Videotape

by Don DeLillo

*short

“They show it because it exists, because they have to show it, because this is why they’re out there.”

The short story "Videotape" revolves around a man at home attentively watching the video; he continuously called on his wife to watch the video with him. The Videotape represents how everyone is being desensitized to violence, how there is a growing obsession with violence, and also how quickly life can be taken away.

Unknown Binding

Published December 1, 1994

About the author

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."

Reviews

[Carmen Tudor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't the first time I've read 'Videotape', so reading it for the second time today meant that the horrors of the subtext weren't new to me. However, DeLillo delivers them so nonchalantly that you could read it ten times and still find people, and this story in particular, alarming for the acceptance of -- perhaps insistence for -- such things.

The only aspect I don't quite like is how our young video-recording twelve year old remains nameless. Yes, namelessness is mentioned as a facet of our anonymous, voyeuristic society, but still. Give the girl (or characters like her) a name; her anonymity functions as yet another unintended nod to Patriarchal Protection Syndrome.

[✧ yasmin ✧ · Rating 5 out of 5]

for school

[Deldar · Rating 3 out of 5]

The whole story seemed like a personal essay. But the message of it was interesting!

[channel alli · Rating 5 out of 5]

probably one of the most impactful things i've read in my academic career and it's only three pages; really gets at the heart of the depravity we all engage in (social media, news stories, etc.)