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Thursday, March 10, 2005
Don DeLillo - The Movie!
As I force myself to work on a freelance writing assignment, I found myself wondering what my favorite authors are up to. On the one hand, it made me consider who really are my favorite authors and who I merely claim to be my favorite authors - there's a growing disparity there, which I think encapsulates the gap between ambition and reality. On the other hand, I found out that Don DeLillo just had his first screenplay turned into a movie, Game 6. It stars Michael Keaton, who certainly has the ability to be a DeLillo-esque character - serious and straight-faced and even a bit homicidal in the face of an increasingly absurd postmodern world. The movie apparently debuted at Sundance earlier this year. Whether or not it'll make it to local theaters, I have no idea.
DeLillo also has a play that will debut next year, Love-Lies-Bleeding. No word on any new novels in the horizon.
DeLillo is one of those authors I often claim to be a favorite but who isn't anymore. I found The Body Artist unreadable and a huge stylistic departure for DeLillo; Cosmopolis was ridiculous, albeit closer to DeLillo's previous works and concerns. I remember when Underworld came out and various people talking about it in my graduate school classes, asking how far they've gotten into it, what they thought. When I finally got around to it, I found that it was a satisfying read for the most part - but compared to the other "big novels" that I treasure (Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis's J R, most notably), it didn't stick with me.
For me, at least, DeLillo's peak was in the late seventies and most of the eighties - Players, Running Dog, The Names, White Noise, and Libra. The last two novels were what brought him wider attention, but the first three have a noir quality that I find more enjoyable to read and speaks to me in a more resonant fashion. I've read White Noise at least a dozen times by now - I've taught it, I'd written a reading guide about it, I've read it repeatedly for pleasure... And while I still find it an absolute joy, over the years I've had to accept that I read it very differently from what DeLillo intended. DeLillo wished to condemn American Dread and the postmodern anti-life style it encompasses, while I reveled in its excesses and absurdities. What he sees as capitulation, I see as adaptation.
I'd like to see a new DeLillo novel, though apparently he's devoting more and more time to writing plays - and now movies, I guess. I read somewhere, a while back, of a film adaptation of Cosmopolis, though I was under the impression DeLillo wasn't involved in writing the screenplay or anything. I doubt that DeLillo's gone Hollywood, quite - but wouldn't that irony beat all?
Or would it just be an adaptation to the realities of the literary world?
DeLillo also has a play that will debut next year, Love-Lies-Bleeding. No word on any new novels in the horizon.
DeLillo is one of those authors I often claim to be a favorite but who isn't anymore. I found The Body Artist unreadable and a huge stylistic departure for DeLillo; Cosmopolis was ridiculous, albeit closer to DeLillo's previous works and concerns. I remember when Underworld came out and various people talking about it in my graduate school classes, asking how far they've gotten into it, what they thought. When I finally got around to it, I found that it was a satisfying read for the most part - but compared to the other "big novels" that I treasure (Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis's J R, most notably), it didn't stick with me.
For me, at least, DeLillo's peak was in the late seventies and most of the eighties - Players, Running Dog, The Names, White Noise, and Libra. The last two novels were what brought him wider attention, but the first three have a noir quality that I find more enjoyable to read and speaks to me in a more resonant fashion. I've read White Noise at least a dozen times by now - I've taught it, I'd written a reading guide about it, I've read it repeatedly for pleasure... And while I still find it an absolute joy, over the years I've had to accept that I read it very differently from what DeLillo intended. DeLillo wished to condemn American Dread and the postmodern anti-life style it encompasses, while I reveled in its excesses and absurdities. What he sees as capitulation, I see as adaptation.
I'd like to see a new DeLillo novel, though apparently he's devoting more and more time to writing plays - and now movies, I guess. I read somewhere, a while back, of a film adaptation of Cosmopolis, though I was under the impression DeLillo wasn't involved in writing the screenplay or anything. I doubt that DeLillo's gone Hollywood, quite - but wouldn't that irony beat all?
Or would it just be an adaptation to the realities of the literary world?
