television crews to record it and therefore the event is trivialized. Bee laments to her father about this: “Where’s the media? … they went through all that for nothing? (92). The experiences of the people on the plane become meaningless without its interpretation on the 6:00 news. Without that blurb on the news, the experiences of the “crash survivors,” during their nightmarish flight, are not affirmed. Therefore, their emotions, their fears, their panics, are all worthless to them. The “survivors,” engulfed in their melancholy, all huddle around the man relating their story to Gladney. They feel comfortable letting the anonymous man tell their story just as they would be made comfortable by a news anchor detailing their struggle. With the obvious lack of the anchor they settle for the minor comfort of their story being told not to the world but to just one man.The bloodiest scene in White Noise, Gladney’s shooting of his wife’s lover, is also coded in terms of the television Simulacrum. The entire scene is painted with the unreal atmosphere of television, as is related by many murderers when describing their crimes. The words used by DeLillo in this scene are ripe with the hyper-detail of television. Detail is superb when an object is focused on and grows fuzzy the more the camera zooms out. Describing Gladney’s murderous approach towards Mink’s prone body DeLillo writes:I took another step … As the TV picture jumped, wobbled, caught itself in snarls, Mink appeared to grow more vivid. The precise nature of events. Things in their actual state … [Mink was] sharply outlined against the busy air. White Noise everywhere (310).The picture in Gladney’s mind, the picture of television, gets jumbled by the overload of sensory material—just like how a face in a pile of two thousand five hundred bodies would be blurred against its background. However, whe...
