It starts with a crash course, a few film clips of all kinds of car accidents, plus a little philosophy of these terrible events. There is nothing violent about them, we are told, they are in the tradition of American optimism… Professor Murray is lecturing, played with very dry irony by Don Cheadle. “You have to think of it like Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, days of self-celebration. An American director says: I want this flatbed truck to do a double somersault in the air, complete with a fireball, twelve meters in diameter… That’s it a moment full of spirit and inspiration, like an old-fashioned stunt flight or that number of walking on airplane wings, walking on wings.” The crash considered fine art. And the blood, the shards, the sheet metal? “Pass the violence… The people who staged it had a lightheartedness, a wonderfully exuberant spirit of innocence.”
It’s under these auspices that White Noise has to be viewed, all the shocking and ridiculous things that turn the lives of Jack Gladney and his family upside down. Gladney, like crash expert Murray, teaches at a small provincial university and is played by Adam Driver – his fifth film with Noah Baumbach, this time with a beer belly. Jack has established himself as a Hitler specialist, fully receptive to the demonic fascination of the figure, the party, the German people. Murray’s research is dedicated to Elvis, so there’s a collegial competition, Elvis and his mother bond vs. Hitler and his mother bond. Intellectual filmmaker Noah Baumbach pokes fun at American intellectuality more than the novel he is filming here, originally titled ‘White Noise’, 1985, by Don DeLillo.
Don DeLillo’s novel’s proximity to the pandemic experience was uncanny
The Gladneys are a blended family, genuinely American, so quite talkative, it’s all about healthy food and medicine and drugs from dawn to dusk. The eighties were the time when criticism of consumerism got going, against the terror of the supermarkets. The children from various marriages are terribly clever, one of the sons is named Heinrich. There is more talk of death, morbidity and mortality than all of Woody Allen’s work, and Jack’s wife Babette – played by Greta Gerwig, Baumbach’s partner (who was just finishing her new film Barbie, starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling) – Takes an obscure new drug called Dylar for her death anxiety. This has the stupid side effect that you can no longer distinguish things from the words that describe them; culture of the material.
The film arose from the spirit of the lockdown, which also drove the Baumbach/Gerwig couple into isolation around the turn of the year 2019/2020 – they were both nominated for the Oscars with their new films, he for “Marriage Story”, she for ” Little Women”, and got stuck in a whirlwind of press conferences and screenings on the west coast, all with many people, always close – back in New York the Covid stress gripped her and kept her in her apartment for weeks: “Every morning checked I watch the news to see how scared I should be.” Noah had revisited Don DeLillo’s novel, and its closeness to experiences of the pandemic, the dominance of an unseen threat, was uncanny.
“White Noise” was considered unfilmable – Barry Sonnenfeld, James L. Brooks, Michael Almereyda had tried it and given up. But now that the future of cinema was at stake due to the closures of the movie theaters and the hygiene conditions of the shoots, it seemed to be a completely natural project. And Netflix saw it too. For Noah Baumbach, who rather intimately dissects the psyche of the American family in his films, it was a new beginning – if it’s cinema again, then really, with action and catastrophes and crashes.
Is “White Noise” an American paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend”? Adam Driver (right) with film family.
(Photo: Wilson Webb/Netflix)
It centers on an “airborne toxic incident,” a disaster near the Gladneys that seemed rather utopian when the novel was first published, a year before Chernobyl. A tanker truck with highly toxic cargo rams a freight train. Noah Baumbach films the collision with classic suspense, but elegantly condensed: the carriages of the train slide into one another like an accordion. Small, poisonous red rivulets of Nyodene D. emerge from the body of the tanker, and a cloud of toxic gas threatens the city. The accident is played down by the authorities and in the news, there are evacuations and congested streets, hectic escapes, death is now threatening, invisible, present. Did Jack get some of the deadly poison when he got out and refueled the car? “It will outlive me in my body.”
In Baumbach’s cinema, as in Godard, action and intellect come together
Noah Baumbach took a lot of the dialogue from Don DeLillo’s novel, but he is a child of the cinema, his father, a film critic, always took him with him, even to press screenings. The film is like an American paraphrase of Godard’s “Weekend,” but basically, says Baumbach, a kind of “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” which was family tour clothes with Chevy Chase. There is a hearty slapstick scene – when Jack finally has to learn German for his Hitler studies, he fights with his teacher in one scene with the correct pronunciation of the sentence “I eat potato salad”, with hands and feet, as if he were Don Quixote in front of the windmills… When the catastrophe is over, it all ends in a big musical number – where everyone dances in the supermarket to the music of “New Body Rhumba” by LCD sound system.
In Baumbach’s Dylamarama – as artificially as in Godard – action and intellect come together. The film breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, loud and fiery. A wonderfully exuberant spirit of innocence.
white noise, 2022 – directed and written by Noah Baumbach. Based on the novel by Don DeLillo. Camera: Lol Crawley. Editor: Matthew Hannam. Music: Danny Elfman. Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, May Nivola, Sam Nivola, Lars Eidinger, André L. Benjamin, Kenneth Lonergan, Barbara Sukowa. Netflix, 136 minutes. Streaming start: December 30, 2022.