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In an interview with Tom LeClair, novelist Don DeLillo was asked the "great bar-mitzvah question"-to name some writers who had influenced him. He eventually listed novels by Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, and Malcolm Lowry, but his first response was to cite not a novelist but a filmmaker: "Probably the movies of Jean-Luc Godard had a more immediate effect on my early work than anything I'd ever read" ("Interview" 25). While writing his little-read first novel, Americana (1971), DeLillo kept in mind "The strong image, the short ambiguous scene, the dream sense of some movies, the artificiality, the arbitrary choices of some directors, the cutting and editing. The power of images" ("Interview" 25). And indeed, the influence of film on the plot, narrative structures, and themes of Americana is enormous, as the second part of this essay demonstrates.
DeLillo's debts to cinema are apparent throughout his work. For example, his 1977 novel Players opens with a section called "The Movie," which previews the action and introduces its main characters without naming them; the characters watch emotionlessly as a group of terrorists guns down some golfers. Likewise, in the novel proper, the protagonists, Lyle and Pammy Wynant, cannot experience emotions except through television or movies. After Pammy callously betrays the gay male couple with whom she has been living, causing the death of one of them, she feels no grief until she watches an old movie melodrama on television. At the end of the novel, she is framed against the marquee of a hotel for transients, the star of her own private movie, now playing to an empty house. The plot of Running Dog (1978) concerns the pursuit of an allegedly pornographic home movie of Hitler and his minions in the Fuhrerbunker in 1945. The Hitler film inspires all manner of violent machinations and eventually comes to represent capitalism itself. Like DeLillo's acclaimed novel Libra, both Players and Running Dog use cinematic crosscutting to generate meaning through montagelike juxtapositions. More importantly, both early novels thematize the effects that cinematic representation exerts on subjectivity, suggesting that film has contributed to a commodification of consciousness that turns human agents "into actors doing walk-throughs" (DeLillo, "Art" 301).
But the specific influence of Godard first appears in three uncollected early short stories-"Coming...