ON WHITE NOISE

ON WHITE NOISE

If you could catalog the contents of every undergrad’s bookshelf, White Noise would be among the books you’d find most frequently. Generations of flannel-wearing twenty-somethings have gobbled that shit up. Reading it was almost a rite of passage. There was probably a time when they were giving them away with purchase at Urban Outfitters. For a lot of people it’s one of the first Great American Novels (whatever that means) that you might read recreationally,  and in some ways, it’s a bad one to start on. It’s such a seminal work that you end up coming across countless bad impressions that were published in its wake. Your sense of the novel also gets warped over time. Because of the type of novel it is, and because of the way memory works, you end up remembering it imperfectly (at least I did). You’re left with this impression of its importance and a sense of enjoying it, but what it’s actually about wanders out of sight. I say all that because I really liked Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise, and a lot of other people didn’t. After trying to figure out what I’m seeing differently, I keep coming back to the idea that our relationship to this book in particular makes it a really weird one to try and adapt, and an equally weird film to try and understand. You’re not just reacting to the film on the screen. You’re also having to reckon with your own years-old conception of the book.

I saw the movie during its short theatrical run last year and reread the book afterward. Doing that made me realize how much the version of White Noise in my head was different from the one on the page. I suspect a lot of other folks may be in the same boat. We remember it as a book about late-stage capitalism, or Reaganism, or ecological collapse. Anything but what it’s actually grappling with: the absurdity of death and how we cope with it. All of that other stuff spins out of the central idea that none of us knows how to cope with the fact of our own demise. And because we remember poorly, and don’t like thinking about death, we forget that. We latch onto the symptoms instead, the manifestations of how we try to control this ultimately uncontrollable thing. That’s where all the comedy in the novel comes from. Over time, we forget the joke but remember that it made us laugh.

As is often the case, a lot of the reason I was moved to write was because I saw somebody being wrong on the internet. That’s a silly reason to do anything, but this is a book about silliness made into a silly movie, and I couldn’t help myself, so here we are. In the same way that White Noise is emblematic of the college experience for a particular part of the population, The Ringer has become emblematic of a certain type of pseudo-intellectualism. It’s where slightly bookish dweebs can go to find hot takes on about Elena Ferrante. It’s where I went after I saw the movie and where I read this review by Adam Nayman. On my best days, I find Adam Nayman to be tolerable. And while I’m sure he’s a lovely human who’ll shovel a bit of snow from in front of his neighbor’s house, I don’t care for his criticism. To me, he’s Bob Balaban’s movie critic from Lady in the Water (a reference that might discredit me from having opinions on film, but the true Shyamalads will have my back). It feels like he’s lost the joy for the thing he’s dedicated his professional life to. And not being able to approach this movie with joy or a sense of silliness is like going in with blinders on. You’ll only see part of the screen. Still, his critiques represent a lot of the complaints people have had about this movie, and they’re worth digging into.

A lot of Nayman’s gripes stem from what he views as a mismatch between Delillo’s style and Baumbach’s. I don’t see that at all. In fact, I was struck by how much of Delillo’s dialogue sounds like something Noah Baumbach would write. They both share a view of the world as absurd, and their comedy reflect that. Whether it’s Henrich describing weather fronts or Babette claiming that a pill she swallowed was “just some saliva she didn’t know what to do with,” the jokes in this feel like they belong right alongside Ben Stiller’s Greenberg asking if a pool can overflow. Nayman’s views of Baumbach’s other movies also feels a bit off to me. To him, Baumbach’s “signature is a sort of thorny, gentrified realism.” Again, I think that Delillo and Baumbach have this shared DNA that views the world as a fundamentally absurd place, and that worldview permeates their works. More than anything I’m struck by what an influence Delillo must have been on Baumbach. Baumbach’s movies aren’t impersonations of Delillo, but you can see the impression left on them by his work.

In that way, I’ve been thinking a lot about the number of movies that came out this year in which directors grappled with their own creative journeys. James Gray’s Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg’s The Fablemans are the two biggest examples. Both directors seem to have spent a lot of time during the pandemic thinking about how they became the directors they are. Baumbach’s White Noise is, I think, similar. Instead of being auto-biographical, it’s an attempt by Baumbach to understand himself by diving into a book that was formative for him. Just because something isn’t about us doesn’t mean it can’t be personal. In White Noise, as Nayman points out, Delillo writes that “It is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.” It’s a great line. And when Baumbach includes the following in Kicking and Screaming it’s not a stretch to imagine it was on his mind while writing: “I'm nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I've begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I'm reminiscing this right now.”

The other major gripe that people have with Baumbach’s adaptation has to do with how uneven they feel it is. People tend to really like the second act that covers the Airborne Toxic Event and tend to dislike the first and third acts that set it up and deal with the fallout from it. This, I think, is a reflection of people not getting the thing that they expected going in. For me, there were two dominant images that the book left on me. One was the most photographed barn in America. The other was the brilliant sunsets caused by the Airborne Toxic Event. Neither are included in the movie. I also remembered the Airborne Toxic Event being more of the story than it was. In my defense, and in the defenses of those people who’d claim Baumbach got the book wrong, it’s easy to mistake something being memorable for it being important. And because this book tends to be so formative for younger readers, we latch onto the version of it we have in our minds.

One of the fairest criticism I think you could levy against this movie is that it’s really weird. I don’t know how you could make a not-weird version of this book. It’s not anything I’d want to watch, but there’s something that might be alienating about that if you’re not expecting it. If you’re the imaginary person who hasn’t read the book, liked what Baumbach and Adam Driver were doing in Marriage Story and decided to check this out on Netflix, would you be a little put off when Adam Driver bites seductively into a piece of fried chicken that has multi-colored peppers decorating it? Maybe. Would you tune out after the dueling lectures between Driver and Don Cheadle about Elvis and Hitler’s fascination with their mothers? Probably so? There’s a strangeness to White Noise that makes it all the more impressive that Netflix gave Noah Baumbach a blank check to make it. What did they think was going to happen? Did they all misremember how weird the book was too? One of my biggest takeaways from rereading it was that Baumbach didn’t change very much. His movie isn’t any stranger than the book is. A lot of the dialogue is lifted straight off the page. The things the book is interested in are the same things that Baumbach seems to be: grocery stores and death. Before re-reading it, I had forgotten about that strangeness. It’s almost as if White Noise the object, the canonized thing, has become so normalized that we lose sight of the fact that it’s such an odd duck.

I mentioned it above, but it’s really hard to overstate just how much this book is about mortality and the pretzels that we will work ourselves into to compartmentalize what is the mother of all mind freaks. Our own compartmentalization as readers and viewers is a big part of why we might forget certain things about the book. White Noise isn’t actually about the Airborne Toxic Event. A different cloud that hangs over everything: our inescapable doom. The ecological collapse is just a symptom of it. Almost exactly halfway through the movie, a character (the great Bill Camp) delivers a monologue that drives that home. Stuck in another shelter, one of the survivors of the ATE is complaining about how little attention is being paid to them. “Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with cameras and reporters,” he asks. “Shouldn’t we be yelling out the window at them, ‘leave us alone. We’ve been through enough already.’ Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions?” The group’s concern isn’t for what they’ve been through. It’s that it didn’t matter enough. That’s the central tension. It’s not that they could have died. It’s that if they had, the world wouldn’t stop to notice.

The late-stage capitalism/consumerist tendencies that are such a big part of both the book and the movie are a reaction to that anxiety. One of the places that you can really see the money Netflix gave to Baumbach is in the full-scale supermarket they had built. It’s blindingly white and filled with painstakingly accurate recreations of famous food packaging from the eighties, and it’s also where characters discuss the major themes of the movie. Don Cheadle talks about how the grocery store operates as kind of hex against death. You can’t die while shopping for groceries. The illusion of unending plenty and always being fresh that the grocery store gives you keeps death at bay. It can’t trigger the automatic doors up front. The smell of bread and the sight of the butcher counter let you know that you’re alive.

I’ve had a hard time thinking about this book and this movie as separate objects. They share the same DNA. It feels more like Baumbach staging a new production of a play than it does reinterpreting someone else’s work. Maybe you can hold that against him, but I don’t. A movie can be a venue for working through ideas. If you can make it funny while you’re doing that, I think you’re most of the way toward a successful movie. The people who take issue with things this movie does, I think aren’t actually looking for White Noise. They’re looking for how it made them felt, and as Delillo or Baumbach would certainly tell you, how you feel about something is a pretty poor barometer of what that thing was actually like.

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