If I was still teaching, Point Omega would be a nice addition to my curriculum. I don't think plot is particularly important in a novel comprised mostly of cultural one-liners like this one, but I'll bring you up to speed anyway.
An avant garde filmmaker wants to do a one-take ninety minute "interview" filmed with just a talking head in front of a wall--he's already picked out the perfect wall--of Richard Elster, a one-time consultant for the defense department who lent a philosophical perspective to war-gaming before he ended his service. Elster is hesitant about the proposition and spends a lot of time in the desert talking profundities with the hopeful documentarian. Half way through this extended discussion, Elster's daughter, Jessica, shows up adding her own perspective and providing a little potential romance to the proceedings.
Nothing hugely significant happens until Jessica vanishes. DeLillo never definitively lets us know what has become of her, but the whole novel is framed on either end by a performance art thingee at MOMA where they are screening Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in super slow motion so that it takes 24 hours for a full showing. The shower scene, for instance, is strung out frame by grisly frame. With this kind of prologue and epilogue it is relatively safe to assume that Jessica has met with some grotesquely foul play.
But the real reward of this terrific little book (it is only 117 pages long) is the postmodern fun DeLillo has wondering about what makes some things more real than others. Is there any REAL difference between, borrowing from White Noise, the most photographed barn in America and a photograph of the most photographed barn in America, or a photograph of someone taking a photograph of the most photographed barn in America? That's the kind of stuff I love to read and think about. Plots bore me.
I like the way DeLillo makes his readers wade through aesthetic layers. "Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress. . ." "The film made him feel like someone watching a film. The meaning of this escaped him. He kept feeling things whose meaning escaped him."
He goes from this to the larger idea of the effort it takes to see the moments in front of you.
It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. He was mesmerized by this, the depths that were possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see, the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing.
People now and then casting shadows on the screen.
He began to think of one thing's relationship to another. This film had the same relationship to the original movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real.
Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not.
"Meaningless, he thought, but maybe not." That basically describes the worlds DeLillo creates. Come to think of it, it also describes the world I live in.
This kind of SEEING leads to a kind of sanctification of each moment. And this thinking gets its start from Teilhard de Chardin, at least that is what DeLillo says. When I taught I evoked Teilhard a lot simply to get a rise out of my students. He was a kind of renegade priest who spent a good part of his life in China (N.B. I'm not being scholarly here, so don't necessarily trust what I say. Being too lazy to research so as to guarantee accuracy, I am just spouting off the top of my head.). To my way of thinking Teilhard bridged the gap between science and religion when it came to evolution. He postulated that since energy does not dissipate, it must be in a continual act of perfecting itself. In a Jungian leap he suggested that the earth, in addition to a biosphere, stratosphere, and ionosphere, had a noosphere, a gathering point for the collective thoughts of man and that noosphere is what we call God. As simplistic as the explanation is, it is still thrilling to think of.
The Point Omega then is like the noosphere. Because if each thing is in the process of perfecting itself on its way toward the noosphere and Godhood, then each moment is at any given point along that progression the most ideal expression of that moment at that particular time. It is the Point Omega.
Since nothing much happens, at least nothing we can be sure about, in this novel, it is a collection of Point Omegas. Each no more or less significant than the last. It is a fun idea to think about and would make a nifty essay question.
There is one more thing about DeLillo that I love. He writes great sentences.
The door slid open and there was a stir of mild traffic at the far end of the floor, people getting on the escalator, a clerk swiping credit cards, a clerk tossing items into large sleek museum bags. Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies.
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