Today we’re reading Point Omega by Don DeLillo (published in 2010), and talking about intellectualism, misogyny, Psycho, and the Omega Point (aka the end of the universe).
I first read Point Omega shortly after it was published, and quickly deemed it one of my favorites. Let me set the scene: I was young, I (obviously) hadn’t read as many books at that point, and I was—uhhh—severely depressed. So something about this story (a young woman disappearing in the desert, a longing to become a stone in a field) just spoke to me.
As I prepared to re-read this last month, I figured I might feel differently about it this time around. Here was my initial reaction upon finishing my re-read:
I’m ambivalent now. I don’t know if this book is without substance, despite insistence that there is something here to think about. Or if the meaninglessness of the mens’ conversations is exactly the point. How they babble on about time, war, film, truth as if that is life. Meanwhile both are unable to see Jessie as her own being, until she’s gone. Her disappearance is only a mystery because they never saw her as her own person.
A few weeks later, and another re-read under my belt (yes, I read it again—it’s very short), I’m no longer ambivalent. I’m sticking with my initial thoughts about the “point” of this book, but I don’t think everything the characters said was totally meaningless either. There is a lot to think about in there, it’s just not that important in the grand scheme of things.
But we’ll get to all of that in due time. For now, I’ll just put it this way: this book made me think a lot, therefore I liked it.
Get a copy of Point Omega by Don DeLillo from Bookshop.org
Omega Point:
The Omega Point is a supposed future when everything in the universe spirals toward a final point of unification.
An Overview
The book opens with this scene: an anonymous man is watching a film installation at a museum. He thinks about the meaning of film and this work of art and time. He is one of the few that truly understands this. Anyone who leaves the exhibit too soon isn’t serious. He is waiting for someone serious to show up—a woman. Yes, he’s waiting for a woman to show up, one who stays at least 30 minutes, that proves she is serious, and worthy. She gets it/she gets him.
He began to understand, after all this time, that he’s been standing here waiting for something…He’d been waiting for a woman, a woman alone, someone he might talk to…Wasn’t that it? He was thinking a woman would enter who’d stay and watch for a time…an hour, half an hour, that was enough, half an hour, that was sufficient, a serious person, soft-spoken, wearing a pale summer dress. (p. 14)
Then we cut to the desert, “somewhere south of nowhere”. A retired “defense intellectual”, Richard Elster, and a filmmaker, Jim Finley (this section of the story is from Jim’s POV). The filmmaker wants to make a film: “just a man and a wall” that’s the film. The defense intellectual will talk, stream of consciousness, no cuts, that’s the film.
These two men talk and talk and talk at this isolated house in the desert. Weeks are spent talking. They talk about time and war and truth. There is so. much. talking.
Richard Elster’s daughter comes to visit: Jessie. She is there, a witness to their intellectual discussions. To the father, she is a daughter. To the filmmaker, she is the girl that sleeps in the room next to his, wearing a thigh-grazing t-shirt.
In those first days, I thought of her as the Daughter. Elster’s possessiveness, his enclosing space, made it hard for me to set her apart, to find some semblance of an independent being. (p. 39)
Then Jessie disappears.
To bookend the story, we re-visit the anonymous watcher, the man at the museum. He is back to watch the film, to wait. A woman shows up. She stands, she watches, she stays. She inches closer to him, and then she speaks.
Suddenly she is the only thing Anonymous can think about: how can he explain the film to her? How can he impress her? How can he make his intelligence known?
The woman leaves, and he follows her, and he asks for her number, because she passed the test, and he is so sure this is meant to be.
The end.
24 Hour Psycho
The film being played at the museum is Psycho, but it’s slowed down to play over 24 hours. This anonymous man fixates on every detail, and he describes to us the infamous shower scene: in which Janet Leigh (she is always Janet Leigh, her character’s name never remains) is stabbed, with a great focus on how the rings from the shower curtain spin and spin and fall, as she falls.
Watching now, the way the water dances in front of her face as she slides down the tiled wall reaching her hand to the shower curtain to secure a grip and halt the movement of her body toward its last breath…He counted six rings. The rings spinning on the curtain rod when she pulls the curtain down with her. The knife, the silence, the spinning rings. (p. 12-13)
~
The installation in the book is based on a real installation called 24 Hour Psycho (1993), created by Douglas Gordon (which ran at the MoMA from June 11- September 6, 2006 as part of a larger exhibition on the artist—this is the same time period as the book).
Watch a 4:42 clip of the shower scene from 24 Hour Psycho.
Intellectualize (verb):
give an intellectual character to.
to talk, write, or think intellectually.
to give rational form or content to.
(in psychology) a defense mechanism in which people reason about a problem to avoid uncomfortable or distressing emotions—thinking is used to avoid feeling.
Vanity of the intellectual
Richard Elster was hired by the U.S. government, during the Iraq War, as a Defense Intellectual to make things sound better. To make war more palatable. His skill set is language—he talks.
Jim Finley is desperate to make another film, one full of truth. About war. Elster is the answer.
The paragraphs of Elster’s conjecturing is a bore. It is the perfect example of the intellectual ego, the type of person who talks at people instead of to them.
“He’s been talking to students all his life,” I said. “He doesn’t expect anybody to say anything.”
“Every second’s the last breath he takes.”
(p. 46)
I’ll admit: at first, I read these paragraphs and rolled my eyes, wanting to indict DeLillo for spouting junk and passing it off as “intellectual”. I’ve never read any of his other work, so I have no guide post. But I tend to give an author the benefit of the doubt, and my annoyance felt purposeful.
It felt, instead, like DeLillo was indicting this very sort of intellectualism that runs rampant in art, academic, and political spheres—or at least, indicting its use to justify war.
“A deathbed conversion. That is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.”
(p. 53)
Women are so ~mysterious~
Elster and Finley barely register Jessie outside of the ways in which she is relevant to them. As I said earlier: she is simply a Daughter to her father (“I’m not sure he understood the fact that she was not him”), a potential sexual object to the filmmaker—not because there is any welcomed sexual or romantic connection between the two, but because this man doesn’t seem to know what else she could be to him—a sister, perhaps (“a small lifetime of non-encounters, like with your sister”…like, what?).
He watches her sleep:
I went inside and turned off a couple of lights and then stood outside her room. There was a space between door and jamb and I eased the door open and stood there, waiting for the dark to soften to the point where I could make out shapes. Then there she was, in bed, but it took some time before I realized she was looking at me. She was under the bedsheet looking straight at me and then she turned on her side and faced the far wall, pulling the sheet up to her neck. (p. 73-74)
We barely get an outline of Jessie: she is mid-twenties, brown hair, her mother sent her to see her father because of a man she’s been “seeing”. She talks to strangers, she is “otherworldly”.
One day, Elster and Finley return from a trip to town, and she is gone. No sign of her or what happened.
Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for, two full days, no word, no sign. Had she strayed past the edge of conjecture or were we willing to imagine what had happened? (p. 81)
Convergence
Jessie is the woman who shows up at the museum. Though the scene is at the end of the book, it happened before we cut to the desert. A story in three parts. She meets (or rather, happens to stand next to) Anonymous man as they watch.
The scene from Psycho being described now is another stabbing, this time the stabbing of the sheriff. The watcher remembers every single detail of this movie, except for the name of Janet Leigh’s character.
He chases after Jessie as she leaves, all the way outside the museum. She gives him her number. As he goes back inside, he realizes he never asked for her name.
This novella is quick to read—slow-paced but compact. I don’t know if I picked up on what happened the first time I read this book all those years ago, if I ever made the effort to put the pieces together.
Slow things down, and it becomes real time.
My younger self read Jessie’s disappearance as an act of freedom, of escape. And I do think that fits in somewhere with Elster’s interpretation of the Omega Point—
“The omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”
(p. 52-53)
—but that reading is for another time, place, and self.
Point Omega
We never get a concrete answer about what happened to Jessie. All we know is that someone (possibly a man named Dennis) kept calling her at her mother’s house, and then hanging up. Over and over. But the calls stopped right when Jessie left to go to the desert.
Forget everything these men say. Forget all the talking they do. The answer is not in the paragraphs upon paragraphs of talk about war or film or whatever. What they’re saying isn’t the answer to the story. Their incessant talking is the distraction. It’s what renders Jessie and her reality invisible.
It’s all right there on the page in front of you, but are you paying attention to the right people? Are you trying to figure out what their words mean? Are you afraid that you don’t get what they’re saying? What if it means nothing? What if they’re literally saying nothing?
I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has been narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not. (p. 98)
Distortion
Language can distort reality—no one knows that better than Elster (or the U.S. government). How a story is told, and who tells the story, can both reveal and conceal so much. It’s a great distraction.
The center of this story, Jessie’s disappearance, is mostly concealed. It’s only the bits and pieces we get from others that allow us to consider what really might have happened, whereas Jessie’s perspective would have given us the full explanation. Her disappearance is only a mystery because we never really listened to her speak.
What my younger self saw in this book was an answer—I’m happy to report that I no longer dream of disappearing. But I do still think about what might have happened to Jessie, and my hope is that she got what she wanted.
Omega Point
Okay, let’s talk about the omega point.
Omega is the final letter in the Greek alphabet, so it has come to represent an ending—often the final or last part of something. So the “omega point” is, simply, the end point. In Christianity, Omega represents the all-encompassing nature of God.
The Omega Point as a philosophical/theological theory of the universe was put forth by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. As a paleontologist and Catholic priest, his theory was an attempt to marry evolution and religion to explain the universe. He believed that, like Christ (famously the prophet of Christianity), the universe draws all things unto itself. In this way, he argues that the universe naturally becomes “more organized”, until it reaches its final point—the Omega Point (aka God, aka Singularity).
This is a surface-level explanation of the theory, and it requires a bit more spiritual belief than I maintain in order to truly go along with it. But I think this foundation will serve us well enough in relation to Point Omega. Although there is one final point we should consider: Teilhard asserts that communication, connection, and interaction between humans is what pushes consciousness to grow—this “consciousness” being of a more Divine sort.
And of course we have to ask: what is obliterated in the process of this “growing consciousness”, this idealization of returning to The Source? The obvious answer is life as we know it.
But also, we often obscure real emotion in favor of intellect as a more “true” representation of reality. Where do actual people fit into the plight of the intellectual?
Which brings me back around to philosophy bros—wait, have we gotten there yet? *sigh* Okay, yet another tangent to save for another day. But I really want to bring up Frankenstein’s egotistical quest for god-like-power-through-knowledge, his obsession with instilling life into the dead as way to mask his intense grief…
Am I asserting that Victor Frankenstein was a proto-philosophy-bro? Anyways.
During my research, I found that trans-humanists and post-humanists reference Teilhard, Tipler, and this Omega Point stuff pretty regularly. And everything comes together to remind me of how some are willing to erase very-much-real, on-this-Earthly-plane humans, in service of their ideology (or you know, just purely for power).
Look, I came across some very concerning YouTube videos (stop trying to make eugenics happen), and I have enough to worry about. So let’s end my digressions here.
…unless you *do* want to hear about Frankenstein?
TL;DR
We overthink, over-intellectualize, and talk too much—and in the process, real life and real people become so abstracted that we hardly think of anything as real anymore. Humanity is erased, the end has arrived.
~
I do not absolve myself of the vanity of intellectualizing. Thanks for reading.
…there seemed to flow an array of of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much…The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. (p. 5)
Loose Threads
Because there’s always more to think about, and never enough time to write about it all.
post-modernist irony
the end of history
Iraq war
death drive
haiku
the masculinized intellectual ego
etymology and the evolutions of words
norman bates
stones in fields
Further Reading:
The Omega Point and Beyond: The Singularity Event — M. Castillo, AJNR
Point Omega by Don DeLillio — Phi Fic (podcast)
My Obsession with DeLillo’s Obsession with Gordon’s Obsession with Hitchcock — Figuring Fiction
Douglas Gordon — Gagosian Quarterly
Is Don DeLillo’s endgame of consciousness played out? — Bookforum
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