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Originally Posted by demonrail666

As you say, there was something inevitable about Cronenberg adapting a DeLillo novel; they do seem like kindred spirits in lots of ways. It's interesting that you're drawn to the dialogue, though. I like DeLillo a lot but that's a side of his writing I really struggle with. Great ideas and amazing descriptions but he does that thing where his characters don't so much speak to each other as make statements. I'm sure it fits with his overall message and can apprecate how it might work conceptually, it just really grates on me, and it seems that Cronenberg stuck pretty close to DeLillo's dialogue.

haaa haaa yes!! i remember you saying how much you hate his dialogue. which again i can understand-- it is as you say, not natural speech but statement-making. i think a lot of people of his era do/did stuff like that, try to jam some sort of philosophical shit to inform their novels because the novel had been declared dead and they had to try something so they turned to "theory". so you have people like kundera or julian barnes or what was the name of that playwright with the chaos in the english garden? i forget. in any case, yes, it's theory, disguised as novel or drama, but where i find julian barnes's moralizing extremely irritating i find delillo speaking through his stiff masks highly entertaining. the sense of alienation/otherwordliness i get from him is wonderful: i "get" it, not that i claim i "understand" it, but i catch his mental illness temporarily, and for me it's an enjoyable ride, like one of those comfy fevers one has to take in bed with a pile of comic books. calvino does the same thing to me by the way, now that i think of it (except calvino is harder to enter). i rant too much this morning, i am procrastinating urgent work, i should temporarily flee but thanks for the ear.