The F word in DeLillo

[Terrance]

In DeLillo's Running Dog he looks at how  a propaganda tool that
organized "myth, dreams, memory" into a national consciousness. Fascism
itself had an
erotic appeal--power and sex entwined with all the Nazi paraphernalia of
uniforms, leather, jackboots--and this combination of power and sex,
captured in
the marketable medium of film, turns the movie of an alleged Nazi orgy
into
a product as desirable as Bucky Wunderlick's "mountain tapes" were in
Great Jones
Street. It is "an object of ultimate desirability, and ultimate dread,
simply because it connected to Hitler," DeLillo confided to DeCurtis, a
commodity that
reveals "the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live." And like Bucky,
who had
been described as a dictator, Hitler is compared to a "pop hero," a
"modern
rock 'n' roller," an icon who himself becomes a commodity. When the film
is
discovered to be merely a self-conscious parody, its marketability is
deflated, and
Lightborne can only lament: "Who do I sell this to?"