Sneak Attacks on Dominant Culture

"These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context.

"...the external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about classs or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology -- they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.

"You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

"This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?

"They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture."

--DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.