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Postmodernism's desire for

simulated death: Andy Warhol's
car crashes , J. G. Ballard's
crash, and Don Delillo's white
noise
a
Michael Hardin
a
Teaches at Bloomsburg University
Version of record first published: 18 Oct 2010.
To cite this article: Michael Hardin (2002): Postmodernism's desire for simulated
death: Andy Warhol's car crashes , J. G. Ballard's crash, and Don Delillo's white noise,
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POSTMODERNISM’S DESIRE FOR SIMULATED DEATH:

ANDY WARHOL’S CAR CRASHES, J. G. BALLARD’S
CRASH, AND DON DELILLO’S WHITE NOISE
Michael Hardin
Michael Hardin teaches at Bloomsburg University. He is the author of
Playing the Reader: The Homoerotics of Self-Reflexive Fiction (2000). He
has published widely in contemporary literature, gender studies, and
popular culture.
As an atheist finishing this essay on Easter Sunday, I cannot help but

notice the irony. Contemporary American culture and postmodernists
are not the first to posit death as simulacra; death has, it seems,
always been approached as simulacra. From the first notion of an
afterlife, humans have actively sought to remove the reality from
death. Jean Baudrillard writes in ‘‘Symbolic Exchange and Death,’’
‘‘Death should never be interpreted as an actual occurrence in a sub-
ject or a body, but rather as a form, possibly a form of social relations,
where the determination of the subject and value disappears’’ (124).
How is Baudrillard different from Protestant ministers who tell
mourners at a funeral to be happy because the person is not really
dead but in heaven with Christ or Catholics who pray to dead saints as
if they were alive for living persons who might die? It may not even be
possible to take death from the personal to the public without it
becoming simulacra. This may result from death’s position as the one
point at which subjectivity is completely removed; one can only
approach it as object. As object, then, death is redefined, either as
‘‘form’’ or ‘‘transition to afterlife,’’ allowing one not to deal (or pre-
venting one from dealing) with the reality and finality of death.
Postmodernism and contemporary American culture are different
from religions only in how they approach death as simulacra. In a
post-Darwinian, post-Nietzschean world, we locate solace and security
not in God but in surfaces and packaging, the objects of popular cul-
ture.1 In Andy Warhol’s Car Crashes series, J. G. Ballard’s novel
1
Even here, Christianity has anticipated postmodern culture. The elaborate and of-
ten gaudy interiors and facades of High Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo cathedrals reveal a
similar fixation with surfaces.
21
22 M. Hardin
Crash, and Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, death and disaster are
presented as simulation, as hyperreal, but within each work, there is
an unraveling of the postmodern denial of the real, an individual
moment when death must be confronted as real. A quick simplification
of these three approaches is that Warhol tries to mask death’s reality,
Ballard celebrates the associations with popular culture but does not
posit a moral response to it, and DeLillo exposes the tendency of
popular culture to be anesthetized to it.
There is a trend among certain postmodern cultural critics to locate
death beneath the surface of contemporary American culture.2 Fredric
Jameson writes, in his post-Marxist critique of contemporary Amer-
ican culture, that the real association lies in the class disparity, and
not in a particularly American phenomenon: ‘‘this whole global, yet
American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural
expression of a whole new wave of American military and economic
domination throughout the world; in this sense, as throughout class
history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror’’
(5). This exportation of American culture and structure will be parti-
cularly evident in Ballard, although it is equally applicable to Warhol
and DeLillo. However, Jameson’s critique focuses on the historical
effect — exploitation of the working class — not the intent, the fear
and=or denial of death.
If death is beneath the skin of culture, then we might interpret its
visible ‘‘absence’’ in terms of repression or denial; but what happens
when death is visibly expressed on the surface of culture? If one shifts
death from beneath the surface to on the surface, in effect from being
the signified to being the signifier, or from genotype to phenotype, then
one creates the potential for redefinitions of the term if not a complete
removal of meaning; death becomes a rhetorical trope which the
society or individual can manipulate. In order to see the hypnotic
quality that death possesses in contemporary culture, one does not
have to go to a museum or read a novel; one only has to look to the
nightly news. Both Warhol and DeLillo are especially aware of the
representation of disaster in the news media. Warhol uses magazine
and newspaper images for most of his Death and Disaster series. And
DeLillo, in End Zone, depicts Gary Harkness as fascinated by disaster
stories, ‘‘I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I
liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities’’ (20). In White Noise,
2
Positional prepositions are inherently vague when dealing with abstract concepts.
‘‘Beneath,’’ as I am using and interpreting it, should be understood in the same way that
we might say that our skeleton and organs are beneath our skin; what we see on the
surface is the product of everything that goes on inside.
Postmodernism’s Desire for Simulated Death 23
Jack Gladney and his family watch disasters on TV: ‘‘There were
floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. [ . . .] Every dis-
aster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more
sweeping’’ (64). And, it seems as if the media are only becoming more
focused on presenting disasters. For thirty minutes each evening, the
networks broadcast airplane crashes, school shootings, and fighting in
Macedonia and Gaza; as if ‘‘real’’ televised death were not enough, the
networks supplement our viewing with the simulated deaths of Ebola
viruses, asteroid collisions, and volcanoes. The multiplicity of images
of death in the media creates a scenario in which death does not exist
unless it appears on television; essentially, the only ‘‘real death’’ is that
which is televised.
The presence and prominence of death expressed overtly in culture
or art are hardly new. If we look at the pyramids of Egypt or
Michelangelo’s Moses, originally intended as part of Pope Julius II’s
tomb, we see artistic constructions created to celebrate the life=death
of a given person. However, we often see the art separately from the
dead individual being commemorated. When one enters a Gothic
Cathedral, he or she passes under the Last Judgment, an act designed
to publicly enforce the idea of eternal death at the same time that it
allows the individual to escape the reality of death through Christ. In
a sense, even in these pre-‘‘postmodern’’ works, death has been
effaced. It may be that religion, the notion of an ‘‘afterlife,’’ functions
as its own effacement of death as real. Thus, postmodernism’s con-
struction of death as simulacra may be little more than a secular
manifestation of the religious desire to escape death.3 Today, American
funeral homes package death for all of us, not just the rich and pow-
erful. Our dead are embalmed and dressed —often looking better dead
than alive —and then sealed in coffins, away from sight. The implicit
question is ‘‘why?’’; are we protecting the dead from the elements or
protecting ourselves by sealing death inside? In the twentieth century,
however, the real tension over death and simulation between moder-
nists and postmodernists seems to lie in the distinction between high
art and kitsch, between the elite and the popular culture.
When Evelyn Waugh comes to California, he is shocked by Forest
Lawn Memorial-Park and writes The Loved One in 1948 as a reaction
to such a commercialization and kitschification of funerary practices.
His descriptions within the novel sound like contemporary definitions
of simulacra: ‘‘This is more than a replica, it is a reconstruction. [ . . .]
Time has worked its mischief on the beautiful original. Here you see it
3
Given that many postmodernists grew up in various churches, the similarities may
warrant further investigation. For example, both Warhol and DeLillo grew up Catholic.
24 M. Hardin
as the first builders dreamed of it long ago’’ (Waugh 78); ‘‘A notice
proclaimed the inferior dimensions of their Old World rivals’’ (Waugh
38). Unlike Baudrillard, who celebrates the hyperreal, Waugh laments
the loss, the crass commercialism of the copy. What underlies this
anxiety is that the copy is presented as real; there is little concern
whether the people are pleased with the setting for their deceased
family and friends. The objection, it appears, is aesthetic. Waugh has
Aimée Thanatogenos (her name means ‘‘loved [the] production of
death’’) paraphrase Hubert Eaton (Forest Lawn’s founder) that ‘‘It is a
natural instinct [ . . .] to shrink from the unknown. But if you discuss it
openly and frankly you remove morbid reflexions. [ . . .] By removing
that fear they actually increase their expectations of life’’ (5253).

This logic evolves into Warhol’s own ideology: Overt repetition causes
the subject to disappear. Based on my own experiences at Forest
Lawn, it may also be a practical application of Edgar Allan Poe’s story,
‘‘The Purloined Letter’’: Placing an object in plain sight is an ingenious
way to conceal it.
Jessica Mitford references Waugh’s novel in her own scathing report
on American funerary practices, The American Way of Death Revis-
ited. And like Waugh, much of Mitford’s critique of Forest Lawn is the
tackiness of the place: ‘‘If much of the Forest Lawn statuary looks like
the sort of thing one might win in a shooting gallery, there’s a reason
for that, too. Some of it was bought at fairs’’ (Mitford 107). Her
argument is one of aesthetics; the statues are not only copies, they are
bad copies. And on top of that, the cemetery runs a gift shop, where
among the wares offered are salt and pepper shakers in the shape of
some of the Forest Lawn statuary; the Builder’s Creed, printed on a
piece of varnished paper and affixed to a rustic-looking piece of wood;
paper cutters, cups and saucers, platters decorated with views of the
cemetery; view holders with colored views of the main attractions.
(Mitford 104)
America, California specifically, has transformed the solemn rituals of

burial and mourning into a superficial, money-making enterprise. The
gift shop kitsch and replicas of classic art shift the focus from death to
themselves.
Thus, we should not be surprised at Umberto Eco’s distress over the
glorification of the simulation when he visits the United States and
writes Travels in Hyperreality. Eco’s ideas concerning the American
relationship between culture and death are expressed through the
Forest Lawn cemeteries, which Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot
49, associates with the ‘‘American cult of the dead’’ (62). What seems
to fascinate and simultaneously abhor Eco is the unapologetic
hybridization of death and kitsch; there is not the somberness of art

and history that one might find in a European cathedral where the
great persons of the past lie:
Death is a new life, cemeteries [ . . .] must contain reproductions of the

most beautiful artworks of all time, reminders of history (great mosaics
of American history, mementoes — fake — of the Revolutionary War), and
they must be a place with trees and peaceful little churches where lovers
can come and stroll hand in hand [ . . .] where couples can marry. [ . . .] So
the great California cemeteries [ . . .] are immense imitations of a natural
and aesthetic life that continues after death. (Eco 56)
Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can remember going to Forest

Lawn on school field trips covering American history; I’ve been to a
wedding at another funeral home, but I’ve never been to a funeral at
any of them. Furthermore, most, if not all, of them, overlook freeways;
they are fully participant in a car culture. By making the cemetery
into a type of theme park, Forest Lawn has made death banal. As was
previously mentioned, art is a vital aspect of the Forest Lawn philo-
sophy, but instead of being elevated and esteemed, it is presented to
the public as spectacle: ‘‘To see the Last Supper, admitted at fixed
times as if for a theater performance, you have to take your seat,
facing a curtain, with the Pietà on your left and the Medici Tombs
sculptures on your right’’ (Eco 37). This is not a museum experience at
all; one is at a show, literally. And all of this is occurring at the cem-
etery. Eaton has performed the greatest illusion of them all: He has
removed death by changing cemeteries into P. T. Barnum-type side
shows. Eco saves his most acerbic barbs for the presentation of a
stained-glass reproduction of The Last Supper:
A glass reproduction of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Not the way it looks now
[ . . .] but the way we suppose it must have looked when Leonardo painted
it, or rather — better — the way Leonardo ought to have painted it if he
had been less shiftless, spending three years and never managing to
complete the picture. (Eco 38)
The Last Supper, better and more spectacular, and not five thousand
miles away, we have forgotten that we are at a cemetery.
Likewise, Baudrillard comes to America with his own preset ideas of
‘‘America,’’ which are quite similar to Waugh’s and Eco’s, but his con-
clusions are much different. Like Jameson, Baudrillard looks at
American popular culture and sees death barely beneath its surface:
‘‘All dwellings have something of the grave about them, but here
the serenity is complete. The unspeakable house plants, lurking
everywhere like the obsessive fear of death, the picture windows
26 M. Hardin
looking like Snow White’s glass coffin [ . . .] everything here testifies to

death having found its ideal home’’ (America 30-31). The American
home is modeled on the grave. Unlike the cemetery which is modeled on
the side-show and effectively effaces death, the home acknowledges the
fear of death in all of its characteristics. Furthermore, Baudrillard adds
that the individual him-=herself is in life an imitation of his=her dead
self: ‘‘The care taken of the body while it is alive prefigures the way it
will be made up in the funeral home, where it will be given a smile that
is really ‘into’ death’’ (America 35). For Baudrillard, death is the
simulation, ‘‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality:
a hyperreal’’ (Simulacra 1). According to this model, American popular
culture imitates death and in doing so creates the simulation; by living

the simulation, the real disappears. Of course, all of this depends upon
the real and the simulacra being a stable dichotomy. If the real seeps
into the simulacra, if the subject becomes objectified, the structure can
be exposed. Thus, death can be better understood, not because the
subject is directly experiencing it, but because the layers of culture
between real and simulacra, subject and object, have been penetrated.
What we can see is that death and the culture at large are inex-
tricably linked at multiple levels, both on and beneath the surface. If we
look at art, we can see how American popular culture uses simulated
death as a means to efface it. Andy Warhol exploits this fascination
with death by aesthetisizing, multiplying, discoloring, and obscuring
numerous representations of death and disaster — such as his Car
Crashes series— and in doing so, exposes the superficiality of death and
disaster in American popular culture. J. G. Ballard, although British,
repeatedly associates the eroticism of death with technology and
American popular culture (American cars, American pop icons, and
supermarkets). Don DeLillo also depicts what death and disaster have
become in contemporary society, which often resembles Warhol’s
depiction. However, the novel affords DeLillo the ability to provide
multiple perspectives of death, from fascination to fear and abhorrence.
In 1962, the year most critics cite as the beginning of Warhol’s
important work — Campbell’s Soup Cans, Marilyns, and so on —
Warhol also painted mock newspaper front pages. One such front page
is a plane crash, an actual event, which seems to have struck him as
especially revealing about mass media4 and death:
4
‘‘Mass media,’’ simply put, are those media that are widely accessible, such as
TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines. There is a connotation, however, that mass
media are ‘‘common,’’ part of ‘‘low art.’’ The high art=low art distinction has been the
target of many twentieth-century artists and writers; Marcel Duchamp and Andy
Warhol are two of the most prominent.
I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper:
129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I
was doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day — a
holiday — and every time you turned on the radio they said something
like ‘‘4 million are going to die.’’ That started it. But when you see a
gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.
(qtd. in Swenson 12021)
This comment was recorded by Gene Swenson in the watershed article

‘‘What Is Pop Art?’’ of 1963. Normally, one cannot take Warhol at his
word about his art, but this is quite early in his career, before he was
so insistent that there was nothing to his work. The work, ‘‘129 DIE’’
(1962), is a painting and not a repeated silkscreen, so it does not have

the same ultimate effect as the Death and Disaster series, but it does
refer to the multiplication and depersonalization of disaster by the
mass media, in this case, the newspaper.
Warhol’s paintings of celebrities further the idea that his work was
about death. Jonathan Flatley, in his essay ‘‘Warhol Gives Good Face,’’
writes that Warhol is conscious of the connection between repre-
sentation and memorialization: ‘‘Warhol saw that the poetics of pub-
licity were also those of mourning. [ . . .] Warhol draws attention to the
homology between the face-giving that portraiture accomplishes and
the work of representing or memorializing involved in mourning’’ (105-
106). Fame and being made into an icon strip the individual of life;
one’s iconography replaces one’s life. Elizabeth Taylor (Figure 1),5 for
example, is hard to imagine as anything but object: We see her on the
cover of various tabloids, constantly ‘‘near death,’’ and we see her in
films, never aging. One might even speculate that her many marriages
are evidence of her husbands’ inability to see her as something other
than her object-self. Baudrillard makes a connection between fame
and death in Simulacra and Simulation: ‘‘Death is never an absolute
criterion, but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean,
Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply
because they had a mythic dimension that implies death’’ (24). The
mythic dimension is that which erases the individual; the reproduc-
tion of the individual in the culture, fame, removes the original.
However, the irony is that at the same time that iconization strips the
individual of life, it strips the individual of death; being transformed
into art or the media gives these icons an immortality that we can see,
unlike religion that forces us to believe. It is not coincidental that
5
Warhol begins the Liz paintings following her near-fatal battle with pneumonia in
March of 1961.
28 M. Hardin
FIG. 1 (c) 2001 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts=ARS, New York.
James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys are all Warhol icons;
they are prime examples of how the dead live in=as American culture.
By the end of 1962 and into 1963, Warhol began to multiply the
images of death and disaster by making silkscreens of press photos
taken from magazines and newspapers of car crashes, suicides, food
poisoning, race riots, atomic bombs, and electric chairs, removing the
act even further from the subject. In an exhibit that he calls Death in
America, Warhol brings together his Disaster series with his portraits
of Marilyn and Liz (Flatley 119). In this, he connects celebrity and
death. When he himself achieves this celebrity status, it is death
which terrifies him, and ironically, Valerie Solanas shoots him. The
silkscreen process, which Jameson argues is in itself a death process,6
provides Warhol with the opportunity to transfer the image to the
6
‘‘The external and colored surface of the things [ . . .] has been stripped away
to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic negative’’
(Jameson 9).
canvas where he can multiply it from two to hundreds of times, color it

lavender, gold, green, black, and so on, or obscure it by blurring the
silk screen or by using varying amounts of acrylic. By utilizing these
different effects and processes, Warhol succeeds in altering the per-
ception of death and disaster. He removes the pathos from what could
be very moving and disturbing images and makes them cold and
sterile.7 No longer does death have any substance; it has been robbed
of meaning by too much exposure and familiarity. It has become
objectified, a cultural icon.
One specific series of Death and Disaster is the Car Crashes; by
examining how Warhol approaches and executes this series, I will
show how he posits death as simulacra. A brief list of merely thirteen

of the works from this series provides a sense of its extensiveness and
diversity. ‘‘White Burning Car III’’ (1963), ‘‘Ambulance Disaster’’
(1963), ‘‘Ambulance Disaster Two Times’’ (1963), ‘‘Optical Car Crash’’
(1962), ‘‘Foot and Tire’’ (1963), ‘‘White Car Crash Nineteen Times’’
(1963), ‘‘Saturday Disaster’’ (1964), ‘‘Orange Disaster’’ (1963), ‘‘Orange
Car Crash Ten Times’’ (1963), ‘‘Five Deaths on Orange’’ (1963), ‘‘Green
Disaster Ten Times’’ (1963), ‘‘Green Burning Car’’ (1963), and ‘‘Green
Burning Car I, Nine Times’’ (1963). These silkscreens are not all taken
from the same photo, but they are similar in content: gruesome pho-
tographs of mangled bodies and automobiles. Unlike the Electric
Chairs or Atomic Bombs, which are austere and without people, these
pictures are vivid and graphic representations of actual deaths.
However, Warhol utilizes numerous techniques to alter the viewer’s
response to the car crashes in such a way as to de-emphasize the
horror. Rainer Crone suggests that it is in the choice of the icon=pic-
picture that Warhol’s statement is evident (89), but I would argue, it is
also how that image is represented that is equally revealing. Some-
times the silkscreen is a single, monumental image of an accident;
sometimes it includes the repetition of one image as many as forty
times (‘‘Optical Car Crash’’); the images may be darkened and=or
lightened to obscure the details (‘‘Optical Car Crash’’); the images may
overlap to hide the details (‘‘White Car Crash Nineteen Times’’); and
finally, the canvas may be painted, adding color(s) to the image. The
repetition of images is one of Warhol’s most identifying characteristics.
This mass repetition illustrates well Warhol’s comment that the mass
media provide us with images of death so often that death no longer
has an effect. In Simulations, Baudrillard argues that through repe-
tition the sign devoids itself of meaning: ‘‘For the sign to be pure, it has
7
One of the reasons Warhol uses media photographs is that much of the pathos had
already been removed from the event. Warhol’s processes further the removal.
30 M. Hardin
to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its

meaning. This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also: the multiple
replicas [ . . .] are there to show at the same time the death of the
original and the end of representation’’ (136). However, ‘‘purity’’ within
the sign is a tenuous ideal, something that can be penetrated. For
Warhol, AIDS ruptures the simulacra of death; for Jack Gladney, it’s a
bullet.
If we look at ‘‘White Burning Car III’’ (Figure 2), we can see
Warhol’s grasp of the consequences of the replication of death. The
burning car directs the viewer’s eye away from the impaled man in the
upper left. Directly to the impaled man’s right is a passerby, who
seems oblivious to the entire scene. As viewers, we are implicated in

this silkscreen; we see the crash and yet don’t see what is actually
happening, or we don’t understand the full consequences of the acci-
dent. Also, the space in the lower right, where the sixth image would
be is itself a comment on the other five. If we see death so often, does it
not vanish?
A similar effect is created by (dis)coloring as is created by repetition.
When Warhol presents ‘‘Green Disaster Ten Times,’’ he hides the car
crash in the color, in the obscurity, in the replication; one hardly
notices the corpses because one does not expect to find corpses in a
green field. We associate green with life (and money) —the packaging
is ironically ideal. Not surprisingly, Forest Lawn’s ban on headstones
is done to create an uninterrupted field of green.8 Warhol takes the
emotion from the image and, it could be argued, transforms the
gruesome image into an aesthetic one. John Rublowsky makes this
point in his discussion on Warhol and certain other pop artists: They
have an ‘‘esthetic concern for the everyday images of our world as they
occur mindlessly or through the needs of our industrial, urban, highly
commercialized society’’ (qtd. in Mahsun 14). With the same pre-
sentation as soup cans and comic strips, images of death appear
‘‘mindlessly’’ throughout our society; there is no marked difference.
Making sense of Warhol’s purpose behind his presentations of death
is unusually difficult. Unlike a novel, where an author can present
personae, an artist is associated with all his=her works: Each Death
and Disaster silkscreen is ‘‘a Warhol.’’ Furthermore, a painting differs
from a novel in that the reading of the painting is more abstract. We
are not told whether the work is social commentary or merely repli-
cation. Finally, Warhol offers little insight on the subject in his early
career and denies any depth in his later interviews. However, in one
8
All that is permitted is a marker that lies flat on the ground, allowing the lawn
mowers to pass right over it.
FIG. 2 (c) 2001 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual arts=ARS, New York.
early interview with Alan Solomon, Warhol said that he hoped some
people would become ‘‘more aware of living through this sort of funny
way which they are made to think about themselves [ . . .] because it’s
so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly’’ (qtd. in Mahsun 85).
This statement would seem to indicate that the Death and Disaster
series functions to draw the viewer’s attention to the way in which
culture has hidden death by over-exposing us to it, or by making it
32 M. Hardin
aesthetically pleasing or distant. Crone suggests that the function of

Warhol’s art is to point us in the socially and politically responsible
direction and force us to decide what to do or think (qtd. in Mahun 65,
69). There is no indication that Warhol has provided answers for us,
only that he has pointed in a general direction and has told us to
determine the specifics.
Like many of Warhol’s critics, Donald Kuspit does not see any
direction in Warhol’s art; he argues, like Jameson, that it is removed
from meaning:
Warhol, simply by manipulating signs — repeating them ad nauseum

and arbitrarily — makes us immune to their particular meanings and to

their larger import, to the context of events from which they emerge.
Warhol enforces — polices — our moronization, rather than leading us
out of it. (Kuspit 214)
The assumption Kuspit seems to make is that we were not immune to

these images before Warhol, that somehow he is responsible for their
lack of import. Instead of giving us answers and concrete direction, as
Kuspit would like, Warhol exposes the ‘‘moronization,’’ or rather the
immunization of the individual from death by the culture. Solomon
disagrees with Kuspit’s position; he states that Warhol is painting
mirrors in which we see our own responses (qtd. in Mahsun 83). If we
can only see what we bring into a work, any moronization or illumi-
nation would begin with us, the viewers.
None of these writers, however, mention one painting not exhibited
during Warhol’s life which possesses the potential to undermine all of
these arguments for or against the presence of meaning:
‘‘AIDS=Jeep=Bicycle’’ (Figure 3).9 The first reference to AIDS (then
popularly known as ‘‘gay cancer’’) in Warhol’s diaries, from February
of 1982, reveals that he considered it a ‘‘real’’ threat: ‘‘Joe MacDonald
was there, but I didn’t want to talk to him because he just had gay
cancer’’ (Warhol 429). Warhol does not know what causes AIDS; all he
knows is that it strikes gay men. He worries that he could contract it
from ‘‘drinking out of the same glass or just being around these kids
who go to the Baths’’ (442). The fear is so real for Warhol that he
refuses to watch a show about it on television: ‘‘Donahue had a show
9
Flatley suggests two reasons why the work, begun around 1985, was never ex-
hibited: It was incomplete or it was the beginning of a collaborative project (122). Of
course, there are other paintings from this period that are similar in style and ap-
pearance, which could suggest that it was finished. Warhol’s decision not to exhibit it
may in fact be that he felt the painting was unsuccessful or that it dealt with issues too
personal to expose to the public.
FIG. 3 (c) 2001 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts=ARS, New York.
on gay cancer but I didn’t want to watch it, it made me nervous’’ (469).
Nothing in the replication or airing of the show removes the fear, the
reality. AIDS on television is still frightening. The reality of AIDS, for
Warhol, is very close, and rumors circulate from early on that he is
sick: ‘‘Maura met me there and she told me that Page Six had asked
her if I was sick. And I was shocked. I said, ‘Well, tell them I’m not! You
know I’m not! You can see I’m not!’ And I know they meant AIDS and it
was too scary’’ (497). Here, the rumor is terrifying despite the fact that
the individual knows, thinks, or hopes he is not infected; since there is
no evidence that Warhol has been tested, his adamant denial at this
point may not be fully warranted, but based merely on appearance.
One of the saddest and most telling moments in the diaries is after his
boyfriend, Jon Gould, is hospitalized for ‘‘pneumonia’’; Warhol tells his
housekeepers, ‘‘From now on, wash Jon’s dishes and clothes separate
from mine’’ (552). AIDS is too real; Warhol cannot separate himself
from the fear. He cannot replicate the image to make it vanish. Warhol
tries to make AIDS disappear, not through replication or alteration,
which are the ways in which the virus spreads, but through silence
(also how the virus spreads). After Gould dies from AIDS, Warhol
writes ‘‘the Diary can write itself on the other news from L.A., which I
don’t want to talk about’’ (760). Not all of Warhol’s responses to AIDS
are negative, he participates in AIDS benefits and still maintains
34 M. Hardin
contact with many people with AIDS. At one benefit in 1986, he meets
a young boy: ‘‘I was talking to a kid and then he said he was an AIDS
patient and you don’t know what to say — ‘Gee, what a great party?’
And then you looked and there were the spots, and that was back to
reality’’ (730). Warhol recognizes immediately that there is no super-
ficial way for him to approach AIDS; AIDS is a deep ‘‘reality.’’
The above passages reveal how ‘‘real’’ AIDS is to Warhol. However,
when he describes his encounter with Calvin Klein, he uses a different
imagery, one that is penetrative and mechanized. In 1983, rumors are
circulating about Klein being HIV positive: ‘‘Calvin came in and he
kissed me so hard and his beard was stubbly and I was so afraid that
it was piercing my pimple being like a needle and giving me AIDS’’

(515). To have Klein ‘‘pierce’’ him is sexual; the beard stubble becomes
phallic (and viral) as it penetrates the body. The stubble is clinical,
‘‘like a needle’’; as we will see in Ballard’s Crash, the intersection
between body and machine or metal is one of the sites of both death
and sex. However, because AIDS is a disease of penetration for Warhol
and the silkscreen is about things and people that exist as surfaces,
the two contradict. Furthermore, AIDS is not a photographic image
that he can replicate or alter endlessly to remove its meaning, its
threat. It is clearly not simulated death. Instead of a photograph, in
‘‘AIDS=Jeep=Bicycle,’’ Warhol writes the word ‘‘AIDS’’ under a New
York newspaper masthead, just as he did with ‘‘129 DIE,’’ and he
outlines a Jeep and a bicycle.10 Flatley describes it in the following
manner:
[It] is remarkable because it contains no address, no faces, no mechan-

ism for managing the gap between the embodied and the abstract.
Instead, there is only absence. The bicycle and the Jeep are riderless. It
is Warhol’s most melancholic painting in the depressing sense, regis-
tering a failure to mourn, an inability to appropriate some form of
publicity that might comfort him. (122)
Flatley sees this painting as reflecting Warhol’s inability to mourn or

find comfort, but I would argue that this painting suggests much more
than that. The fact that this painting is unique, Warhol’s only AIDS
painting, is itself significant given his fondness for repetition. His
refusal to replicate a disease which was already replicating too quickly
around him suggests three things: One, his fear that the photographic
10
Following the word ‘‘AIDS’’ is an ‘‘F’’ and half of a ‘‘U.’’ The inclusion of the ‘‘FU’’
raises the possibility that this was intended as a defiant painting. The ‘‘FU’’ may re-
present ‘‘AIDS FUNDRAISER,’’ ‘‘AIDS FUCK,’’ or ‘‘AIDS: Fuck U.’’ The presence of
written puns in painting is best exemplified by Pablo Picasso’s Cubist works.
replication would in some way bring the disease closer to him; two, the
Death and Disaster paintings were simulations, photographic images
taken from the print media, while AIDS was happening to his friends
and lovers; and three, as a gay male, he had special reason to fear
AIDS, especially in the late 1970s and the 1980s. AIDS was real to
Warhol and no matter how much he would have liked to strip its
meaning away, he could not. He could hide the death inherent in his
previous work behind celebrity smiles and endless repetition, but the
truth and proximity of AIDS prevent the work from approaching
meaninglessness. The inability of Warhol to execute or exhibit this one
painting allows one to read all the other paintings of death and dis-
aster as simulacra, as works that remove the origin, the real.

The title and content of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash insist that it be
read with some acknowledgement to Warhol’s Car Crashes.11
Although Crash is set in England, it functions very clearly in terms of
American popular culture; the one overt reference to Warhol in the
novel occurs when Robert Vaughan and the narrator, James Ballard,
are discussing how American cultural icons would have sex in cars:
‘‘Vaughan would cross-examine me about the ways in which Marilyn
Monroe or Lee Harvey Oswald would probably have had intercourse in
their cars, Armstrong, Warhol, Raquel Welch’’ (183). In fact, the novel
begins with James12 thinking how ‘‘Vaughan [ . . .] had rehearsed his
death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. [ . . .]
Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so
many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights’’ (7).
Vaughan’s sexual fantasy is to be involved in a car accident with the
American actress; sex, death, and American culture are intermingled.
Along with fantasizing about how cultural icons have sex, James and
Vaughan recreate and fantasize their deaths in cars, which in turn
sexually arouses them: ‘‘Vaughan dreamed endlessly of the deaths of
the famous, inventing imaginary crashes for them. Around the deaths
of James Dean and Albert Camus, Jayne Mansfield and John Kennedy
he had woven elaborate fantasies’’ (15). Through the medium of the
car, inevitably an American car, sex effaces death, or, sex with=in the
car removes the individual from the mortal biological realm and places
him=her in a less fragile technological=cyborg realm. Baudrillard, in
‘‘Two Essays,’’ describes Crash in these terms, although he states that
the car is the ‘‘extension of the body’’:
11
A comparison with another American artist from the same period, John Cham-
berlain, who created sculptures using parts from junked cars, might also be fruitful.
12
For clarity, ‘‘James’’ will refer to the narrator and ‘‘Ballard’’ will refer to the author.
36 M. Hardin
Technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body — no longer a func-

tional medium, but an extension of death: dismemberment and mutila-
tion, not in the pejorative vision of a lost unity of subject [ . . .] but in the
explosive vision of a body given over to ‘‘symbolic wounds’’ [ . . .] — a body
with neither organs nor organ pleasures, entirely dominated by gash
marks, excisions, and technical scars — all under the gleaming sign of a
sexuality that is without referentiality and without limits. (313)
Baudrillard has it backwards here: Mapping technology onto the body

does nothing but affirm the body’s centrality, its subjectness. Mapping
the body onto technology is what creates ‘‘immortality,’’ the simulacra,
because it screens the human onto the technological— exactly what

Warhol does with his Liz portraits — transforming the human into
object. The image of an icon on film, the impression of a person on the
hood of a car: These are what create ‘‘celebrity.’’ In these terms, James
describes Robert: ‘‘I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-
crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted
radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass’’ (209-10). In ‘‘Ballard’s
Crash-Body,’’ Paul Youngquist writes, ‘‘A body in a car becomes the
prosthesis of a speed machine. As organism, it dies into the life of
motor oil and steel’’ (par. 7). Scars and prosthetics may be signs of
technology and they may make the ‘‘real’’ appear ‘‘artificial,’’ but nei-
ther result in death as simulacra.
The elements of American culture in Crash extend beyond the
celebrities. Mark Osteen, in his book on DeLillo, defines ‘‘the airport,
the supermarket’’ as ‘‘American environments’’ (169). In an amazingly
similar way, Crash takes place on the highways near an airport and
the only business mentioned other than the television advertising
company, which James works at, is the supermarket. The super-
market is associated with car crashes and death from the beginning
when Vaughan imagines ‘‘taxis filled with celebrating children collid-
ing head-on below the bright display windows of deserted super-
markets’’ (13). The cars that Vaughan and James drive are American
and are either the same make, model, and color as cars involved in
celebrity deaths (Kennedy’s, for example) or they are television=film
props: ‘‘the rented American car, unknown star of so many second-rate
television serials’’ (61). The car itself seems to be an American icon,
participating in celebrity deaths and classic film sequences; even
Forest Lawn wants to be visible to the car. In White Noise, Murray
Siskind notes how in American popular culture people are frequently
identified by their cars, even after death: ‘‘The dead have faces,
automobiles. [ . . .] ‘He drove an orange Mazda’’’ (DeLillo 38). Given the
associations of Crash with American popular culture, we should not be
surprised with the responses in the novel to fatal disasters: ‘‘A con-
siderable number of children were present, many lifted on their par-
ents’ shoulders to give them a better view. [ . . .] None of the spectators
showed any signs of alarm. They looked down at the scene with the
calm and studied interest’’ (155). Death has become something to see,
but not as death; it is viewed because it affirms, via the media, the
worth of the individual and=or the moment. Replication and broad-
casting give an event or person an immortality, a life in=on technology.
Youngquist makes this point about three of the major elements of
James’s and Vaughan’s process: ‘‘Photograph, automobile, imitation:
Such are the means to a semiotic transcendence of the life —and the
death — of the organic body’’ (par. 14). This is the paradox of fame, of
Warholian replication: Becoming part of technology, being filmed, kills
and gives immortality at the same moment. For many people, John F.
Kennedy’s life consists of the few seconds of Zapruder film where he
dies. How many Americans consider him one of the great presidents
but cannot associate him with any legislation? For the narrator of
Crash, televised disasters are so distant from ‘‘reality’’ that they pro-
vide him and his wife, Catherine, sexual stimulus: ‘‘Television news-
reels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality
which we vaguely watched on the colour TV set in our bedroom as we
masturbated each other. This violence experienced at so many
removes had become intimately associated with our sex acts’’ (37).
American culture is permeated with death, yet that death ‘‘has no
sting’’; it becomes just a step in the process of replication or recreation,
both sexual and technological, for both the victim and the viewer.
One question, which afflicts much of the criticism of Crash, centers
on Ballard’s intent: Is he exploring a fantasy or critiquing the culture
that fosters it? We have the same problem with Ballard as we have
with Warhol: Is critique implicit in exposition? Those who read Crash
as critique base that critique on Ballard’s introduction to the French
edition: ‘‘The ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning.’’13 Using
this, Nicholas Ruddick reads Crash as metaphor, inserting into the
text an ethos: ‘‘The violent, perverse, graphically-depicted death-
oriented sexuality in Crash is an extended metaphor for this insatiable
cultural death-lust’’ (357). If Crash is metaphor, then this reading
seems accurate, but is there anything within the text that encourages
such morality? I find that the novel itself offers little, if any reason to
13
Crash (New York: Vintage, 1985), 6. Much of the argument surrounding Ballard’s
intent can be found in N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, Brooks Landon, and Vivian
Sobchack’s ‘‘In Response to Jean Baudrillard,’’ Science-Fiction Studies 18.3 (55) (1991):
32129.
38 M. Hardin
do such, and tend to agree with Baudrillard’s interpretation: ‘‘All is

inverted. Here it is the Accident which gives life its very form; it is the
Accident, the irrational, which is the sex of life. [ . . .] There is no pos-
sibility of dysfunction in the universe of the accident; thus no per-
version either’’ (‘‘Two Essays’’ 315). According to this, the accident
functions to form life. The idea that we are more aware of life or live it
more fully because we are conscious of these accidents assumes that
the accidents are interpreted as ‘‘real’’ and not as simulacra. If the
audience does not fully engage the accident, then it cannot have a
‘‘real’’ effect. In ‘‘Symbolic Exchange and Death,’’ Baudrillard seems
less convinced that death is itself simulacra: ‘‘Perhaps only death, the
reversibility of death, is of a higher order than the code’’ (122). Death,

represented metaphorically in the staged accidents and literally in the
fatal accidents, permeates Crash; is there any space within the text
where death is not simulacra?
In ‘‘Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics,’’ Bradley Butterfield
argues that ‘‘Crash does indeed depict a world of total absorption by
simulacra,where everything has always already been mediated,
reproduced, or represented by the technologies of capitalism’’ (67).
However, there are moments when the absorption does not seem so
total. One of the moments that seems to expose the simulation within
the novel is when Seagrave is dressed as Elizabeth Taylor. The mere
act of disguise is enough to make the narrator describe it as ‘‘potent
confusions of fiction and reality’’ (111). It is as if the ‘‘real’’ is threa-
tening to show from beneath the ‘‘simulation’’; the confusion is that the
viewer is afraid of mistaking the simulation for real. This fear comes to
pass when Seagrave is killed in an auto accident while dressed as
Taylor; James is ‘‘Confused and shaken by the stunt-man’s death and
the tags of the film actress’s clothing’’ (186). Vaughan’s original
simulation has become real, but that reality is itself another simula-
tion, a dress rehearsal for the final production, Vaughan’s death,
which in turn gives him life, since the narrator is telling his story.
Even Vaughan’s death is complicated; because he is driving James’s
car, he is first identified as James, and that is whom most think has
died.
For most of the narrative, James is enraptured by Vaughan’s
approach to sex and death, and thus there is little ‘‘reality’’ to the
deaths. Even Vaughan’s death appears as simulacra to James, mostly
because it has been rehearsed so many times. However, there is one
moment when James is next to the highway and Vaughan is driving
straight at him: ‘‘Knowing that Vaughan would not stop for me, I
pressed myself against the concrete wall of the layby’’ (206). Although
this passage is not written with the kind of fear one might expect,
James does vomit immediately after this, suggesting that it is a

traumatic event. This counters the logic that he had regarding the
accident simulations: ‘‘In these fantasies I was able at last to visualize
those deaths and injuries I had always feared’’ (179). The fantasy is
not ‘‘real,’’ and thus the fear of death could be confronted in a con-
tained way. Likewise, James mentions that ‘‘that real world of violence
calmed and tamed within our television programmes and the pages of
news magazines’’ (37). As with Warhol’s Car Crashes, replication and
reproduction alter and remove the threat and ‘‘reality’’ from death. It
is only when Vaughan’s car is headed directly at him that death
becomes ‘‘real,’’ something to get out of the way of.
It may be that death is the one thing that we cannot truly know as
‘‘real’’ until it comes hurtling at us. Bradley Butterfield posits the
Baudrillardian response to Princess Diana’s fatal, media-complicit, car
crash: ‘‘Jean Baudrillard’s readers no doubt expect to be told that in
some real sense the princess never died, that the real tragedy was
somehow lost in the hyperreal hype’’ (‘‘Ethical Value’’ 64). Of course we
don’t believe she died, because for the past ten years, she was not
‘‘real’’ to begin with: From the televised ‘‘fairy-tale’’ wedding, to the
made-for-TV spats with Charles and Elizabeth, to the tabloid roman-
ces, to her cliché celebrity death, facilitated it seems by reporters. In
the same way, Vaughan’s death does not seem real because it repeats
the simulation. Youngquist associates this kind of ‘‘immortality’’ with
Christ; Vaughan ‘‘is the alien messenger of some new semio-gnosis,
and his crash-body is its risen Christ. [ . . .] Vaughan, the weird mes-
siah of this perpetual resurrection, inhabits a strange new cultural
space beyond both the opposition of life and death and the organic
body that substantiates it’’ (pars. 16, 23). We want a ritual, something
to counter the finality of death, and so we continually construct nar-
ratives to redefine death or the body. Vaughan’s impression on the car,
the images of him on film, and his fatal association with Elizabeth
Taylor are all ways to continue to exist beyond the biological.
Creating connections between White Noise and Baudrillard and
Warhol is not very difficult, although the connection to Ballard is more
tenuous. Some critics have interpreted Murray Siskind as Bau-
drillard’s presence in the novel;14 however, Murray’s seminar on car-
crash movies connects him equally well with both Warhol and Ballard.
It almost seems as if DeLillo writes White Noise between reading
Baudrillard and viewing Warhol’s art; he wonderfully maps the
interworkings of simulated death in American popular culture, and,
14
See Haidar Eid’s ‘‘Beyond Baudrillard’s Simulacral Postmodern World’’ and
Bradley Butterfield’s ‘‘Baudrillard’s Primitivism and White Noise.’’
40 M. Hardin
like Warhol, creates a moment when death approaches the ‘‘real,’’

expressed primarily as intense and imminent fear of death. Leonard
Wilcox reads White Noise in part as a critical response to Baudrillard;
although he tends to polarize Baudrillard and DeLillo, he does point
out the continuous critique of the simulacra:
Baudrillard’s position toward the postmodern world is ultimately one of

radical skepticism: finally there is nothing outside the play of simula-
tions, no real in which a radical critique of the simulational society might
be grounded. DeLillo’s writing, on the other hand, reveals a belief that a
fictional narrative can provide critical distance from and a critical per-
spective on the processes it depicts. (Wilcox 363)
Regardless of whether Baudrillard is skeptical or celebratory of post-

modern culture, he does have a difficulty positing anything outside the
simulacra. This is where he differs from DeLillo, Warhol to an extent,
and possibly Ballard. The form of the novel does allow DeLillo more
freedom than Baudrillard has with the essay, in part because it provides
more perspectives: Not all characters are interpreted as speaking for
DeLillo, but all voices in an essay are assumed to be the writer’s.
DeLillo provides himself the perfect segue by using Warhol and his
work as a motif in his novel, Mao II. The narrator makes a comment
from Scott’s point of view, who is looking at Warhol’s paintings: ‘‘the
electric-chair canvases, the repeated news images of car crashes and
movie stars [ . . .] it seemed entirely right, people eager to be undis-
tracted, ray-gunned by fame and death. Scott had never seen work
that was so indifferent to the effect it had on those who came to see it’’
(2021). Scott sees the works on the textual level, where the signs of
death sit, but does not try to engage them; he is comfortable letting the
images remain inert and impotent. And yet, by watching the people
walk by the works without being engaged, Scott recognizes the
immunization of the public to death and disaster. DeLillo’s responses
to Warhol can also be found in interviews surrounding the publication
of Mao II. DeLillo tells Margaret Roberts that part of Warhol’s genius
lies in his ability to separate the image from the history:
What he did with Mao in particular was to float this image free of his-
tory, so that a man who was steeped in war and revolution seems in the
Warhol version to be kind of a saintly figure on a painted surface, like a
Byzantine icon [ . . .] there’s no difference in the Warhol pantheon
between Mao and Marilyn. (Roberts 5)
The comparison of Mao and Marilyn to Byzantine icons seems quite

astute, especially in light of contemporary culture’s almost religious
devotion to celebrities and fame. According to DeLillo, Warhol removes

the ‘‘real’’ from the image, allowing us to gaze at a tyrant blithely.
Although neither Warhol nor Ballard appear overtly in White Noise,
the elements of death, disaster, and popular culture form its very
basis. One of DeLillo’s working titles for this novel was The American
Book of the Dead (Moses 79), a title that echoes the Egyptian and
Tibetan books of the dead as well as Warhol’s exhibit title Death in
America. Mark Osteen notes that these books of the dead were used
‘‘to guard the dead on their journey to the next life’’ (183). Do not we,
contemporary secular individuals, use media and technology to keep
our ‘‘souls’’ or subjectivity alive, acts that ultimately objectify us?
Death and popular culture are joined quite early in this novel; the
Hitler studies department and the department of popular culture
share the same building (9). Hitler represents the most extreme and
heinous elements of death, yet he is a convenient package for all of the
atrocities of the National Socialists, the Holocaust, and fascism;
behind one word, the horrors of war are veiled. Through Hitler’s
commodification and packaging with pop culture by a university,
death, at its most dreadful, has been appropriated and, according to
Paul Cantor, has been made banal (45).
Packaging becomes the marker of contemporary culture, and
nowhere is this more evident than the grocery store; for Warhol, the
grocery store was the source of many of his ideas, from Campbell’s soup
to Brillo boxes; in Crash, the supermarket is everpresent at the edge of
the fantasy; in White Noise, the supermarket becomes a meeting place,
a kind of religious sanctuary. Murray tells Babette and Jack in the
grocery store, ‘‘‘Everything is [ . . .] hidden by veils of mystery and
layers of cultural material.’ ‘Dying is an art in Tibet. [ . . .] Here we do
not die, we shop’’’ (3738). Murray believes that culture is a veil and
that popular culture and shopping are the American equivalents to
death and art. Here, Murray parallels an idea postulated by DeLillo in
his interview with Maria Nadotti: ‘‘If you could write slogans for
nations similar to those invented by advertisers for their products the
slogan for the US would be ‘Consume or Die’’’ (93). To consume is to
participate, to be validated and acknowledged by culture; lacking a
‘‘real’’ national pastime (or a deity), we shop. Supermarkets and
shopping malls bring us together in ways that centralized cathedrals
did in the 1300s; the only other time we come together tends to be
during times of televised tragedies=events: the Kennedy assassination,
the Challenger disaster, Waco, Oklahoma City, Princess Diana’s wed-
ding and funeral. Jayne Anne Phillips also points out the connections
between shopping and belief: ‘‘Nowhere is Mr. DeLillo’s take on the
endlessly distorted, religious underside of American consumerism
42 M. Hardin
better illustrated than in the passage on supermarkets’’ (30). If the cult

of the supermarket has a bible, it is the tabloid. In an interview with
Caryn James, DeLillo states: ‘‘Perhaps the supermarket tabloids are
the richest material of all, closest to the spirit of the book. They ask
profoundly important questions about death, the afterlife, God, worlds
and space’’ (qtd. in Phillips 31). The fantastic elements of the tabloids
are read by most as unreal, and yet, their existence and popularity
suggest the possibility that some may believe that there is something
alien or divine or spiritual out there. Osteen recognizes this desire in
us to transcend the biological=mortal: ‘‘The postmodern prophecies
repackage death and turn it into magic [ . . .] for tabloids are the textual
equivalent to such postmodern religions’’ (179). Now that we know we

were not created in six days, but evolved instead from slime, we need
something beyond ourselves. Murray understands this need, and
instead of a cross or religious symbol, suggests that they ‘‘carve an
aerosol can on my tombstone’’ (283). Murray complicates Warhol’s
statement that he wanted his tombstone to read ‘‘figment’’ (Warhol,
America 129). Murray’s death would be signified by the technological,
pop cultural object, like Vaughan’s death by the car, or Liz Taylor’s
near death by the silkscreens. Murray becomes surface without sub-
stance, a package of ‘‘nothing.’’
Along with shopping, the television creates shared experience in
American culture; that which appears on television is deemed
important. I was on a flight once from Paris to Los Angeles that had to
make an emergency landing because of hydraulic problems. The
landing itself was smooth and non-eventful; however, it made the
evening news in L.A. This fact made the event more terrifying in
retrospect, and impressed my friends, not that I had ‘‘faced death,’’ but
that I had been part of a televised ‘‘potential disaster.’’ In White Noise,
after the turbulent airplane ride, the passengers are disappointed and
angry because they went through a simulated death but were not
rewarded with the normal appearance on television generally afforded
such near-victims. This event is important as well because it allows
DeLillo another perspective from which to comment on the difficulty in
representing death. During the near crash of the airplane, one of the
flight crew said, ‘‘They didn’t prepare us for this at the death simulator
in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and
pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation’’ (90). The fear
of death, here, exceeds the representation, the simulation of it. How-
ever, the comment only has tangible meaning to those passengers
during the event. DeLillo cleverly gives us this information through
the voice of a passenger who heard it, further removing the audience
from the event. The effect of the narrative distance is visible, even on
the other passengers who are in the audience: ‘‘It was as if they were
being told of an event they hadn’t personally been involved in. They
were interested in what he said, even curious, but also clearly
detached. They trusted him to tell them what they’d said and felt’’ (91).
The ‘‘reality’’ of the fear of death is already fading; the narrative is
replacing the event. The fact that no media are there to record this
story challenges its status as event; furthermore, with no public nar-
rative of the event, it will fade.
Television plays a central role throughout the novel. Jack’s students
believe that ‘‘television is the death throes of the human conscious-
ness’’ (51). This is an aesthetic judgment, one that devalues mass
culture; I would never have been able to afford Warhol to do my por-

trait, but I can be part of a television event. The slew of ‘‘KILL YOUR
TELEVISION’’ stickers that I see in my English Department suggests
that this idea is not unique to Jack’s students. That same television is
the center of the Gladney household: The entire family gathers each
evening for quality time by watching disaster footage on the television.
Osteen comments that ‘‘when death is everywhere, it becomes more
frightening’’ (165), but that presumes that the death is interpreted as
‘‘real’’; simulated or replicated death appears to have the opposite
effect. Osteen seems to recognize this, because later he writes, ‘‘tele-
vised apocalypses wrap social problems into tidy narrative parcels,
reducing frightening events to formulaic fables’’ (174). Like Warhol’s
Death and Disaster series, the multiplication of images has deprived
the actual disasters of their effects. Tom LeClair goes even further by
saying that ‘‘the effect of televised death is anesthetizing’’ (217). Death
has been dullingly reduced to a mere image or picture.
Warhol felt that the television would allow for a future in which
everyone could be famous for fifteen minutes; this is, strangely
enough, an egalitarian idea. However, Haidir Eid views such desire as
intentional subjection: ‘‘The individual’s ultimate goal in White Noise
is to become a part of the ‘culture industry’ of the TV, to become an
image, to appear on TV, and thus accept her=his subjugation freely’’
(11). Television has replaced religion, but what else do we have to keep
ourselves ‘‘visible’’ or present after death; is this desire any different
from those who write, those who paint, those who in some way or other
are inscribed in more traditional forms? Television and film idols are
the epitome of visual celebrity, and their fates become marked in time
via television: The émigrés discuss where they were when Marilyn
Monroe, James Dean, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford died. The
death of a culturally ‘‘important’’ figure serves as a point in the lives of
the members of that culture which is eternally fixed in time and can be
repeated ad infinitum. Death allows for perpetual ‘‘life.’’
44 M. Hardin
Looking back to the writings of Waugh, Mitford, Eco, and Bau-

drillard, we see the continuous association of American culture with
California. There is a conflation of Hollywood with California with
American popular culture. After discussing the screen and TV stars,
DeLillo’s pop culture émigrés discuss California and its televised
importance to the culture:
Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we

depend on them. [ . . .] This is where California comes in. Mud slides,
brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can
relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that Cali-
fornia deserves whatever it gets. California invented the concept of life-

style. (66)
In the same way that Warhol states that all his paintings were about
death, whether they were the Death and Disasters or Marilyns, the
émigrés approach California the same way: Both death and fame are
televised for the rest of the country. The émigrés argue that disasters
are fascinating events, but there is an implication that the importance
of the disaster is dependent upon its availability to the mass media,
and thus the culture at large. One might even speculate that DeLillo is
flirting with the idea that Hollywood is located in California because of
the disasters, that what we really want televised are serial killers, car
chases and their obligatory crash-endings, and earthquakes.
Technology and the media are as vital to the understanding of White
Noise as they are to understanding Warhol or Crash. In many ways,
Babette is the figure who represents the application of simulacra
(Murray is its theorist). There is one point when Jack sees her face on
television— she gives lessons in posture, televised on community
access cable— that he thinks that she is dead; at this moment, she has
become the Warhol=Ballard icon whose media replication implies
death. Terrified of death, Babette resorts to tabloid science, sex, and
placebos. Dylar is promoted to cure death, but at best only stimulates
the brain not to be afraid; it treats hyperreal death. Osteen argues
that Babette believes that technology can counter death: ‘‘she also
possesses the American faith that pills can defeat even death —or the
fear of death’’ (182). Jack cites the interesting thing about Dylar, that
it is technological as well as bio-chemical: ‘‘Those little white disks are
superbly engineered. Laser technology, advanced plastics’’ (190). Thus,
each time Babette ingests one, an act reminiscent of taking the
Eucharist, she is incorporating technology, not unlike the characters
in Crash, just on a microscopic scale. In his article ‘‘Baudrillard’s
Primitivism and White Noise,’’ Butterfield locates hope in technology:
‘‘A seemingly benign technology whispers promises of eternity and

salvation —we sense that if we trust in the system it will preserve us,
that even dying is sanctioned as part of its perpetual productivity, that
machines are in control and will take care of us even in the afterlife’’
(‘‘Baudrillard’s Primitivism’’ 9). Dylar for Babette, packaging for
Murray, the media for Warhol, scars and automobiles for Vaughan,
cryogenics for others: we want technology to keep us ‘‘alive’’ in one
form or another.
A major collision between death and culture comes when Jack is
watching his daughter Steffie sleep and she says ‘‘Toyota Celica’’ (155).
In his interview with Adam Begley, DeLillo comments on the power of
such words: ‘‘Words that are computer generated to be used on pro-

ducts that might be sold anywhere from Japan to Denmark — words
devised to be pronounceable in a hundred languages. And when you
detach one of these words from the product it was designed to serve,
the word acquires a chantlike quality’’ (Begley 291). ‘‘Toyota Celica’’ is
a multinational word, a translinguistic signifier that the contemporary
unconscious seeks out in time of distress and fear. Murray has already
said that Americans shop instead of dying; during a disaster, the
Airborne Toxic Event, when a child’s thoughts would normally be on
the fear of death, they have been transferred to repeat the mantra, the
rosary of the culture: a commodity, a car, words from a television or
radio commercial.
SIMUVAC (simulated evacuation) embodies DeLillo’s clearest pre-
sentation of simulated death in American popular culture. During the
Airborne Toxic Event (ATE), a SIMUVAC person tells Jack that the
computer shows that death is in Jack’s body:
‘‘Am I going to die?’’

‘‘Not as such,’’ he said.
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘Not in so many words.’’
‘‘How many words does it take?’’ (140)
Jack has incorporated death into his body, according to the computer,
but no one knows what that means; he is told that if he survives into
his eighties, then he will not have to worry about the exposure to the
ATE. For Jack, there seems to be a substantial difference between this
‘‘death’’ event and when he is shot. Although he has incorporated the
ATE, there is no visible sign of penetration; the sign of death is outside
of his body, on the computer monitor. However, when he is shot, the
bullet penetrates his body, leaving a visible sign. Within White Noise
the ATE is important because it places the individuals within a media-
46 M. Hardin
worthy disaster and allows us to see their incapacity to understand

their situation. The ‘‘reality’’ of the event makes it unreal; for these
people, the ‘‘real’’ only happens on TV, not to them directly.
After the Airborne Toxic Event, SIMUVAC decides it is necessary to
have a simulated disaster because the real disaster did not happen
exactly as they would have liked. The reason SIMUVAC is at the ATE
in the first place was because they thought they ‘‘could use it as a
model’’ (139). Jack questions this logic: ‘‘Are you saying you saw a
chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?’’
(139). SIMUVAC is Baudrillard’s hyperreal; the simulation denies and
removes the real. The SIMUVAC employee tells Jack the problems
with the real event:
We don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an
actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we
find them. [ . . .] You have to make allowances for the fact that everything
we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of polishing we still have to do. But
that’s what this exercise is all about. (139)
The real is the dress rehearsal for the simulation. As in Warhol’s

silkscreens, real events are relevant only for their ability to be pho-
tographed and then reproduced. Any acknowledgment of the disaster
as relevant in itself is gone.
We have seen that death is presented as the primary aspect of
culture; the question now becomes how does DeLillo expect us to deal
with it? Unlike Warhol, who gave us essentially one image repeated
hundreds of times, or Crash where Vaughan and James repeat a few
accidents over and over, DeLillo has given us ‘‘hundreds’’ of perspec-
tives of one image, simulated death. White Noise seems much more
clear in its critique, in part because our protagonist has moments
where he confronts and challenges simulated life and death. We know
that Jack is terrified of death; his narrative is fixated on it. He is the
one who mentions that ‘‘all plots move deathward [ . . .] political plots,
terrorist plots, lover’s plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We
edge closer to death each time we plot’’ (26). His fear seems incom-
patible with his profession, professor of Hitler studies, until we
recognize that the simulation of death anesthetizes him to its effects.
DeLillo, in an interview with Anthony DeCurtis, remarks on the role
of Hitler for Jack: ‘‘The damage caused by Hitler was so enormous that
Gladney feels he can disappear inside it and that his own puny dread
will be overwhelmed by the vastness, the monstrosity of Hitler him-
self. He feels that Hitler is not only bigger than life [ . . .] but bigger
than death’’ (‘‘An Outsider’’ 301). Hitler is a figure who represents six
million deaths; this much repetition makes the death of one person
seem insignificant, almost invisible. Osteen reads the presence of
Hitler in White Noise in the same terms that DeLillo reads Warhol’s
Mao: ‘‘Hitler is figured more as a pop star than as a mass murderer’’
(168). As horrible as this sounds, we have only to look at the serial
killer trading cards that circulate in schoolyards to know that killers
have become commodities (Warhol recognizes this with his Most
Wanted Men series). Murder creates its own iconography, and the
popular media participate fully in the spectacle.
Despite spending the majority of the novel engaging death as
simulacra, Jack seems to be the only character in the novel who has a
moment where death is not simulacra; the others remain relatively

constant in their views of death. Toward the end, he does seem to come
to the realization that death is real, but in doing so he nearly kills
Mink and he gets shot in the process. The point of realization comes
when Mink shoots him, puncturing the simulacra: ‘‘The world col-
lapsed inward, all those vivid textures and connections buried in
mounds of ordinary stuff. I was disappointed. Hurt, stunned, and
disappointed. What happened to the higher plane of energy in which I
had carried out my scheme?’’ (313). Death has become tangible: no
longer is death something to be seen on television, in the history books,
or on a computer screen. Death is in/on him; it has penetrated him.
The bullet represents something different for Jack, because from the
onset, he has thought, ‘‘Shouldn’t death [ . . .] be a swan dive, graceful
[ . . .] leaving the surface undisturbed?’’ (18). The visible mark on the
body is what terrifies Warhol about AIDS and what excites Robert and
Vaughan about car accidents.
Something about the fear or immediacy of death causes Jack to try
to prevent Mink from dying. Once Jack decides to try to save Mink,
death reverts back to being simulacra because the rescue begins to
sound like an overly heroic and melodramatic scene from television.
The scene ends at a hospital, where Jack is shocked when a nun tells
him that her order no longer believes:
Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives

are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief
shrinks in the world, people find it more necessary than ever that
someone believe. [ . . .] Those who have abandoned belief must still
believe in us. [ . . .] We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief pos-
sible. (319)
Christianity posits that death is not real, that one is merely passing
from one life to the next; Christian death is simulacra. Thus, the nun
48 M. Hardin
represents the religious=secular binary, the idea that each needs the
other in order to exist, but also, that the secular world wants someone
else to believe, so that one’s own miniscule hope that there is some-
thing after death is validated. As much as we don’t believe in an
afterlife, we want to be proven wrong. Religion has become the
simulacra for the secular world in a similar way to which it has always
been for believers. At the Most Photographed Barn in America, Mur-
ray tells Jack, ‘‘Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes
impossible to see the barn. [ . . .] We can’t get outside the aura. We’re
part of the aura’’ (1213). DeLillo exposes the fissures of the simula-
cra, and in doing so, provides his critique. One cannot escape
the simulacra, but by recognizing its structure and language, one

has a better chance of understanding the cultural package and its
contents.
Death and disaster are media events and cultural moments, but as
such, they are deprived of much of their power and awe. Leonard
Wilcox says of White Noise that
Even death is not exempt from the world of simulation: the experience of
dying is utterly mediated by technology and eclipsed by a world of
symbols. The body becomes simulacrum, and death loses its personal
and existential resonances [ . . .] media and technology transform death
into a sign spectacle. (35253)
In the culture represented by Warhol, Baudrillard, Ballard, and

DeLillo, popular culture, our culture, death is subject and simulacrum;
it is the culture itself. By locating death on the surface of culture,
instead of beneath it, they demonstrate how culture, and they them-
selves as creators of cultural commodity, present death as simulacra
and in doing so separate it from its meaning. In this, they are no
different than those who hide death behind promises of eternal life.
But death does remain a problem in postmodern art, literature, and
theory: How does one deal with an event as anything but real when
one sees the corpse or feels the bullet? It is well documented that after
he is shot, Warhol becomes much more frightened of death and by the
eighties, AIDS represents the full manifestation of those fears. Despite
the best attempts by postmodernism and by American popular culture
to make death into simulation, it continues to penetrate the surface.
Even postmodernists die. Hyperreal culture has done much to simu-
late death: From our life-styles, to our houses, to the places we go to
view Leonardo’s glass The Last Supper. We believe that in repetition,
death loses its sting. Warhol, Ballard, and DeLillo have shown that for
the most part, repetition and simulation do make us immune. But
unfortunately, they have shown as well that postmodern ideology and

culture only keep us immune until we are personally confronted with
a bullet, AIDS, or a car hurtling at us. One can only be incredulous
so long.
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Michigan P, 1994.
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Semiotext(e), 1983.
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Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 11948.
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Fiction Studies 18.3 (55) (1991): 309320.
Begley, Adam. ‘‘Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV.’’ The Paris Review 128 (1993):
274306.
Butterfield, Bradley. ‘‘Baudrillard’s Primitivism and White Noise: ‘The Only Avant-
Garde We’ve Got.’’’ Undercurrent: An Online Journal for the Analysis of the Present 7
(Spring 1999): 20 pars. hdarkwing.uoregon.edu= ucurrent=uc7=7-brad.htmli. 22
May 1999.
——— . ‘‘Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Baudrillard-Ballard
Connection.’’ PMLA 114.1 (1999): 6477.
Cantor, Paul A. ‘‘Adolf, We Hardly Knew You.’’ New Essays on White Noise. Ed. Frank
Lentricchia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 3362.
Crone, Rainer. Andy Warhol: A Picture Show by the Artist. Trans. Martin Scott. New
York: Rizzoli, 1987.
DeLillo, Don. End Zone. New York: Penguin, 1972.
——— . ‘‘An Interview With Don DeLillo.’’ By Maria Nadotti. Trans. Peggy Boyers.
Salma Gundi 100 (1993): 8697.
——— . Mao II. New York: Viking, 1991.
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Decurtis. The South Atlantic Quarterly 89.2 (1990): 281304.
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Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace, 1986.
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NC: Duke UP, 1991.
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50 M. Hardin
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Frank Lentricchia. Cambridge UP, 1991. 6386.
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11.1youngquist.htmi.

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POSTMODERNISM’S DESIRE FOR SIMULATED DEATH:

As an atheist finishing this essay on Easter Sunday, I cannot help but

that fear they actually increase their expectations of life’’ (5253).

America, California specifically, has transformed the solemn rituals of

hybridization of death and kitsch; there is not the somberness of art

Death is a new life, cemeteries [ . . .] must contain reproductions of the

Having grown up in Los Angeles, I can remember going to Forest

looking like Snow White’s glass coffin [ . . .] everything here testifies to

culture imitates death and in doing so creates the simulation; by living

This comment was recorded by Gene Swenson in the watershed article

(1962), is a painting and not a repeated silkscreen, so it does not have

canvas where he can multiply it from two to hundreds of times, color it

show how he posits death as simulacra. A brief list of merely thirteen

to duplicate itself: it is the duplication of the sign which destroys its

seems oblivious to the entire scene. As viewers, we are implicated in

aesthetically pleasing or distant. Crone suggests that the function of

Warhol, simply by manipulating signs — repeating them ad nauseum

and arbitrarily — makes us immune to their particular meanings and to

The assumption Kuspit seems to make is that we were not immune to

it was piercing my pimple being like a needle and giving me AIDS’’

[It] is remarkable because it contains no address, no faces, no mechan-

Flatley sees this painting as reflecting Warhol’s inability to mourn or

aster as simulacra, as works that remove the origin, the real.

Technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body — no longer a func-

Baudrillard has it backwards here: Mapping technology onto the body

because it screens the human onto the technological— exactly what

do such, and tend to agree with Baudrillard’s interpretation: ‘‘All is

reversibility of death, is of a higher order than the code’’ (122). Death,

James does vomit immediately after this, suggesting that it is a

like Warhol, creates a moment when death approaches the ‘‘real,’’

Baudrillard’s position toward the postmodern world is ultimately one of

Regardless of whether Baudrillard is skeptical or celebratory of post-

The comparison of Mao and Marilyn to Byzantine icons seems quite

devotion to celebrities and fame. According to DeLillo, Warhol removes

better illustrated than in the passage on supermarkets’’ (30). If the cult

equivalent to such postmodern religions’’ (179). Now that we know we

culture; I would never have been able to afford Warhol to do my por-

Looking back to the writings of Waugh, Mitford, Eco, and Bau-

Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we

fornia deserves whatever it gets. California invented the concept of life-

‘‘A seemingly benign technology whispers promises of eternity and

such words: ‘‘Words that are computer generated to be used on pro-

‘‘Am I going to die?’’

worthy disaster and allows us to see their incapacity to understand

with the real event:

The real is the dress rehearsal for the simulation. As in Warhol’s

moment where death is not simulacra; the others remain relatively

Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives

the simulacra, but by recognizing its structure and language, one

In the culture represented by Warhol, Baudrillard, Ballard, and

unfortunately, they have shown as well that postmodern ideology and

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