tiful as is seen in the author’s fixation on its grandeur. Television, especially disaster television and the bigger and better crash films discussed by Murray, are not beautiful due to their American ethic, but rather because of their distance from an immediate reality. DeLillo maintains this assertion and ties it into Deleuze’s theory by showing that the disaster unfolding outside the windows of the Gladney’s station wagon is itself unreal—just a Simulacra. Although the Toxic Event parallels the hyper-reality of television, it is the lack of television in the physical sense, which causes the greatest deal of stress to the survivors. Frow notes DeLillo’s concern of this: “The most horrifying fact about the evacuation is that it isn’t even reported on network television. ‘Does this thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore?’ asks one man” (qtd. in Frow 423). People are shocked by a noticeable lack of a copy of their distress. No cameras are physically present to remind them how to behave, how to cope with their present situation. There is no television signal beaming across the heavens in “magic waves” simulating their sorrows to countless homes worldwide. Only the “survivors,” alone with their own miseries, are conscious of their subdued sufferings. The man walking around the second shelter with a television on his shoulder complaining about the lack of media coverage becomes the center of attention during the crisis’s end. He brings with him the full force of the television and consequently its disillusionment to the survivors. Since that television has no focus on the disaster unfolding, the disaster itself is negated and the experiences of the people in the disaster are therefore meaningless. This is also evident in the other near disaster of the novel, the near collision of two airplanes. When the two plains nearly collide there are no ...
