A Psychic Mystery

We can’t hear the movie in the airplane because we don’t have headsets, but a piano in the aircraft’s bar provides ominous and then innocently tinkling accompaniment as seven or eight middle-aged suburban men on screen swing their golf clubs over a wide, bright green. “It’s worthwhile to point out that the characters and landscape are being seen through the special viewpoint of a long lens. This is a lesson in the intimacy of distance.” The voice at the beginning of Don DeLillo’s Players comes not from the screen but from DeLillo who whispers as we watch. On the screen a man with a semi-automatic rifle rises in the underbrush of the foreground. A woman, wearing fringed buckskin pants and holding a machete, runs in slow motion across the green. The revolution begins with “blood on golf bags, on white shoes, spreading over tartan pants.” The piano music ends, the travelers remember they are on a plane and Don DeLillo’s chilling and perceptually disquieting novel about the ambiance of our time is off to a running start.

Lyle and Pammy are a young Manhattan couple who have no children. They used togotoor rather “collect” restaurants; now they live parallel lives, viewing each other but not being together, even in their daily sexual play. They miss each other most, or seem to be most together, when forced to separate, to live beyond each other’s gaze. Then each character lives as the focal point of the whole world, sensations streaming in, perceptions radiating out. Lyle works at 11 Wall Street on the floor of the Stock Exchange; at home he sits within dialing distance of the TV and watches but seconds of fleeting images before he moves the dial. The sound is off or too low to matter, or the program is in Spanish. Lyle is always aware of the nonpersonal, electrical units of power underpinning reality. Sometimes he carries teleprinter slips around: “The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point.” Real life in units and dimensions normally perceived by the human eye bores him. Plays, for instance, bore him, though movies don’t: A “kind of torpor was generated by three-dimensional bodies, real space as opposed to the manipulated depth of film.” At home alone, he finds it hard to turn off TV. “There would be a gap to fill. It caused a tremendous wrench, turning off the set. He was there, part of the imploding light.”

ZK

About the Author

Zane Kotker

We can’t hear the movie in the airplane because we don’t have headsets, but a piano in the aircraft’s bar provides ominous and then innocently tinkling accompaniment as seven or eight middle-aged suburban men on screen swing their golf clubs over a wide, bright green. “It’s worthwhile to point out that the characters and landscape are being seen through the special viewpoint of a long lens. This is a lesson in the intimacy of distance.” The voice at the beginning of Don DeLillo’s Players comes not from the screen but from DeLillo who whispers as we watch. On the screen a man with a semi-automatic rifle rises in the underbrush of the foreground. A woman, wearing fringed buckskin pants and holding a machete, runs in slow motion across the green. The revolution begins with “blood on golf bags, on white shoes, spreading over tartan pants.” The piano music ends, the travelers remember they are on a plane and Don DeLillo’s chilling and perceptually disquieting novel about the ambiance of our time is off to a running start.

Lyle and Pammy are a young Manhattan couple who have no children. They used togotoor rather “collect” restaurants; now they live parallel lives, viewing each other but not being together, even in their daily sexual play. They miss each other most, or seem to be most together, when forced to separate, to live beyond each other’s gaze. Then each character lives as the focal point of the whole world, sensations streaming in, perceptions radiating out. Lyle works at 11 Wall Street on the floor of the Stock Exchange; at home he sits within dialing distance of the TV and watches but seconds of fleeting images before he moves the dial. The sound is off or too low to matter, or the program is in Spanish. Lyle is always aware of the nonpersonal, electrical units of power underpinning reality. Sometimes he carries teleprinter slips around: “The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point.” Real life in units and dimensions normally perceived by the human eye bores him. Plays, for instance, bore him, though movies don’t: A “kind of torpor was generated by three-dimensional bodies, real space as opposed to the manipulated depth of film.” At home alone, he finds it hard to turn off TV. “There would be a gap to fill. It caused a tremendous wrench, turning off the set. He was there, part of the imploding light.”