The Image as Double-edged Sword – Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Non-violent Resistance to Fundamentalist Ideologies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Both Don DeLillo and Jean Baudrillard have been critical of American culture, presenting it as a vapid culture fixated on the image – whether that means the actual products disseminated by film, television, print media and advertising, or the erecting of the imagined edifice of American exceptionalism and superiority that these products support. However, this article aims to show, through an analysis of DeLillo´s approach to the image in the novel Falling Man, that his relationship to the work of Jean Baudrillard is, in fact, a complicated and antagonistic one. Central to this complication and antagonism is DeLillo´s conception of the crucial role of the radical artist, particularly in times of historical upheaval, and his view of the ambivalent place America found itself in the days and years that followed the attacks of September 11. This article argues that the figure of his titular hero, Falling Man – the performance artist that haunts the streets of New York in the wake of the attacks – is presented as something Baudrillard would have seen as an impossibility; that is to say, as a source of orientation and unity in divisive times.