A necessary confession, since so much of Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” adaptation deals with claimed expertise and faulty memory: it’s been a few decades since I last read Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel and I’m hazy on a lot of the more granular detail. For this post, I’m approaching the movie with a sense of hybrid authorship, so I may mean “DeLillo” when I say “Baumbach.” I may even mean “Gerwig,” because Greta is such an important creative figure in Baumbach’s work.
The first thing is that I liked it. I can exhale now. The question of whether it was “unfilmable” was answered when it was filmed, but whether it should have been adapted at all? Yes, I believe that was a good call. There’s a lot in the source material that early reviews are calling “prescient,” generally pointing to parallels between the Airborne Toxic Event and Covid, between distrust/misinformation/panic and the enduring allure of Fox News. More interesting to me than that though, is how from Baumbach’s position in the present, he’s able to identify how things were shifting back then and where they were shifting to.
By the mid-1980s, the postmodernism and cult-of-personality studies and semiotics that professors Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) trade in were already beginning to feel sweaty in real-life academic walled gardens. Which means that as in trends of haute couture, they’ve outlived their usefulness in one realm and are ready for the monoculture. Derrida and Baudrillard eventually become the giant signifying bean of Max Headroom. What starts in lecture halls falls into the hands of guileless media manipulators, which subsequently falls into the tabloid racks at supermarkets. Prof. Gladney gets freaked out by the “simulation” implications of someone’s Simuvac armband at an evacuation site. Prof. Siskind understands and even applauds the Pavlovian conditioning of Hollywood car crashes on eager viewers. Baumbach’s film makes clear exactly how haunted its characters are by thoughts of themselves and others as lab rats, or that the products making lab rats sick in the testing stages will kill us all next. You can see the antivaxxer movement starting to take shape in this era; Julianne Moore’s phobic obsession with chemicals in Todd Haynes’s 1987-set “Safe” points to this as well.
I typed “not wanting things to change” in my Notes app on the way home, sensing this as a theme. Not wanting things to change in academia, choosing an area of study rooted in the perceived immutability of iconography (where the subjects are at once hyperspecific and vague). Not wanting the family unit to change, when it’s already a blended, Brady Bunch–style clan assembled from different previous marriages. Not wanting children to age. Fearing death. Today, MAGA touts the “again” stuff, but it’s less about changing back than the delusion of not acknowledging social change at all. And I think the film is conscious of these fears to the extent that it adapts structurally from one end to the other.
I wasn’t certain at first whether the supermarket motif really works, but it does function as a stage of sorts where we can visualize how these movements take place. A lot of the first act feels very black-box, very masc and hubristic, very 1970s Steppenwolf Theatre Company; by the final act, there’s softness. This plays out in the supermarket, in physical and theoretical terms. The condescending patriarchalism of finding supermarkets absurd gives way to embracing their primacy, their role in fulfilling human need. And I do interpret this as academia changing! As the movie’s point of view evolves toward Babette (Greta Gerwig), we feel some of the film’s earlier ironic remove fade away. Suddenly, the tone is less “here’s what I, an expert, think” and more lived experience–centered. Babette dislikes a certain phrase in porn not because of kneejerk second-wave feminist semantics but for entirely personal reasons. The abstract, the “grey,” the symbolic, collapses into the real. The color spectrum. The rainbow that addicts were laughed at for always chasing in the infamous anti-drug commercial of the era.
This “White Noise” is kinda messy, but Baumbach presents human nature as messy. Our behavior is counterintuitive and contradictory as fuck. We can have a death drive and a death phobia and, gasp, optimism about a pleasant future, and we never know which one will appear in the foreground at any given time. The only constant is a compulsory James Murphy song on the soundtrack.
