PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Culture and Communication
Spectacle Dominance and the Existential Vacuum: A Critical Reflection on the Age of the Spectacle in DeLillo's The Silence
Provisionally accepted
Haijie Liu*
Ting Wang- Xinjiang Agricultural University, Urumqi, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This paper employs Guy Debord's theory of the society of the spectacle as its core framework, integrating Jean Baudrillard's consumer society and Byung-Chul Han's critique of digital culture, among other perspectives, to conduct a systematic interpretation of Don DeLillo's novel The Silence. The study demonstrates that through the extreme scenario of a global digital system collapse, the novel profoundly reveals the operational logic and existential consequences of the society of the spectacle in the contemporary era. Despite the spectacle's attempt to erase all authentic experience, DeLillo offers replicable paths of resistance through Tessa's "embodied documentation" and Martin's "intellectual defiance". The paper contends that The Silence not only serves as a powerful testing ground for the society of the spectacle but also expands its theoretical boundaries, offering new interpretive possibilities for understanding the "post-spectacle" phenomenon.
Keywords: advertising, Cultural Encoding, data colonialism, Don DeLillo, existential wasteland, Spectacle, Therapeutic Discourse
Received: 03 Sep 2025; Accepted: 09 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Haijie Liu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.