A few good things about filmmaker Noah Baumbach's adaption of Don DeLillo's 1985 novel White Noise currently streaming on Netflix.
Over the past two weeks, I've watched Noah Baumbach's latest film White Noise twice. You may be wondering why I'd spend four hours of my one wild and precious life watching a movie that people paid to have opinions about movies have deemed so-so. Well, as it turns out, I like White Noise.
A Quick Plot Summary
Like other, better-received Baumbach films, White Noise focuses on a quirky family. The Gladneys are led by Jack, a revered professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill, an experimental liberal arts school. Jack lives with his fourth wife, Babette, and their four kids, only one of which they share. Babette, also on her fourth marriage, spends her free time teaching gentle movement classes and reading periodicals to senior citizens.
The rhythm of the Gladneys' lives gets interrupted by a strange "airborne toxic event," which forces them to evacuate their home. From there, the movie blends several genres, including the family vacation romp, the dystopian disaster, a little action, and a dash of thriller all to varying degrees of success. In the film's third act, the Gladneys return home, and to paraphrase Jakob Dylan, they haven't changed, but they certainly aren't the same. The toxic event has widened the pre-existing cracks in their lives, leaving Jack to take extreme measures to keep his fourth family together.
A Good Thing
The Gladneys may be the film's center, but its star is Murray Jay Siskind played to perfection by Don Cheadle. A recent arrival to the College-on-the-Hill by way of New York, Murray hopes to start an Elvis Studies program. He believes that Jack can help, given his success in turning Hitler Studies into a legitimate academic field.
Murray is a professor specializing in living icons. He does things like tell Jack that his wife has "important hair" during a visit to the grocery shopping. In the middle of the evacuation, he runs into Jack and marvels at the fact that every white person has a favorite Elvis song. Is this true?
He's intelligent, effortlessly funny, constantly curious, passionate about the world around him, and opinionated though not shut off from other points of view. Barring the obsession with Elvis, he's an ideal man.
Another Good Thing
I like the acting performances in White Noise. I don't particularly love the story, but I enjoyed the dialogue enough to start reading DeLillo's book. But listening to an article in the New York Times about the making of the movie tipped the scales of appreciation for me. The article details how Baumbach began re-reading White Noise several weeks before the covid-19 pandemic shut down most of the country. Baumbach first read DeLillo's novel as a teenager; it was one of the few contemporary novels he and his father, a writer, bonded over. The director's father passed away in the spring of 2019, so it's tough not to see his revisiting White Noise as a way to connect with and grieve his father.
The article helped me understand White Noise as both a movie and a cultural object. As something wrapped up in the personal life of its primary maker. It reminded me of art's ability to provide comfort and inspiration and to help us make sense of confusing experiences, be it a global pandemic or the death of a family member.
So in the spirit of my belief that White Noise helped its creator cope with challenging times, here are a few other ideas about what art can do.
Solve a Problem
Aside from her hair, one of Babette's defining characteristics is her fear of dying. She's so afraid of dying that she takes a black-market anti-anxiety medication that seems to cause memory loss. During a walk with Jack, she describes to him how she spends her days. He responds by telling her that her life sounds boring. What a guy! Babette needs art to quiet her anxious thoughts and draw her attention to simple joys. Something that doesn't try to erase her fear of death but replaces it with an appreciation for living.
Something abstract and colorful, something like what Stanley Whitney makes. Since the 1970s, Whitney has created colorful grid paintings influenced by artists like Piet Mondrian and Charlie Parker. Whitney fills his rectangular canvases with blocks of color which create a grid. He thinks of the works as a call and response between colors. Despite giving himself a seemingly fixed set of working conditions, Whitney sees the possibilities for his work as "limitless." What an inspiration such an idea could be for Babette's boring life. A way for her to find pleasure within the boundaries of her existence.
Put the world into Perspective
Once everyone returns home following the toxic event, Jack and Murray meet up at their spot..the grocery store. Murray muses about how the supermarket "recharges us spiritually" and contains "all the letters and numbers, colors of the spectrum, and ceremonial phrases." This is how the people of Los Angeles sound when they talk about Erewhon.
Murray's gift of observation and desire to see the larger importance of mundane things reminds me of the German photographer Andreas Gursky's work. Gursky's large-scale photographs show how he sees the world in broad strokes and incredible detail. Gursky says he shows "our contemporary world as it is." This means making pictures of an Amazon warehouse, a 99-cent store, or stock exchange floors around the globe. Places where all the ceremonial phrases can be captured.
Point Out Problems
White Noise starts with a lecture from Murray about car crashes in movies. He tells a captive group of students to think of car crashes on film as "a celebration" akin to the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving. He encourages them to understand crashes in American movies as "spirited moments" of "innocence and fun." This opening can be taken as foreshadowing, given that a crash triggers the toxic event. But it's also Baumbach letting his audience know that a disaster film can still be a good time.
You know who didn't think disasters were fun? Andy Warhol. Death and Disaster, an early body of work from the pop artist, dealt with the seriousness of events like plane crashes, civil rights protests, state-sanctioned executions, and of course, car crashes. Warhol pulled images from newspapers and put them through his signature process of repeated silkscreening. By repeating these images, Warhol wanted to highlight how the media can desensitize us to suffering and death by showing so much of it. At least, that's the claim. I'm not so sure that copying the media's methods is the best way to critique them. At any rate, the series has earned a place in art history, and even Warhol skeptics can acknowledge the artistic merits of Death and Disaster.
The Extras
One more thing about icons: A few years after the release of White Noise the book, the artist Jeff Koons debuted his Banality series. Banality consists of sculptures depicting various figures, from Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles to the actress Jayne Mansfield with the Pink Panther to St. John the Baptist. The kitschy sculptures were meant to remind collectors of the kinds of objects they'd find in their grandparents' house, to give them objects through which they could channel their bad taste. Even though Koons's sculptures are very different from the little figurines in grandma's curio cabinet, the series recognized a cultural trend towards a melding of high and low culture. This brings me to the fact that Noah Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay for the forthcoming Barbie movie while working on White Noise.
The Academy of Motion of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has let me down yet again. They've failed to nominate LCD Soundsystem's "New Body Rhumba" for best original song. The song plays during the delightful and strange end credits for White Noise.
This profile in Bustle covers Jodie Turner-Smith, who plays neurochemist Winnie Richards in the movie. She talks about her character, her experience on set, and how she'd never heard of DeLillo's book but was eager to work with Baumbach.
Lastly, I'm only a few pages into reading White Noise, so all opinions above are subject to change. Until Next Time!
From the film stills (the colors! the cast!) and your description alone, my interest is piqued!
**Adds movie to weekend playlist**
I'm always conflicted whether I should read the book first or watch the movie first for stories like these (I blame grade school days when teachers would insist on the book first, movie later) but because streaming is just so easy, I already know which one I'll get to sooner.
Also love your reference to Gursky. His "99 cent" photograph is so visually fun and I notice something new each time I see it. But I wonder if he were to recreate it with today's economy/market, if he would have to update photograph title to "1 dollar, 25 cent" (Thanks a lot Dollar Tree).
Great review, can't wait to hear what you think about the book.
"You may be wondering why I'd spend four hours of my one wild and precious life watching a movie that people paid to have opinions about movies have deemed so-so."
Babes we know it was because of Adam Driver.