Videotape analysis 12-11-07

Taylor Haupt
Professor Adams
December 11th 2007
Analysis Essay, first draft

Videotape
In Videotape by Don DeLillo, we are immediate drawn into a story of a man who is clearly mesmerized by shocking footage on the news. The clip that is being shown over and over, revolves around a young girl with a video camera and the stranger in the car behind her. As she is riding in the backseat of the family car, she innocently begins taping the man in the Dodge that is driving right behind them. The man waves as the girl continues to tape. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, the man is shot in the head by an unknown murdered known as, “The Highway Killer”. The girl continued to tape as the man’s life unexpectedly ended. The man that is watching this footage at his house cannot seem to draw himself away from it as he tried to get his wife over to watch it with him. The several elements that figure importantly in this story include setting, theme, character, and plot.
The setting of this story takes place in a car, on a highway, on what seems to be just an ordinary day. The story was published in 1994, so its safe to assume that the time period its based on is sometimes during the late 1980’s or early 1990’s when video cameras had first come out and were very popular. This simple setting is important to the story because it makes the murder that much more shocking.
The theme throughout this story seems to be how fleeting our existence can be. The man watching this footage is obsessed with this idea. Thoughts of “this is the risk of existing” (para.31) race through his mind. I know that if I saw something like that, it would definitely make me think. The murder of the man in the footage was completely mind boggling and thought provoking because it was so unexpected. We realize that the man is so transfixed by the video because it definitely “demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings.”(Para.36) The whole theme of the story surrounds life and just how quickly it can be taken from you.
In this story, there are basically 3 characters. First, there is the young girl. She was just the curious explorer in this story that ended up finding something unexpected. We don’t know much about her because her privacy was being protected. “It is the kid’s own privacy that is being protected here. She was twelve years old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it” (para.4). Then, we have the man in the Dodge. All we can gather from him is that “He is bald up to the middle of his head, a nice guy in his forties whose whole life seems open to the hand-held camera” (para.12). We don’t get the chance to learn much about him at all, because he is soon shot after he is introduced. Finally, there is the narrator. He is watching the footage from his home, and it isn’t his first time watching it. He knows exactly what will happen every time and yet he can’t pull himself away from it. He’s so intent on having his wife watch it with him that it almost seems as if he needed verification that his feelings were okay, from her. He wanted to know that other people were as impacted by this video as he was. He felt very deeply about the video, and it was as if he needed a “reality check”.
The plot of this story was very intriguing. Right from the start, you could feel the suspense, and it kept you reading to see what happened next. DeLillo definitely used quite a bit of foreshadowing to keep up the suspense. By paragraph four, we know that a crime is going to happen. By paragraph nine, we learn that it involves a homicide. “It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child who thought she was doing something simple…” (para.9) The majority of the story is telling us about the girl videotaping the man, then it all happens fairly quickly, the man is shot just like that and is dead in an instant.
DeLillo wrote his story in a way that makes you feel as if you are right there with the narrator watching this footage on the news. You can’t help but think about how haunting and shocking it all is. He used the elements of setting, theme, character, and plot to bring out a question to anyone that reads his story; can it really be over just like that?

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Journal Entry 5 Freewriting an evaluation topic 11-26-07

Journal Entry 5A- Reviewing what you now know about the subject

-i am interested in evaluating nordstrom because i have been shopping there for years. my mom is human resource manager there and has been for the last 6 or 7 years so i have basically grown up around the department store

- i like nordstrom because it carries a lot of the designer brands in one spot so you can get it all done in one place.