A brief sketch of Delillo's representation of TV in Mao II

One of the more personally striking scenes in Mao II is the passage when Karen watches a TV report of the infamous soccer (football) riot in the UK. Karen notes that "on any given day it was mainly the film footage that she wanted to see and she didn't mind watching it without sound." She then proceeds to experience the clip of violence not as a horrible event of violence and death, but as a work of art; as she puts it, "it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church...". But Delillo isn't trying to say that Karen is wrong, desensitized, or even fooled by taking the visual images in without the context of sound. Instead, he seems to be pointing out that, like the mass of bodies in the riotous crowd, mass media is an environment where individuality (whether the boy in the white cap or the singular meaning attempting to be conveyed through the report) is lost in the onslaught of the surroundings.

Delillo is pretty clear in pointing out that the overt message or meaning of the newscast is irrelevant. It is only the medium of the representation that matters. In Karen's words, "you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to the pictures only." Karen doesn't see anything wrong with this idea of ignoring the message in favor of the medium, and Delillo doesn't give us any hint that we ought to correct her, either. Instead, Delillo's description of the riot, while seemingly bruital, is really clinical and strictly descriptive, not laying any negative judgments on the barbarity of the scene. He accomplishes this description through a sort of detached prose where Karen even stops to search for the appropriate word to use ("writhing"), supposing a sort of clinical interest in the correct way to categorize rather than a visceral label. Further, Delillo plunges into his litany of violent imagery ("terrible slow straining and heaving," "two men crawling on heads and shoulders," "pressed together and terribly twisted," "suffering faces"), only to cease the litany mid-description to point out "men calmly watching...in shorts and jerseys...standing in the grass" (as well as the seemingly irrelevant observation "soccer is called football abroad") before delving directly back into the violent images. Not only does this interrupt the flow of meaning (paradoxically by seamlessly being integrated into the narrative), as if this image were on par with the violent ones immediately surrounding it on both sides. But, in wondering why Karen and these soccer players seem calm and desensitized, one can look at the strong artistic parallel presented in the passage.

Such scenes have become much like the religious works of art that Karen compares it to. Unlike art, television (and particularly the news) is supposed to represent a form of reality. Yet art is something that, while it may be horrible in the sense of being "filled with people suffering," it isn't something that is supposed to be taken as a direct representation of reality as it television. However, Delillo here suggests that television (and perhaps mob behavior/violence in general extrapolating to the soccer players themselves) actually has become no more than an aesthetic, soundless form of art. People tune in to television to see these types of things, and the television stations oblige by giving their viewers what they want. The actual reality behind the event becomes of second importance if of importance at all. Television (and spectacles in general, perhaps), are no longer any more meaningful than the relationship between viewer and viewed.