en they are affirmed and created by the radio. The entire Toxic Event is coded in the language and terms of the media and more specifically television. Safety from the Event is found by the characters coding the real disaster as a television epic. The safety is found in the association of “real” horror with the “simulated” horror on television. DeLillo codes the entire scene as a TV event by using TV jargon words such as “scene” and “panoramic.” Frow acknowledges this and includes a selected passage in his notes: “In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the clouds resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy paint and billboard, TV saturation [italics mine]” (qtd. in Frow 423-4). In the mind’s eye of the spectators the black cloud is something they’ve seen before; it is something they’ve experienced before in Bhopal etc. through the Simulacra of television. The people are not seeing the true Toxic Cloud but instead a cloud conditioned by thousands of hours of toxic clouds they have seen on television. The helicopter lights—the spotlights on the superstar at the center stage of the exodus epic—the Toxic Cloud. The Toxic Event is further seen as paralleling television in its obvious distance from any reality. No one is killed by the Event, as would be the case with any self-respecting disaster. The reality of the toxicity itself, due to the lack of death, is called into question. If no one dies there can be no disaster; for the only disasters that cause no death are those beaming into living rooms of America from the television. The children, the most astute seers of the Gladney household, recognize the unimportance of the Event and demonstrate this by sleeping through it. Not only is the event made unimportant by its parallels with television it is made beau...
