War, terrorism, rape, murder…gauche boots? baseball? Lucky Strike? Luis Bunuel? Where and how do we connect the associative lines? In a world where terrorists carry Molotov cocktails “in a Coca-Cola sixpack,” these associations are jarring, yet feel somewhat natural (DeLillo 5). Don DeLillo’s “The Uniforms” is a crossroads of many things: sex, violence, and consumerism (perhaps accurately identified as the DeLillo-ian trinity), and this trinity is mediated through DeLillo and delivered to the reader; however, he is not the sole “owner” of the texts. As expressed from the lips of DeLillo himself, the short story “is an attempt to hammer and nail my own frame around somebody else’s movie (http://perival.com/delillo/dduniforms.html): Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend.”
In a sense, the story reads like a script for some terribly perverse action film (hence, Godard). DeLillo’s descriptions are limited to whom and how a band of terrorists rape, pillage, burn, and mutilate its victims, and like any good screenwriter, DeLillo provides detailed sketches of costumes and props; “Bradley wore Hassan’s red beret; a blue bandanna around his neck; buckskin pants and moccasins and a bright green football jersey with the silver numeral on the front and back. He put some lampblack under his eyes […]” (11). Amusingly, Bradley (or “Wheaties”) emulates the American jock turned brutally hard soldier, often associating what he sees in battle with sports (He thinks of Jean-Claude’s Molotov toss as “girlish” and un-baseball. He fashions his own grenade tossing as a Kareem-esque skyhook). This merger between sport and war is a theme that DeLillo experiments with a lot (most notably in End Zone).
Interestingly, many of the sporadic, anecdotal interjections made by the characters/actors reference directors and films:
“[Harlow] told them this was a trick she had learned in Algiers during the time of the filming of Pontecorvo’s great fictional documentary” (5).
“Jean-Claude asked the crew whether it was true or false that Resnais had faked the filmclips of the bomb victims in his movie about Hiroshima” (8).
“Jean-Claude had learned the lighter fluide trick from his father, who had been in the hills with Bunuel when the latter had declared that the days of the slow dissolve were numbered” (9).
And so on…
Jean-Claude, thinking like the filmmaker that he is, provides a mini-lecture on the importance of effective uniforms in war films/newsreels; “The revolutionary uniform must be tight and spare. Touches of color, individuality and personal fantasy are to be encouraged. […] We will shoot in color because color is the color of childhood fantasy” (7). Summarizing Jean-Claude’s remarks, the violence they commit becomes and image mediated through film and delievered to the masses. Thus, the lethal consequences of war/terrorism come to mean less than the emotions and reactions evoked from the audience viewing this product (Examples? DeLillo points to the Zapruder film in later works. Our generation? 9/11?). As Jean-Claude might suggest, in today’s world, history is often learned through (and altered by) media. (I’m reminded of the persuasive power of Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” or Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.”) I think DeLillo is trying to illustrate this point for us. As we are reading through the story, Jean-Claude is filming all the horrific acts, ensuring that the violence reaches its potential as a visual media. Sadly, violence has been reduced to its prospect as images on a screen, losing its entrie connotation as lethal. In “The Uniforms,” life has become mediated through film, and the result is propagandisitic art for the anxious consumer.
The question of mediation is one we’ll return to time and time again this semester. Roughly speaking, it’s the idea that no event is ever experienced for what it is. Instead, we only experience events that are mediated, in which some form of technology stands between us and what we are supposed to be experiencing. And real events never feel “real” unless there is some form of media to frame and interpret it for us.