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

Abstract

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.