POINT OMEGA, by Don DeLillo. Scribner; 112 pages; $24.

Don DeLillo has always been fascinated by movies. Not in any conventional way — as artifacts of celebrity, or even of sociology. He’s fascinated by their physicality, their visual attributes — the dance of the grain as the frames pass by, the way that film has of capturing lost time. He built one entire novel (Running Dog) around the search for a 35mm print from Hitler’s private film collection.

That fascination bookends Point Omega, whose beginning and ending both feature 24 Hour Psycho, an installation at the Museum of Modern Art which slows down Hitchcock’s Psycho to the point where it takes 24 hours to watch the entire movie.

"Anthony Perkins is turning his head. It was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’ head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion."

Jim Finley, the novel’s narrator, sits and watches the frames click past the same way that Richard Elster watches his life slip by. Elster is an elderly theorist of war who was one of the architects of Iraq. Finley is a filmmaker whose company is unpromisingly called Deadbeat Films. He has gone to Elster’s house in the desert to persuade him to participate in a documentary.

As with Falling Man and Underworld, DeLillo is once again spinning off semi-actualities. For Finley, read Errol Morris; for Elster, read Robert McNamara, or, if you want to be literal, Donald Rumsfeld. It doesn’t really matter, because, once the premise is set, DeLillo slides away from conventional history, or even conventional narrative.

Elster says he doesn’t want to do the documentary, but he never actually tells Finley to go away. Finley just keeps hanging around. He doesn’t have anywhere to go — his marriage has just broken up, and he finds Elster fascinating.

Into the mix comes Elster’s daughter Jessica. Finley idly thinks of taking her to bed, but doesn’t. And then Jessica goes missing.

Before that, the book presents a series of dialogues that eerily replicate the Martin Sheen/Marlon Brando exchanges in Apocalypse Now: one naive inquirer in over his head, one gnomic philosopher/madman spouting inspired malevolence.

"I wanted a haiku war," Elster says. "I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things."

"What are we?" he rhetorically asks at another point. "We’re a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in the field."

Notice how each sentence expands the ideas, each sentence being more or less sensible by itself, but nudging meaning further out until you come to the end — beautiful gibberish spouted in the desolation of the desert.

The book’s brevity is not the same thing as thin; DeLillo traffics in density — of thought, of emotion, of musings on the way we live now. For that matter, DeLillo carries through with the Hitchcock metaphors, for "Elster" is the name of the heavy in Vertigo, who throws his wife off the mission tower and draws the innocent James Stewart into his plan.

Hitchcock eventually makes it all clear to us. DeLillo doesn’t, unless his appropriation of the name Elster is supposed to tell us everything we need to know. What DeLillo makes clear is the beauty of film, of the way "black and white was the only true medium for film as an idea, film in the mind."

And once again DeLillo makes clear that he is one of the few writers who can make the polymorphous perversity of our lives seem at least semi-coherent by acknowledging and embracing one simple fact: Chaos theory is no longer a theory.