If you stare at anything long enough, a pattern will emerge. Americans used to regularly confront this truth when television programming ended sometime after midnight and the local network affiliate went off the air following a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Enter white noise. The screen turned to hissing static, and that was it for the rest of the night. The Spielberg-produced film Poltergeist used this to creepy effect in 1982, and this is the same timeframe and cultural milieu that animates Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, a genre-spanning fantasia of suburban dysfunction and middle class malaise based on Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. The ‘80s were a time of dawning awareness of the pitfalls of consumer culture and the perils of living in the age of television, and these are the obsessions that drive the characters as well as the plot points. It’s a cynical treatise on the hollow promise of Reagan-era America, disguised as a story about a resilient midwestern family, spiked with broad strokes of comedy and action. It isn’t so much unlike any other movie as it is a mishmash of multiple genres, stirred up like a fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt cup to temper the sour with some sweet.
Baumbach’s script sticks roughly to the story beats of the novel, recreating portions of the dialogue even when it bears little resemblance to how humans who aren’t Don DeLillo actually speak. The tone wavers between satire and sincerity while never comfortably settling into either. The chatter at the Gladney family dinner table sounds like stream-of-consciousness notes for a lecture on media literacy. That’s because Jack (Adam Driver) is a professor at the College-on-the-Hill where he’s the chair of the Hitler Studies department despite not speaking German. The scenes of bustle and blather in the suburban home are comfortingly naturalistic and warm-hearted as Jack, his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their four children exchange zingers and talk past one another while shuffling cereal boxes and juggling name-brand packaging. It’s hard to say whether the avalanche of period-appropriate branding is an artifact of genuine product placement or a parody of it.
This reaches its zenith in the recurring scenes at the local A & P grocery store where the whole cast seems to convene as if at the town square. Jack bumps into his fellow university instructors who join him pushing their carts down the soup aisle as they chatter in critical analysis sound bites. When Murray (Don Cheadle) reveals that a colleague has just died, he adds that he came straight to the grocery store after hearing the news. It’s consumerism as modern therapy, and the film doesn’t so much critique that idea as have fun with it. These are goofy but sympathetic characters with relatable lives and concerns, trying their best to find meaning in a world that feels like it’s quickly coming off the rails.
In a literal manifestation of that theme, a collision between a freight train and a semi unleashes an ominous cloud of burning chemicals at the outskirts of town. Borrowing the chapter headings from the novel, this segment of the film, “Airborne Toxic Event,” plunges into Spielberg territory as the family piles into their station wagon to join the crush of humanity fleeing the zone of the industrial accident. Establishing shots show the black cloud looming like an invading mothership, with lightning flickering and helicopters battering. The suspense turns its screws. As a director with a reputation for staging talky stories in homey living rooms, Baumbach proves surprisingly adept at the framing and pacing of nail-biting action. Here’s Jack, frantically running across a field as motorcycles, cop cars and frenzied drivers careen about seemingly within inches of pulverizing him. The kinetic force of these scenes nearly wrenches the film into a new genre–Armageddon cartoon–so there’s a bit of comic whiplash when the story settles back into chatter mode after the world fails to actually end.
Jack and Babette, it turns out, have an even more insidious problem than the environmental catastrophe happening outside. She’s been popping mysterious pills for an ailment she doesn’t want to reveal but which nicely rounds out the cornucopia of middle class blues this story centers around: fear of death. Here in the third act the movie shifts tone yet again, veering into David Lynch territory as Jack sleuths out Babette’s pill dealer in a sleazy motel where the vibe is neon-and-shadows. Here the satire begins to feel more blurry than barbed as dream logic supersedes whatever choices real people might make.
White Noise is a kaleidoscope of styles and messages, bolstered by funny and sharp performances. Driver and Gerwig are nearly unrecognizable in suburban schlub cosplay but both inhabit their roles with a naturalism and ease that counteracts the overwrought dialogue. Baumbach showcases a broad palette of narrative modes, most impressively in the closing credits where the A & P supermarket becomes the soundstage for a shaggy song-and-dance number set to an LCD Soundsystem tune. This bit, featuring André 3000 of Outkast shimmying with a box of generic cookies, is worth the price of admission. It doesn’t tie up the many zany strands of this charming and confounding story, but it does offer a bit of comfort for the soul after a harrowing journey through America’s dark heart. In Don DeLillo’s world, that’s what a supermarket is for. White Noise is ultimately about the background hum of fear and desperation that fuels our civilization, and the lengths we go to to drown it out. Our preoccupations might be a bit different today–climate change, social media, the rise of fascism–but our solutions remain the same: have a waffle, pop a pill, go to the movies.
Photo courtesy of Netflix
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