Photo by John Jackson on Unsplash
Out of the Din: Review of White Noise
By Geoff Carter
According to Merriam-Webster.com , white noise is defined as an heterogeneous mixture of sound waves extending over a wide frequency range, a constant background noise, or ameaningless or distracting commotion, hubbub, or chatter. In other words, all sound frequencies at the same time. Many compare white noise to radio static, the whirring of a fan, or the sound of a waterfall. Some claim playing white noise at night can help people sleep because it drowns out other background noise.
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise explored modern life through the lens of constant media clatter, simulations opposed to—and as variations—of reality, the specter of death, the avalanche of information in the modern world, and the chaos of family. It is a wonderfully rendered and eerie novel that manages to encompass the pathos, absurdity, humor, and joy of modern life. The reason it took thirty-eight years to bring this story to the screen is that the common thought the hyper-stylized dialogue and the density of its ideation would make it unfilmable—and unpalatable to audiences.
Noah Baumbach, however, has taken the story and turned it into not only a thoughtful, satiric, and funny take on our sometimes (and maybe usual) tenuous grasp of reality in modern society, but also as a reflection of our own more recent experiences of isolationg and alienation during the Covid lockdown.
The film opens with its first chapter, “Waves and Radiation”, as Professor Murray Suskind (Don Cheadle) is giving a lecture on the beauty and universality of car crashes, saying, “Don’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. No, these collisions are part of a long tradition of American optimism. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs… Each crash is meant to be better than the last. There’s a constant upgrading of tools, skills, a meeting of challenges.” This sequence beautifully sets up the thematics of illusion versus reality, disaster as entertainment, and academics as theater of the absurd.
We then see Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) a professor of Hitler Studies (an academic program which he originated) at College-on-the-Hill, welcoming in the new school year. His most recent wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), is a happy soul who teaches posture to seniors and reads to the blind. They are a blended family with four children from four different marriages. The kitchen table at dinnertime in the Gladney household is sort of a miniature Tower of Babel. Everyone talks with, through, and/or over each other. Much of the information, especially from the precocious Gladney children, comes from mysterious sources and is many times wildly inaccurate—or surprisingly accurate. The oldest son Heinrich is being constantly asked by his father where he heard something or got his information. When a news story about a plane crash comes on, the children rush to the screen, mesmerized by the image of the disaster, insisting on watching it over and over.
Professor Suskind wants to establish an academic niche “Elvis Studies” program, modeled on Jack’s established and popular “Hitler Studies”, and asks him to do a guest lecture at his class as a favor. Jack shows up and joins in with Suskind’s lecture and together do a sort of academic question and answer during the lecture, comparing Hitler and Elvis’ effect on crowds, the sort of mass hysteria both induced while performing, and the dissolution of personal identity in their presences. During his own performance, Jack attains what looks like sort of messianic divine trance. It is a hit. The sequence is a chilling and reflection on human nature as well as a deliciously ironic send-up of academia.
The second chapter, “The Airborne Toxic Event” begins with as a fuel truck crashes into a freight train hauling toxic chemicals. In a long, involved, and breathtaking sequence that seems almost antithetical to Baumbach’s previous introspective work, when the train cars explode into a malignant black cloud of smoke—the aforementioned toxic event.
When Jack’s son Heinrich (Sam Nivola) focuses in on the event from the roof and begins explaining to his father what he thinks has happened, his dad immediately starts dismissing or reinterpreting the info according to what he wants to be, or hopes is, true. No one seems to know what’s happening at first and Jack insists on normality—that is until an evacuation is ordered. The family flees and is promptly caught in a traffic jam. As they slowly make their way to Camp Daffodil, the designated evacuation center, they see patrons of a retail box store watching them from the windows. “What are they doing there?” someone asks. “There’s a sale.” While stopping for gas along the way, Jack is briefly exposed to the toxic event.
After they get to the camp, the family is smattered with all sorts of speculation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. Jack’s daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy), always an alarmist, begins freaking out, while Jack fruitlessly tries to determine what’s happening. He tries to find out if his life is in immediate danger from the exposure, but discovers the medical experts are actually members of a simulation who only know their own version of the dire reality they are all facing.
The next day, a sudden panic causes the refugees to stampede. During this oddly comic sequence (which Baumbach maintains was inspired in part by Lampoon Summer Vacation), Jack decides to follow a survivalist-looking renegade that leads them to the oddest sort of wilderness escape that strangely resembles a slapstick chase.
The last sequence, “Dylarama” focuses on Babette’s (and Jack’s) morbid fear of death, an obsession that leads her into a maze of deceit, adultery, addiction, and—finally, revelation. It is also peppered with Suskind’s comparison between the supermarket and the Tibetan idea of death. Like death, he says the supermarket is a timeless construct. In many ways, this sequence is reminiscent of David Byrne’s film True Stories, particularly the sequence where Byrne and his friend Lewis discuss the mall as a the modern center of social consciousness.
White Noise is a thematically rich movie, almost deceptively so. Pinballing from questions of consciousness, existentialism, and reality to the media and the simulacrum of belief to mortality to rampant consumerism, the film attempts to (mostly successfully) weave these disparate threads into a coherent tapestry.
As Jack, Adam Driver is a perfect middle-aged blend of bland self-assurance, bewilderment, denial, and apprehension. His passive refusal to accept the truth of the toxic event or to accept the bizarre escape in the family station wagon downriver is perfect. Driver is an actor who can almost effortlessly focus the most subtle shades of his interior onto the screen. His Jack seems to be a mostly bumbling middle-aged man, but the doubts and fears of his interior surface almost unexpectedly.
Greta Gerwig fronts the complicated and multi-layered Babette with a pleasant, seemingly simple housewife sort of façade, but, like Driver, she provides a complexity that bubbles up when confronted with her transgressions.
White Noise is a very good movie that is, on the surface, a fun watch. Part disaster movie, part comedy, and part send-up, it still presents penetrating insights and confounding questions. Death, reality, belief, and mass consciousness are all addressed during the course of this fine film. When the powers that be in the movie industry said White Noise couldn’t be a movie, they obviously hadn’t counted on Mr. Baumbach.