Falling Man And The Age Of Terror Analysis

Her encounter with the performance of Janiak has generated a transcendental awe in her, as compared to looking at the pictures, images, photographs of 9/11 on the television, or in the newspapers or magazines that would make her “get angry and crazy” (42). If Janiak’s performances stand as a forceful interposition into the discourse of 9/11, “DeLillo’s recurrent use of semi-obscure Italian post-Impressionist seems initially oblique” (210). On first reading of the conversation between Martin and Lianne, where both of them think that they can see the towers in the still life paintings of Morandi, the connection between the still life paintings and the psychological effect of 9/11 seems illogical.
They looked together.
Two of the taller items
Conte in “Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and the Age of Terror” notes, “DeLillo repeatedly invoked the World Trade Center as representative of the gigantism and hubris of global capitalism, a force that he stridently resisted from the start of his carrier in Americana, in which the television executive David Bell, abandons his unfulfilling job in New York City” (562). Falling Man exposes DeLillo’s transnational political investigation through its fictional characters who often get into discussions and debates on the raison d'être of the event throughout the novel. DeLillo points out that at the dawn of the millennium the world narrative belonged to American culture that held the power to penetrate every wall of every home and every mind of every life. This was certainly made possible on account of western technology and cyber-capitalism. The attack of 9/11 was an act of resistance to the cultural imperialism through western media, technology, and capitalism. When Martin, Nina Bartos’ lover comes to America after the event, they both start debating over the reason of the attack. While Nina feels that religion is the basic cause that prompts the terrorist attacks, Martin believes that the American society provokes the jihadis. It is the invincibility of America and blatant interference of the American culture into their culture that spites them (46). The blow of 9/11, as maintained by Martin, was a “blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great
DeLillo’s political insinuations become even more conspicuous with the unraveling of the perspective of the fictional terrorist, Hammad. Through the character of Hammad and his leader Amir, DeLillo implies that the terrorists see the West as twisted and hypocrite nation, “determined to shiver Islam down to bread crumbs for birds” (79). They feel that America controls their world and it deserves to be destroyed. No wonder that Conte views the Twin Towers as egregious symbols of American capitalism and market economy and maintains that they have always been indifferent to humanity (563). As an answer to this indifference, there has been a latent longing, America’s libidinal fantasy of destruction which Slavoj Žižek in “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblence” contends is libidinally constructed by America’s cultural imagery. He claims:
Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested – just remember the series of movies from Escape from New York to Independence Day. That is the rationale of the often-mentioned association of the attacks with Hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was