Russian mushroom cloud and these twin, opposing pillars are utilized by the

writer as both encapsulating and shaping American history in the second half

of the twentieth century.1

Critical responses to DeLillo’s earlier work and toUnderworld have focused

upon the writer’s textual encounters with the paraphernalia of modernity and

their effect on the individual consciousness : film, media, rap and rock music,

sport, technology, terrorism, waste, weaponry, simulation, stimulation, alien-

ation and reification.2 As Charles Molesworth, in a 1991 essay, has observed,

1 Don DeLillo, ‘‘The Power of History, ’’ New York Times Magazine, 7 Sept. 1997, 60–3.Throughout the article DeLillo refers to the task of the writer as disinterring the ‘‘unofficialhistories ’’ that lie buried beneath the weight of historical record. DeLillo is candid aboutthe necessity for embellishment on the part of the writer, claiming that the writerdistorts the record ‘‘no more than the historian does unintentionally or the memoristintentionally. ’’

2 Critical responses have, however, been rather slow in developing. Only in the wake ofWhite Noise (1985) and, more especially, Underworld have literary critics begun to take noteof DeLillo as a significant chronicler of contemporary Americana. The first book onDeLillo, Thomas LeClair’s In the Loop : Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel (Urbana : Universityof Illinois Press) appeared in 1987 but, despite persistent championing by LeClair and laterFrank Lentricchia, until the publication of Underworld there was a palpable dearth inDeLillo scholarship. Since the publication of Underworld a number of books and articleshave been added to the bibliographic sources initially comprised of web-pages and sitesaccessed via the DeLillo homepage. Of note is a book of short essays entirely dedicated toUnderworld entitled UnderWords (New York: University of Delaware Press, 2002), edited byJoseph Dewey, Steven G. Kellman and Irving Malin. Also see David Cowart’s study of

18 Catherine Morley

No other contemporary writer could be said to outstrip DeLillo in his ability todepict that larger social reality we blandly call everyday life. Brand names, currentevents, fads, the society of the spectacle, and the rampant consumerism that hasbecome our most noticeable, if not our most important contribution to history, areall plentifully and accurately recorded in DeLillo’s work.3

Largely in light of these preoccupations, DeLillo has been characterized as

postmodern. David Cowart notes that critics have not been reticent in

associating DeLillo’s writing with Jean Baudrillard’s conception of the

successive phases of the image as operative in contemporary culture.4 Mark

Osteen’s significant study of DeLillo’s entire oeuvre, American Magic and

Dread : Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (2000), recognizes DeLillo’s work as

intertextually embedded with that of Jean-Luc Godard and Sergei Eisenstein

in a manifold dialogue with culture and with history. John Johnston, too,

suggests that for DeLillo’s fiction the cinematic image ‘‘occupies a privileged

place_ the world seems to have lost all substance and anchoring or refer-

ence points, except in relation to other images or what are conceived as

images. ’’5 This, though theoretically alluring, misses the implicit idealism in

DeLillo’s involvement with the image.

Engaging with DeLillo’s insistence upon the inextricability of the

American and the Russian moment, this article will look at the writer’s

project as influenced and connected with the filmic themes and techniques of

Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. It will discuss Eisenstein as ever-present

throughout the text, in terms both of method and of the didacticism implicit

in the narrative. Of course DeLillo inserts the director as a character (of

sorts) in terms of the fictional movie he ascribes him, Unterwelt. However,

Eisenstein’s presence and influence is more subtle than simple reinvention.

DeLillo’s entire œuvre from Americana (1971) through to The Body Artist (2001), DonDeLillo : The Physics of Language (Athens : University of Georgia Press, 2002) ; John Duvall’sDon DeLillo’s Underworld : A Reader’s Guide (London: Continuum, 2002) ; and, especially,Mark Osteen’s American Magic and Dread : Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture (Philadelphia :University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), which broadly spans the writer’s career and histextual negotiations with the phenomena of contemporary American life, and to which Iam indebted in the composition of this article.

3 Charles Molesworth, ‘‘Don DeLillo’s Perfect Starry Night, ’’ in Frank Lentricchia, ed.,Introducing Don DeLillo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 143.

4 David Cowart, Don DeLillo : The Physics of Language (Athens : University of GeorgiaPress, 2002) ; and Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘The Procession of Simulacra, ’’ in Simulations, tr. PaulFoss, Paul Patton and Philip Bleitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983). See, forinstance, Leonard Wilcox’s essay ‘‘Baudrillard, DeLillo’s White Noise, and the Endof Heroic Narrative, ’’ in H. Ruppersburg and T. Engles, eds., Critical Essays on Don DeLillo(New York: G. K. Holland Co., 2000).

5 John Johnston, ‘‘Generic Difficulties in the Novels of Don DeLillo, ’’ Critique, 30 (Summer1989), 268.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 19

Fascinated with the actual processes of visual and narrative communication,

Eisenstein’s authority is evident most especially in the textual dynamics of

the Prologue but also in the montage technique, the scenic splicing and

‘‘ jump-cuts ’’ that form the textual landscape of the novel. Eisenstein, of

course, was also deeply fascinated with the portrayal of the masses, with

crowds and the energy of the group – a subject that has interested DeLillo

throughout his fictional corpus but is especially evident in Mao II (1991).

Both DeLillo and Eisenstein are addressed herein as committed to creating

the grand epic narrative of a people within an art form that moves the

viewer/reader to action. Both artists force their audience to participate in the

formation of meaning, to understand and identify the connections that unify

‘‘ everything. ’’ It is argued that DeLillo brings Eisenstein to the text both in

terms of the methodologies he borrows and in terms of the wider narrative

project of complicating the myths of national identity, to demonstrate the

necessary dialogue and interaction of cultures in the creation of cultural

memory and national identity. DeLillo’s engagement with the Communist

filmmaker is seen as a testimony to his faith in resistance, a transmogrifi-

cation of the legacy of the Cold War.

Asked in a 1983 interview with Thomas Le Clair to register his

influences, DeLillo responded that cinema had, in fact, largely shaped his

fiction:

Probably the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had a more immediate effect on my earlywork than anything I’d ever read. Movies in general may be the not-so-hiddeninfluence on a lot of modern writing _ The strong image, the short ambiguousscene, the dream sense of some movies, the artificiality, the arbitrary choices ofsome directors, the cutting and editing. The power of images _ Movies can do somuch_

6

The movies, more generally than Godard and Eisenstein, resound through-

out Underworld, to such an extent that the novel takes its very title from Josef

Von Sternberg’s 1927 gangster movie of the same name. Written by Ben

Hecht and, arguably, the archetypal gangster film from which others

descended, Underworld was a box-office success. Beyond this, a series of

movies infiltrate the text : Robert Frank’s rockumentary of the Rolling Stones

Cocksucker Blues, repeated screenings of the infamous and underground

Zapruder film, video footage of the novel’s serial murderer ‘‘ the Texas

highway killer, ’’ and Unterwelt, a film invented by DeLillo and attributed to

the Russian Constructivist Eisenstein’s period of acute depression and exile

in the Ukraine in the 1930s.

6 Thomas Le Clair, ‘‘An Interview with Don DeLillo, ’’ Contemporary Literature, 128 (1983), 25.

20 Catherine Morley

Godard’s influence on DeLillo’s work is cardinal. The French filmmaker’s

editorial structure of sudden, unexpected jump-cuts, his utilization of Paris as

a ready-made film set and his insistence upon the importance of mood over

plot are seen significantly at work throughout DeLillo’s fictional corpus,

which takes the vast canvas of the American landscape as its narrative terrain.

Ideologically at odds with America, Godard, DeLillo’s named influence,

perceives his art as a political act, a stimulating, provocative vehicle.

Furthermore, Godard admits to the influence of the filmmaking techniques of

Sergei Eisenstein, the figure who spectrally hovers throughout Underworld.7

By citing Godard, DeLillo infers the Soviet director as both filmmakers

pioneer the techniques engaged and applied by the writer to his prose :

montage editing, the camera angle as rendering a theoretical discourse,

characterization as typage, and the integration of factual history with fiction.

Indeed, Godard dedicated a section of Les Carabiniers (1963), in which

he extrapolates his personal vision of cinema as instructive rather than

entertaining, to Eisenstein. In the assemblage of a text that pivots upon the

moment of the Cold War’s inception, DeLillo veers towards the large-scale

vision of Eisenstein : a moral epic tracing the shape of national myths and

history, through the lens of an individual focal point, over a vast geographical

and temporal space.

As a young man living in the midst of profound change in Russian history,

Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) shifted in career from architectural engineer to

theatre director, becoming affiliated with socialist groups such as Proletkult

(the artistic wing of the Communist Party) and Lef (Left Front of the Arts).

Such groups promoted a model of art as stimulant of the spectator’s

ideological consciousness through the integration of politics with abstract

modernism.8 Immediately fascinated by this Constructivist ideal, Eisenstein,

in his early theatrical endeavours, first came to the agit-attraction theatre

(which he later forged in filmic form) then pioneered by Vladimir

Mayakovsky and Vsevold Meyerhold. Agit-attraction theatre, which aimed at

controlling the spectator through the acrobatic dexterity of the actor,

eventually, for Eisenstein, became the ‘‘montage of attractions ’’ in which

emotional (and sometimes physical) shocks to the spectator sought to shape

7 Jean Narbonie, ed., Godard on Godard : Critical Writings (London: Secker and Warburg,1972), 45.

8 According to David Bordwell’s The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1993), Proletkult drama emphasized collective spectacle plays, derivedfrom European Symbolism and Expressionism. When, however, the Communist Partyrefused to recognize the body as its artistic wing, it moved to an even more experimentalstance, engaging with the Avant-Gardes.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 21

the psyche for sociopolitical tasks. In a further cross-cultural exchange of

influence Eisenstein regarded the American eccentricism of Charlie Chaplin

(especially in The Great Dictator) as a potential means of engaging and startling

the audience to steer them into a useful political direction.9

In theatre Eisenstein employed circus actors and acrobats, used fireworks

and explosions (once famously placing firecrackers beneath the seats of the

audience) to physically motivate the spectator and promote the paradigm of a

proletarian art. The device for which Eisenstein is most revered is his work

with film editing, more specifically that which has come to be known as

montage editing. Whilst the director was to revise and revolutionize the

concept throughout his career, the term, at its most basic, denotes a

‘‘machine assembly, ’’ the mounting of the various parts of a machine (a

sense which Eisenstein was to maintain) : ‘‘One does not create a work, one

constructs it with finished parts, like a machine.Montage is a beautiful word: it

describes the process of constructing with prepared fragments. ’’10

Thus montage, the use of pre-organized fragments, implies (in its

Constructivist sense) a necessary friction between shots, ‘‘ a dissonant jux-

taposition of fragments ’’ combined with ‘‘ sharp changes in camera angle ’’

within a particular sequence resulting in collisions which rupture a relevantly

coherent plot into moments of acute amplification.11 Rather than making the

transition between shots smooth or logical (as in continuity editing),

Eisenstein prompts thought and stimulation within the spectator through

a series of unexpected connections. Free to deviate from the story and

unbound by plot requirements (not unlike Underworld, many of Eisenstein’s

films were described by his contemporaries as plotless), conflicting images

are put in interaction with each other to create a dialectic of sorts within the

observer, obliging an intellectual engagement with the image. In his mani-

festo of 1923, ‘‘The Montage of Attractions, ’’ Eisenstein outlines his primary

aspiration for this brand of dialectical film as its transcendence of the

distinction between newsreel footage and fiction.12 He hoped that the viewer

would be as affected by his historical re-creation in much the same way that

real news footage would cause actual emotional distress.

To re-create the scene of the 1905 Revolution at the steps of Odessa in

Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein distilled his material from a mass of historical

9 For Eisenstein’s American influences see Yon Barna’s Eisenstein (London: Secker andWarburg, 1973).

10 From Eisenstein’s diary of 1919, cited in Bordwell, 120–21.11 Bordwell, 122–23.12 Sergei Eisenstein, ‘‘The Montage of Attractions, ’’ Selected Works,Vol. 1 : Writings, 1922–34, ed.

and tr. Richard Taylor (London: Indiana University Press, 1988), 33–8.

22 Catherine Morley

research and eyewitness accounts to re-create just one single episode of the

Revolution. Offering no plot or characterization, he projects the face of the

mass in the manner of a documentary news film. In his analysis of the scene,

Eisenstein articulates the processes of montage which, in its compositional

structure, re-creates the tempo of frenzied excitement :

Let us concentrate on the line of movement.There is, before all else, a chaotic close-up rush of figures. And then, as chaotic a

rush of figures in long-shot.Then the chaos of movement changes to a design : the rhythmic descending feet of

the soldiers.Tempo increases. Rhythm accelerates.In this acceleration of downward rushing movement there is a suddenly upsetting

opposite movement – upward : the break-neck movement of the mass downward leapsover into a slowly solemn movement upward of the mother’s lone figure, carrying herdead son.

Mass. Break-neck speed. Downward.And then suddenly : A lone figure. Slow solemnity. Upward.But – this is only for an instant. Once more we experience a returning leap to the

downward movement.Rhythm accelerates. Tempo increases.Suddenly the tempo of the running crowd leaps over into the next category of

speed – into a rolling baby carriage. It propels the idea of rushing downward intothe next dimension and from rolling as understood ‘‘figuratively, ’’ into the physical fact ofrolling _

13

The careful manipulation of camera movement and the bombardment of the

viewer with a multiplicity of seemingly unrelated images and viewpoints is

unsettling (more especially when actually watched), but also succeeds in

relating to the viewer the manifold nature of the historical moment.

Influenced by James Joyce’s simultaneous unfolding of a display of events,

Eisenstein’s method of extrapolating the whole of the experience rather than

creating singular heroes and his imbuing of fictional re-creation with

historical accuracy is reflective of a more democratic style of filmmaking

which, while somewhat didactic, is comprehensive and encompassing.14

Underworld opens with a baseball game, the 1951 playoff between the

Dodgers and the Giants at the Polo Grounds, a game which pre-dates

television to be ‘‘beautifully isolated in time and not subject to the frantic,

debasing repetition which has exhausted a contemporary event before it’s

been even rounded into coherence. ’’15 Commencing with a moment so

13 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, tr. and ed. J. Leyda (London: 1943), 28.14 Sergei Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, tr. and ed. William Powell and Richard Taylor (London:

BFI, 1995), 665–69. 15 DeLillo, Don, ‘‘Power of History, ’’ 60–3.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 23

deeply embedded within the American national consciousness as, perhaps,

the last expression of innocence by the community, DeLillo applies the

techniques of cinema, subjecting the moment to the processes of rewind,

replay, cut and edit.16 Paradoxically utilizing the Soviet director’s kino-eye

camera movement technique (not unlike the ‘‘camera eye ’’ of Dos Passos’s

USA) to portray the collective experience of pre-technological American

innocence, the narrative style of Underworld ’s prologue may be described as a

kind of ‘‘cinematic writing. ’’17 A narrative version of the image based ‘‘cine-

essay ’’ (which uses the visual image to suggest philosophical ideas), within

cinematic writing the focalizing viewpoint embodies the movement of a

movie camera, often diving from crane shots to the ground and rapidly

switching angles. Allying himself to Eisenstein’s vision of cinema as pro-

jecting and representing both the diversity and the immensity of the masses,

Underworld, as a multi-racial, trans-temporal and multiple-voiced narrative, is

an overt gesture towards the representation of the collective, complete story

of the outgoing half-century.

Thus DeLillo engages with ‘‘ the movies ’’ to project the experience of the

game as a whole, with adherence to the manifold nature of the singular

historical moment. Rather than render the playoff game through the eyes of a

single character, DeLillo cuts into and out of various viewpoints with

dizzyingly multitudinous effect. We enter the game with a young Harlem

black child, Cotter Martin, in a tense moment of police chase as he jumps the

gates to see the contest. Interspersed with rapid shots of Willie Mays, one of

the greatest players in the history of the game, unable to shake a radio

jingle from his head, are the thoughts of real-life radio announcer Russ

Hodges as he succumbs to the nostalgic drift of memory and the past.

Finally, the prologue offers the thoughts and observations which succeed

each other in the mind of J. Edgar Hoover as he scans the crowd and

registers the impending international tensions. In terms of the stylistics of

16 In an inerview with Malcolm Jones Jnr., ‘‘DeLillo Hits A Home Run, ’’ Newsweek, 22 Sept.1997, 84–5, DeLillo elucidates this point further : ‘‘The game was a unifying and largelyjoyous event in which people came out of their houses in order to share theirfeelings _With the onset of the Cold War, the communal sense came to be associated notwith celebration but with danger and with loss. The catastrophic events since then, eventsframed and defined by television, seem to have become predominant, events such asassassination, terrorist acts, even natural disasters. In my private record of events, the ballgame represents a kind of transitional moment between the Second World War and thebeginning of the nuclear age. ’’

17 See Bordwell, 112, for further elucidation on the ‘‘kino-eye ’’ technique (derivative of DzigaVertov’s ‘‘kino-fist ’’), the term applied to the camera’s ability to record the movementgenerated by a mechanized vision.

24 Catherine Morley

the prologue (named after the Bruegel painting The Triumph of Death,

which ironically appears as a feature in Life magazine), DeLillo may even

be viewed as tracking and editing his own career by rendering the

techniques used to produce the crowd scenes ofMao II and the movie-crowd

scene of his most recent novel Cosmopolis (2003). Once cited as saying that

the ‘‘ future belongs to the crowd, ’’ DeLillo’s insistence upon the collective

experience as opposed to that of the individual is articulated by his belief

in the democratic experience of filmic modus operandi, his conviction in

its potential to render a historical moment in terms of its experiential

diversity.18 Creating several, single, very short sentences (or shots) and spli-

cing them between the commentator’s announcements, DeLillo achieves the

effect of a textual montage which moves across several tracks at once :

A man wiped his glasses/A staring man/A man flexing the stiffness.19

Sequencing the radio announcer’s comments in the viewing gallery with

advertisements for consumer goods such as Chesterfield cigarettes and Life

magazine, with dolly shots of the crowd and close-ups of the players on the

outfield, DeLillo stimulates an impression of watching the game on screen

with its rapid, flickering motion.

Experimentally merging the fictional and the factual in terms of

characterization, DeLillo also brings the movies to the text in terms of

casting with the reinvention of actual personalities believed to have been

present at the game. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, New York bar owner

Toots Shor, Ralph Branca, Bobby Thomson and J. Edgar Hoover, in their

respective immigrant identities and national resonance and fame, signal

DeLillo’s democratic project of rendering the entirety of a singular moment

as experienced multiply. The typecast Sinatra and Gleason (and Shor)

momentarily provide the slapstick comedy that is sharply undercut by

Hoover’s close personal-political analysis of the three. Throughout the

prologue, with the use of sweeping crane shots and speedy tracking, the

author assembles seemingly thousands of pieces of visionary and auditory

information into a textual montage which brilliantly renders the whole

experience. Beyond the overtly cinematic prologue DeLillo continues to

engage with the techniques of montage editing by alternating the public and

private spheres of the past. Borrowing Eisensteinian typology, the reader is

never offered a fully developed or rounded character but is presented with

types, faceless characters without knowable identities but with identifiable

18 Don DeLillo, Mao II (London: Vintage, 1991), 16.19 Don DeLillo, Underworld (London: Picador, 1997), 39.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 25

characteristics. The closest we are offered to a protagonist in Underworld is

Nick Shay, occasional narrator and waste-manager whose past lies locked

and undisclosed within the sprawling web of post-Second World War

American history.

Set amongst fictionally created scenes are a series of public moments

which include a wide-angle panorama scene of a civil rights march in the

South in 1964 (perceived through the lens of Rosie Martin, sister of the

young gate-jumper of the prologue). Also presented is the appearance of

J. Edgar Hoover and his alleged lover Clyde Tolson at Truman Capote’s

Black and White Ball in the Plaza in 1966, as well as a manipulated series of

club dates by comedian Lenny Bruce at the height of the Cuban Missile

Crisis which have a particular documentary exactness to them. Bruce’s famed

routine mix of social satire and scathing comedy, designed to startle his

American audiences throughout the 1960s, is a microcosm of DeLillo’s

methodology throughout Underworld, a generic admixture devised to agitate

the reader into contemplation upon the nature of the presented narratives of

political, social and historical reality.

This authorial project of activating the reader, forcing him/her into an

investigative role, is a characteristic undoubtedly derived from cinematic

influence. In the composition of this all-encompassing work, DeLillo

explores the full implications of egalitarian inclusiveness by engaging with a

filmic methodology originally intended to strengthen the spread of

Communism amongst Soviet theatre- and cinema-goers, illustrating the

commonality and affinity of the traditionally perceived competing ideologies.

Envisioning his role as a ‘‘psycho-engineer, ’’ meticulously organizing and

calculating the responses of the audience to shock and surprise, Eisenstein,

in 1924, directed a proletarian play entitled Gas Works which is appropriated

by DeLillo inUnderworld as a means of articulating the democratic aptitude of

film/art.

Set in the real locale of the Moscow gasworks, Eisenstein seated his

audience on benches, surrounded by machinery and immersed in the actual

sights, sounds and odours of the factory. The play, aimed at heightened

bourgeois awareness of the conditions endured by the industrial underclass,

tells the story of a leak within the gas works where the workers, due to the

unscrupulous practices of the bourgeois factory owner, are not equipped

with the gas masks necessary for their physical survival. The drama culmi-

nates with the workers uniting in a communal effort to repair the potentially

lethal seepage. The play, the last production of Proletkult, was forced to close

early due to the audience’s inability to tolerate the emissions of the plant,

but the director had achieved his objective of inflicting the realities of the

26 Catherine Morley

working-class masses upon the consciousness of his addressees. Similarly, as

readers of Underworld, DeLillo coerces us into an enquiry into the nature of

historical reality by presenting not a play but a film (created by the author

himself) entitledUnterweltwhich he then attributes to Eisenstein in a novel that

itself deliberately blurs the boundaries between fiction and historical reality.

Recently recovered, DeLillo’s film is shown at a gala presentation at Radio

City Music Hall in true Eisensteinian fashion – theatrical performance is

merged with the filmic presentation in the pre-film burlesque performance

by the Rockettes. In bringing together the fictionally created Soviet film and

the factually based American song-and-dance act, DeLillo not only attempts

to heal the wounds of Cold War divisions but looks to art (film, fiction and

theatre) as the curative treatment. A viewer of ‘‘Unterwelt ’’ remarks, ‘‘This is

a film about Us and Them, isn’t it ? ’’20

In Underworld the shocked theatre/film audience of Unterwelt, ironically,

question the authenticity of the real American performers but not that of the

fictional Soviet film. The informed reader of DeLillo’s text recognizes their

oversight and, thus, becomes engagedwith the techniques andprocesses of the

author and, consequently, the auteur. We, too, are forced to enter the dialectic.

In consonance with Eisenstein’s early mode,Unterwelt is a silent film which

moves along haltingly, seemingly without plot. Involving a deranged scientist

at work within a secret laboratory, the film climaxes with scenes of the dead

coming upon and amongst the living in a nuclear-destroyed apocalyptic

landscape, slowly uncovering faces disfigured as a result of irresponsible

science. The faceless figures of the fictional film’s dead underclass are rep-

resentative of Eisenstein’s industrial proletariat. Both are denied gas masks

and remain at the mercy of a brutal oppressor until they react collectively as a

unit. In fact, the weight of Eisenstein’s thematics and methodology bears so

heavily upon the DeLillo text that throughout the entire novel there are

frequent references to victims deprived of gas masks by tyrannical per-

secutors. From the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange to the Mississippi

civil rights activists, DeLillo utilises Eisensteinian typage to present a mass

victimhood. As a character watching the film observes, ‘‘Eisenstein’s method

of immediate characterization, called typage _ they were a people persecuted

and altered, this was their typology – they were an inconvenient secret of the

society around them. ’’21 DeLillo registers a shared suffering which flouts the

notion of national immunity or exceptionalism, illustrating through protag-

onists bereft of their Cold War identities that Americans, in fact, have not

been unaltered by Communism and the Cold War (or its demise). Indeed, by

20 Ibid., 444. 21 Ibid., 443.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 27

engaging with the techniques of Soviet, Communistic filmmaking within a

text which has been hailed as a so-called ‘‘great American novel ’’ and,

furthermore, by merging a Communist play with the archetype of American

gangster movies in an almost unrecognizable intertextual labyrinth of factual

happening and fictional event, DeLillo compels the reader to reconsider

his/her accepted history of the previous half-century.

Eisensteinian typage, as utilized by DeLillo, denies the idea of individual

particularities, cuts out the notion of great historical personages as definitive

of an era, to present the multiple, mass experience. In fact DeLillo’s

characters are accused of being impersonal and unknowable, of gushing

‘‘ smart, swift essays at one another, ’’ as John Updike put it, in a review of

Cosmopolis which appeared in The New Yorker.22 However like Klara, the artist

figure in Underworld who uses the Arizona desert landscape as her canvas in

seeking to project a ‘‘ single mass not a collection of objects, ’’ character

typage allows the writer/director to present the narrative sweep of the past.

It enables an egalitarian art.23

DeLillo’s merging of historical fact with fictional composition, as well as

his crossing of the distinct genres of film, fiction, theatre and musical ar-

rangement (he sets a Prokofiev score to the fictional film in the knowledge

that Prokofiev was a close friend of the Russian director, composing the

scores to most of his films), is a deliberate gesture to Eisenstein’s technique

of blending genres to generate emotional shocks within the spectator, a

technique intended to make the observer an active participant in the pro-

duction of artistic meaning. Klara, the focalizer throughout the Unterwelt

episode, observes the development of a ‘‘ rhythmic contradiction’’ procedure

(a term used by Eisenstein himself to describe his methodology in his

posthumously published memoir Beyond the Stars) throughout the film,

composed of static camera jolts, moving from frequent to very little camera

movement in which a series of antithetical images flash across the screen:

In Eisenstein you notice that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic_Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immensebended shadows and there was something to study in every frame, the cameraplacement, the shapes and planes and the juxtaposed shots _

24

22 Cited in Emma Brockes’s article ‘‘View from the Bridge, ’’ Guardian Review, 24 May 2003, 20.23 DeLillo,Underworld, 83 : ‘‘ I didn’t accept this business of life as a fiction _ History was not

a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I hewed to the texture of collective knowledge,took faith in the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history isa workwheel powered by human blood – read the speeches of Mussolini – at least we’veknown the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps ofdisinformation. ’’ 24 Ibid., 429.

28 Catherine Morley

Incorporating this montage technique, DeLillo composes a text consisting of

seemingly random, juxtaposed shots of contemporary culture. Even within

his various chapters and sections he merges genres experimentally. For

instance, the prologue title ‘‘The Triumph of Death ’’ is taken from the

late-sixteenth-century Flemish painter Bruegel’s painting of the same name.

Whistler’s classic American painting of his mother, Arrangement in Gray and

Black, also lends its name to one of the novel’s constituent parts. The

previously mentioned documentary film Cocksucker Blues is also engaged by

DeLillo, as well as Das Kapital (DeLillo’s epilogue), an abandoned Eisenstein

film which was to be the director’s first experiment in the intellectual cinema

designed to ‘‘ teach the viewer to think dialectically. ’’25 Within just one of the

novel’s component parts, ‘‘Elegy for Left Hand Alone’’ (the title of a piece

of work commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of linguistic

philosopher Ludwig Von Wittgenstein, and composed by Maurice Ravel),

the author adopts the techniques of montage through the sharp concurrence

of incongruent moments in the past.

The reader is presented with scenes of Matt Shay viewing and re-viewing

video footage of the Texas highway killer, the first of Marion Shay’s

clandestine meetings with her husband’s colleague Brian Glassic, baseball

enthusiast Marvin Lundy tracking the elusive white ball of the prologue, and

a visit between the Shay brothers Nick and Matt. The text moves on to take

us through the streets of the Bronx with former high-school teacher Albert

Bronzini, then cuts to shots of a sinister octogenarian nun, provocatively

named Sr. Edgar, as she delivers alms to the poor. The focus finally fades

with a glimpse of the mysterious Texas highway killer, who, by virtue of a

fuzzy, hand-held camera, frames the sequence.26 Whilst the montage editing

technique is undeniably present in the narrative composition, the camera

and the lens itself are also ever-present, framing the entire sequence. This

facilitates the assemblage of a section that presents a moment in all its

multiplicity – that is, as it is experienced by multiple identities.27 For DeLillo,

the technological implications of his Soviet-inspired ‘‘cinematic writing ’’

enable the cohesion traditionally espoused by idealistic American

democracy ; they facilitate a mimetic textual unity.

25 Bordwell, 14.26 See Mark Osteen’s American Magic and Dread : Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture

(Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).27 Interestingly, this modernist technique (evident in the writing of Joyce and Woolf) has

recently been demonstrated in the film adaptation The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry,based on the lives of three women (including Woolf herself).

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 29

Throughout his memoirs Eisenstein describes his art as fixated with one

theme – the attainment of unity.28 In dealing with Russian revolutionary and

socialist material, the auteur addresses the issues of national, state and patri-

otic unity (in films such as Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the 1943 film Ivan the

Terrible). Communistic, collective mass unity is addressed in The Battleship

Potemkin (1925), Ferghana Canal (1939) and Strike (1924). However, Eisenstein

did take his vision abroad, journeying to America, where he felt his vision of

unanimity most relevant, in order to make what he described as a truly

American film based on the coalescing contradictions within the American

psyche and the American landscape. Fascinated by a country which he per-

ceived as maintaining a sense of stability in spite of its manifest ambiguities,

Eisenstein came to the United States in 1930 with the ambition of filming

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925). He hoped to apply the

cinematic techniques he had developed and reviewed in the Soviet Union

but the project was eventually rejected by Paramount studios as a result

of idealistic differences and was never completed.

Bitterly disappointed to fail in this endeavour yet steadfast in his resolve to

achieve temporal and geographic filmic unity (in terms of process, plot,

theme and historic vision), Eisenstein turned his attention to Que Viva

Mexico ! (1932), a film which, in its scope and method, bears uncanny

resemblance to the ambitious, epic breadth of DeLillo’s Underworld. The

director was fascinated by Mexico’s diverse geographical terrain and the

country’s curious melange of past and present in its customs (for example, its

Catholic past and the rampant capitalism of Mexico City), but, moreover, he

was drawn to its history of loss and death. In Que Viva Mexico ! Eisenstein

sought to present the history of various successive civilizations, some based

on matriarchal systems, others virtually communistic, on a horizontal

plane – that is, as coexisting in the same geographical locale.29 The film was

designed to encompass Mexican history from its pre-historic days through

the Civil War to the present day and, finally, to the future. Overall, the film’s

central episode epitomized the notion of national unity with the historically

based ‘‘United Entry ’’ into the country’s capital of the combined forces of

Villa and Emiliano Zapata. The film’s pivotal scene embodies the director’s

optimistic envisioning of unity borne out of the chaos of political discord.

With its framing prologue and epilogue (each set in the realm of the dead

where the past dominates and determines the present), Eisenstein’s historical

epic exists almost as a blueprint for DeLillo’s text, which unfolds the events

of the latter half of the twentieth century along a single narrative plain.

28 Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, 792–95. 29 Ibid., 793.

30 Catherine Morley

DeLillo’s text, too, aspires to unity : unity of structure and theme and unity of

collective vision. Taking his cue from Eisenstein’s Mexican experiment by

hinging the novel upon a doubly faceted moment of collective unity (base-

ball) and impending disharmony (the Soviet atomic test), the text aspires to

rebuild the abrasions of the Cold War and disinter the buried ‘‘unofficial ’’

histories of the previous half-century. Like Que Viva Mexico !, the stories

within Underworld, though set in different historical periods and containing

different characters, continually interrelate. Structurally, in terms of both

content and, particularly, composition, themes reappear and interconnect,

illuminating the suppressed circuitry which fastens moments together. Mark

Osteen, notes, for example, the recurrence of the colour orange throughout

the novel. Aboard the Long Tall Sally in Vietnam Chuckie Wainwright and his

crew drop Agent Orange, which reminds him of Minute Maid orange juice.

Later, we meet Chuckie’s father Charles as he composes an advertising jingle

for the product. In 1974 Klara, while watching the Eisenstein film Unterwelt,

recognizes the soundtrack as Prokofiev’s ‘‘Love for Three Oranges ’’ and

later (in the 1990s), working in the desert on Long Tall Sally, Klara wears an

orange T-shirt. In the miracle scene of the Bronx, as an orange moon hangs

over the city, Sr. Edgar notices an orange-juice advert beneath the face of the

dead girl whose death scene the police cordon off with orange tape, ‘‘ the very

orange of the living juice. ’’30

Expressive of how, indeed, ‘‘ everything is connected, ’’ DeLillo unifies art,

war, religion, advertising, crime and death by use of a single recurrent image.

Attempting to encompass all cultural aspects, DeLillo also integrates art (the

previously mentioned Whistler and Bruegel paintings, for example) in much

the same way that each episode of the Mexican enterprise intended to

incorporate one or another Mexican painter. Eisenstein’s influence upon

Underworld is manifest but DeLillo does not limit himself to the processes of

editing, the integration of history and fiction, or the use of montage. Rather,

he integrates such Soviet processes and adopts the Eisensteinian vision of

the monumental (that is, the narrative transcendent of temporal, spatial or

generic boundaries, of epic scale, vision and encompassment). Thus DeLillo,

ironically, by adopting the procedures and vision of the Soviet ‘‘other, ’’

transcends the national, successfully conveying the inherent hopefulness of

the American democratic dream of unity and the interconnectedness of the

global community.

Despite, however, his commitment to the redemptive democratic poten-

tial of cinematic writing and film, DeLillo also displays his characteristic

30 Osteen, 253.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 31

ambivalence towards the medium as sublimating (an ambivalence inherited

from Godard) in his sections that focus upon the Oswald-like Texas highway

killer. Mindful of the occasion within contemporary society to descend into

the hyper-reality of simulacra distended by Hollywood and television, the

writer is ever conscious of the possible interchangeability of the viewer and

the viewed. Throughout his fictional corpus DeLillo has voiced his alarm

with the tendencies of modern media technology, especially that of television,

video and mass-produced Hollywood film. From Jayne Mansfield’s ‘‘drama

of red hot consumption’’ in Underworld to the inability of television to exist

without the presence of Hitler in White Noise, DeLillo, whilst writing from

within the mode which he critiques, cautions against the inherent dangers.

Elucidating the thin interconnection between the watcher and the wat-

ched in an essay preceding the publication of Underworld, the author reveals

his unease with the glut of the image: ‘‘ If you view a tape often enough, it

tends to transform you, to make you a passive variation of the criminal in his

warped act of consumption. ’’31 DeLillo’s earlier novel Libra (1988) con-

troversially deals with this issue of through its ‘‘blurred margin ’’ technique of

fictionalized biography in re-creating the life of Lee Harvey Oswald (a

technique later reworked throughout Underworld).32 DeLillo’s Oswald com-

mits one of the most famous crimes of the century in anticipation of the

media attention he would receive, which would ‘‘validate the experience ’’

and make it and him more real. Demonstrative of the proliferation of the

image and media complicity in criminal replication, the strand of Zapruder

and Oswald is dramatized in Cosmopolis in the character of Benno Levin and,

principally, in Underworld by Richard Henry Gilkey, who, not unlike Oswald,

kills a man in his forties while the victim travels by car. Both Oswald and

Gilkey (and, indeed, their victims) are subject to the illusions nurtured and

sustained by the media culture they inhabit, losing their subjectivity to be-

come hyper-manipulated characters.

Layering fictional moment upon historical fact, Gilkey’s tenth crime is

recorded accidentally by a child (who is consequentially implicated) with a

video camera travelling on the highway at the time of the murder (in much

the same way that Zapruder was filmed by a female bystander) :

At some level the girl has to be present here, watching what you’re watching, un-prepared – the girl is seeing this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that shekeeps the tape rolling _ so the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimescalled because they have to call her something.33

31 DeLillo, ‘‘Power of History, ’’ 63. 32 Osteen, 266.33 DeLillo, Underworld, 158.

32 Catherine Morley

Choreographing the gaze of the voyeuristic spectator to merge with that of

the onlooker (and, in turn, the reader), all are affiliated with the assassin.

Equally, the killer and the viewer are ascribed a false subjectivity by a

medium which fractures the nature of reality, a medium which rather than

activating political consciousness sublimates original thought. Media

complicity is further evident in the suggestion throughout the novel that

Gilkey’s crimes have solicited a further copycat murderer and that Gilkey is,

himself, in fact, an Oswald-inspired assassin.

Critical of the debilitating procedures of conventional media/television

representation, DeLillo suggests a characteristically contemporary affinity

between the criminal act and the manner of its simultaneous recording. The

writer conjectures that the serial crime has become subject to the same

repetition as the television serial, which, in each seasonal re-showing, ripples

further into the fictional, consequently taking the image further into the

realm of the hyper-real :

There is something about videotape, isn’t there, and this particular type of serialcrime? This is a crime designed for random taping and immediate playing. You sitthere and wonder if this kind of crime became possible when the means of taping anevent and playing it immediately became widely available_ the serial murder hasfound its medium, or vice versa – an act of shadow technology.

As Osteen observes, it is only through technological and media intervention

that Gilkey feels his existence validated. This validation is reinforced and

his identity authenticated in his live television conversation with the

‘‘ alien-eyed’’ anchor-woman Sue-Ann Corcoran, who makes him ‘‘ feel real. ’’

Through the dual technological connection of speaking to Sue Ann on the

telephone and simultaneously listening to himself on the television Gilkey

experiences ‘‘ the waking knowledge that he was real. ’’34

This falsification of reality, this blurring of boundaries between reality and

fiction, is at the root of DeLillo’s uncertainty regarding the mechanisms of

media technology. Paradoxically, however, he utilizes the processes he

critiques (such as the ‘‘blurred margin ’’ technique) in conveying the implicit

hope for redemption and regeneration within the community. This ambiva-

lent dual approach to the processes of filmic reproducibility is carefully

attuned to a debate which has been at the heart of American literature and

culture since its inception, the tension between the will of the individual

citizen and that of the democratic collective. His incorporation of movie

technique in his writing is, as has been gestured throughout, a motion

towards the democratic, towards the encompassment and representation of

34 Ibid., 159 and 270.

Don DeLillo’s Transatlantic Dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein 33

the collective. His critique of such processes, however, is firmly in defence of

the individual identity, pitched against the tragic encroachment of the

individual’s powers of discernment and the consciousness necessary for

collective political engagement and activity. Critical of television and video

for the processes and mechanisms he applauds in cinema and writing,

DeLillo’s seeming contradictory stance is based upon the means of

occurrence, the communal experience of cinematic art as opposed to the

isolating mode of video.

DeLillo, like the Russian director whose techniques he adopts and adapts,

conveys the monumental, the epic, that most communal and democratic of

genres which speaks both to and of the community. Inspired by Joyce with a

‘‘consuming desire to play a part in the forging of history, ’’ Eisenstein, in his

quest for monumental depth, once painted a series of concentric black and

red circles on the ceiling of his Moscow apartment on Chysti Prudi.35

Creating his epic through the foraging of history, the American writer and

playwright appropriates Eisenstein’s circles and re-brands them for the US.

The circles become the bulls-eye target of the Lucky Strike cigarette box

which sets the protagonist adrift in the flood of memory and philosophic

contemplation regarding the image’s significance. The Russian director’s

superstitious fear of the number 13 becomes, in Underworld, a symbol of

chaos and loss. As the number worn by the losing baseball pitcher, it

mysteriously haunts the text, suggestive of lost voices usurped by the past

while concurrently reviving the displaced voice of Eisenstein. The Russian

director’s filmic processes inform the poetics of DeLillo’s prose, the acute-

ness of his representation of an outgoing half-century. By renegotiating the

terms solidified by the Cold War, by embracing the Soviet ‘‘other, ’’ DeLillo

achieves an art that is, paradoxically, democratic in its commitment to

transnational inclusion and unity, an art in which ‘‘everything is connected in

the end. ’’

35 Barna, Eisenstein, 14.

34 Catherine Morley