If you’ve never watched it, here’s the 1991 BBC program, Don DeLillo: The Word, The Image, and The Gun. If I had to pick my favorite of his novels, I would say that I probably got the most pleasure from White Noise. Although “pleasure” is an admittedly odd word choice given the book’s topic is an airborne toxic event. I think the majority of his readers would choose Underworld or Libra.

Mao II is such a strange thing: Published the same year as this show, that novel has wooden characters and plotting, but it’s so eerily correct about the coming escalation of terrorism, how guns would become bombs and airplanes would not just be redirected but repurposed. It’s like DeLillo tried to alert us to a targets drawn in chalk on all sides of the Twin Towers, but we never really fully noticed. 

This program is a great portrait of DeLillo and his “dangerous secrets” about technology, surveillance, film, news, the novel, art and the apocalypse.