Jim is looking to persuade a man called Richard Elster to appear in a film he wants to make. We shift from what must be the Museum of Modern Art in New York to Anza-Borrego in California, a small out of the way desert place that requires the narrator of the middle section of the book, Jim Finlay, to use ‘a hand drawn map arrived in the mail’ and make a journey along ‘roads and jeep trails’. The man – who could be DeLillo himself, as DeLillo apparently did watch Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho back in 2006, when Point Omega is set – desires a female companion, someone he could briefly talk to, someone who would step inside the dark room for maybe 30 minutes, long enough for them to strike up a conversation, long enough for something to come of it. He watches the people come and go, usually within a matter of minutes, as he stands watching, wishing that he could remain in the gallery watching the film as it is meant to be seen, stretched out over 24 hours rather than parcelled out across gallery opening times. An apparently anonymous man ‘of attenuated viewpoint’ stands in a gallery watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, slowed down to something like two frames a second, stretched out over 24 hours.
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