What Media Has Made Me Become
“Valparaiso” is another deeply satirical work. It is funny, ironic and sad at the same time. In this play, DeLillo focuses on the joke that media makes of us. It follows Michael Majeski a business man who is supposed to go to Valparaiso, Indiana, but instead finds himself going to Valparaiso, Chile. This mistake, or the succession of supposedly innocent mistakes, has led him on a journey he never thought he would live. What is funny is that we do not know much about the travel itself. The scenes are formed as successions of interviews with Michael about the mistake. The issue becomes bigger and bigger, but it also loses its meaning. Interviewers no longer want to know about the mistake itself but about the man who made it, a man who becomes the object of the media which absorbs his identity and leaves him an empty shell...
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