The Infiltration of Popular Culture in DeLillos White Noise Essay

The Infiltration of Popular Culture in DeLillos White Noise In Don DeLillos satirical novel White Noise, we become acquainted with what we power call a postmodern family - a group of people in the main bound together by birth, marriage, and common residence. however as we rule this family, we notice that the bonds between them are strained at best, and that their lives have been interpreted over by roughly insidious new force. This force is ordinary refining. For better or worse, pop culture has infiltrated the lives of our fictional family just as it has the lives of substantive human beings. DeLillos purpose in the book is best lighten by Heinrichs comment after the airborne toxic event The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. In some other words, DeLillo states that popular culture is ruining - or, perhaps, has ruined - us all. We must number one unpack what DeLillo, speaking through Heinrich, means by this statement. First, we notice that cul ture of some sort is important to a societys well-being - in fact, some would argue that a group of people does not form a civilized society unless they have culture. Now, high culture - the culture espo exampled by the ruling classes, such as theater, classical music, and the like - is usually delivered live. No radiation is required. In contrast, low or popular culture is by and large transmitted by radiation - the television or the radio. Steffies Toyota Celica episode (154-155) is an slip of this, as are the symptoms of the airborne toxic event that continually alter in accordance with the radio. Furthermore, the fear of death figures prominently in the novel, and this is repeat to the obsession with offspring. Many have blamed the American obsession with youth (e... ...ized by an obsession with the messages delivered by the radio. All the characters change the name that they use to refer to the event when the radio announcer does - a feathery plume (111), a billowing clou d (114), and finally an airborne toxic event (117). But this is only nomenclature. More telling is the fact that the girls symptoms - actual objects with physical manifestations - unceasingly change with the radio reports. We learn that Heinrich told her Denise she was showing outdated symptoms (117). How can symptoms be outdated? The only solution is that we really have become media lemmings, govern by the suggestion of beings who exist only in radiation sort of than by our own selves. We have become slaves of the media, as DeLillo so vividly illustrates - and we should be terrified. Work CitedDeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York Penguin, 1985.