The Lying Life of Adults on Netflix: Movies can bring life to books.

 

The Lying Life of Adults; Elena Ferrante; Video; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Bracelet; Beauty

I read The Lying Lives of Adults a few years ago and posted on it.  It is a tremendous coming of age book set in Naples and Milan in the 1980s.  It is also a complicated book with manifold complex characters interacting in intriguing ways.  It was a difficult read for me – not just because of the complexities, but because, I think, of the crossed cultures, and the crossed genders (mine and the lead character’s) in interaction with the cultures.

When my post on the book The Lying Lives of Adults suddenly started getting hits, seemingly out of the blue, I knew something must be going on.  Well, it turned out that the Italian film had dropped as a six-episode series on Netflix.  Thank you internet for this wake up call! 

The Reluctant Wife and I finished watching the series last night, and what a satisfying watch it was.  Despite one possible elaboration, the fidelity to the book went beyond being technically on target, it brought the spirit of the book to life in ways that my Midwestern US male imagination wasn’t quite able to construct from the page.  So, I will take a second whack at describing the impact of the book as interpreted by the film…

Twelve year-old Giovanna (Giordana Marengo) begins to awaken when she overhears her father Andre (Alessandro Preziosi) saying that she is as ugly as his sister, her Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino).  Vittoria is the sister that her father (Andreas in the book) left in the gutter when he ascended to the heights of Naples, rising out of the ghetto by virtue of his education and marrying well.  

Giovanna responds to the broadside from her father by seeking out the shunned and ignored Vittoria who becomes the family truth teller – calling things out as she sees them, helping Giovanna see through the lies of everyone around her.  Vittoria has the grit and clear vision of the ghetto perspective.  But, it turns out, she has been lying about herself.  Giovanna asks why she has been lying about her own life, and Vittoria responds, “Because the lie is more beautiful than the truth.”

The book and the movie, then, can be understood as working from an aesthetic perspective to ask questions about life and love and how to live.  Is a beautiful life a well-lived life?  And who is to determine what is beautiful?  Should we deceive ourselves (and those around us) to create the illusion of beauty?  How would we live a genuinely beautiful life?  These questions are especially relevant in a world that is, in so many respects, ugly.

I think that the film allowed me to more viscerally experience many aspects of the ugliness of Giovanna’s life than I could imagine them on the page.  Most immediately, the boorish behavior of men – the constant objectification of women – is somehow clearer when depicted on the screen than when seen on the page, at least for me.  Also, the particular aesthetic of both Naples's industrial core and its bourgeois high rises is hard to imagine from a different continent.

It is also clearer on the screen that Giovanna, who is deftly portrayed by a woman in what appears to be her first screen appearance, wants to be appreciated not as an object by others, but to have her subjectivity be beautiful.  She wants to be appreciated by the powerful men in a world where they value each other based on the beauty of their words.  She wants to be appreciated as one of them.

This does not mean that she is unaware of her physical beauty or the beauty of those around her.   She is afraid, after all, that her father no longer finds her beautiful at the beginning of the film.  It means, I think, that she comes to lose faith in physical beauty, works to be appreciated for her words, and is exploring, as adolescents do, what the meaning of the physical contact that proceeds from either to provide evidence of love really means.

The most immediate cause of her confusion about the meaning of love is not her own explorations but the dissolution of her parent’s marriage.  Vittoria encourages her to closely observe that marriage – and she can see it falling apart, perhaps before her parents can.  Vittoria then sees evidence of the fractures that Giovanna wouldn’t understand – and pushes the marriage over a cliff.  She notes that a family heirloom – an indication of love, has been given by Andre not to Giovanna, as Vittoria thought would happen, nor to Giovanna’s mother, Andre’s wife, but to another woman (The details of who this woman is are available in the post on the book, here I am going to avoid the complications of describing the manifold players).

Giovanna is crushed by her father’s infidelity and shuns him.  He, given a chance to be with her, complains that SHE is not empathic enough with HIM.  It is suddenly clear that this man she has always admired and modelled herself after is much less mature than he appears – perhaps less mature, and certainly less able to manage his emotions, than she is.  And, to stay true to the central theme of this post, his immaturity and weakness make him ugly.  In a word, his pursuit of beauty has made him ugly.

Vittoria acts as a helpful corrective here – she acknowledges that Andre’s raising Giovanna – his ability to have instilled in her an ability to appreciate beauty – is a testament to his own aesthetic value.  He must be beautiful to have brought such beauty into the world.  (Not an argument that the #METOO movement – in terms, for instance, of the value of the aesthetic products of boors - puts much store in!).

Vittoria’s unexpected support of Andre comes at a moment in the film after Giovanna has demonstrated a fidelity that Vittoria predicted she would not able to manage, and I think Giovanna also surprised herself at having done this, and she was a little undone at having done this.  And this is the turning point in the series, one that is predicted in the opening sequence that takes place before the opening credits.  In that scene, Giovanna swims to the bottom of the sea, searching for the bracelet.  She finds it after much searching, but then she leaves it behind as she swims back to the surface.

The bracelet signifies, among other things, the false loves that we seek out, the false loves that express, in a word, the lying life of adults.  The bracelet was originally stolen from Vittoria’s lover’s mother-in-law to be given to Vittoria – a testament to her lover's extramarital love for her.  It made him feel good to show off his admiration for Vittoria, even though it caused pain for his wife and children.  And Vittoria’s lie is that his love for her was true love – a love that she has remained faithful to, despite her lover’s death.  A beautiful lie, but a lie.

The question that we are left with at the end of the film (and the book) is whether Giovanna can construct a beautiful life not on a lie, but on some other foundation.  In order to do this, she must become an adult, and she concretely arranges to do this in a way that will be painful, brief, and weirdly reparative.

In her exploration of her attractiveness to men, she flirted with and then avoided a repulsive but insistent man whom she cruelly ridiculed for a physical feature – and she purposely repaired that rupture in the relationship with him when she used him to cross over into becoming an adult.  This interaction was clearly not an act of love in the conventional sense, but at its heart there was affection and concern – something that Giovanna expressed throughout her two-year journey of questioning the lives of adults.

 The beautiful life that Giovanna would pursue would, then, include genuine interactions, but these would be founded in the kind of brutal honesty that Vittoria demonstrated when she came clean about lying.  What form might this take?

We get snapshots of this.  Her father’s communistic and leftist views are exposed as hypocritical by his bourgeois striving.  The glowing, deeply spiritual character’s Christian values are exposed as hypocritical by the looseness of his sexual mores.  Giovanna demonstrates Communist and Christian values while staying appropriately critical of both institutions.

At the end of the book and film, Giovanna leaves on a trip, perhaps to a new life, with Ida, the younger sister of her close friend – a writer.  I speculated before that this might be Ferrante. Giovanna has been appreciating her writing, she loves it, and this friend has been writing about a beautiful world.  Giovanna has appreciated her ability to articulate beauty, even while they are both struggling to survive the deceit of the adults they have relied on.

Lies are, I think, essential to human life.  We lie first and foremost to ourselves.  We do this because we live in a harsh world.  Telling ourselves little falsehoods, mirrored perhaps on the loving falsehoods that our parents tell us, help us navigate the world.  Giovanna's father's lie that she was beautiful - and his lie that she is ugly - are the wellsprings of the tension in this film.  The actress playing Giovanna vacillates smoothly between moments of physical and spiritual beauty and ugliness.  The truth is that we are constantly moving along a variety of spectra - we are neither this nor that.  Any attempt to pin us down, to encircle us, the way a bracelet encircles the wrist, through a precise representation is a lie, because it is a static description of a dynamic being that, at best, captures a facet of who it is that we are.

Recently, in writing about the White Lotus, I commented on the psychology of the lies of omission – the things that we don’t tell people because they might hurt them.  The lies that are told here – many of them are lies of omission, but many of them are lies of creation; creating or implying beauty where there is none - do not, in fact, create beauty.  I think that Giovanna’s lie to the repulsive man is a lie to create a false but healing moment.  She has learned how to lie – and to do that charitably, but I hope that she will be using lies as infrequently as possible – working instead to be that rare thing, an adult who can be reasonably truthful and beautiful.

In the spirit of not lying, I have to admit to unsettled feelings about the depictions of nudity in this film.  At the beginning and end Giovanna is depicted in the nude.  It would be a lie to say that 16 year olds don’t have sex and aren’t sexual.  And I think my interest in response to these images may be part of what is driving my discomfort.  I don’t know how old the actress is.  But I am concerned that a movie that is championing female sexuality and power as up to the task of fighting with masculinity shouldn’t have to pander to the male gaze quite so frankly.  On the other hand, perhaps my discomfort is the director's intentional use of my own male gaze to help me realize that I am not so different from the men depicted in this movie. 

 

    

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The White Lotus Season 2: Relationships and Lies of Omission

 

White Lotus, HBO, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lying, Lies of Omission

The Reluctant Wife had watched the first season of White Lotus without me.  I was appreciative of that.  From what I had heard, there were no likeable characters, it was a series about rich people with nothing better to do with their money than to spend it on being pampered, and I, frankly, was not interested in it.  Don’t we live in a world where this is the last thing that we need to be ogling?

Of course, a part of me thought – but wait, what if this series is asking us to take a good look at ourselves and see if we have met the enemy and they are us?  Could it be that rather than a vehicle for envy, which I assumed it would be, it might be a fun house mirror that would expose us to ourselves.  But that part of me was actually pretty quiet.  I mostly thought this was about the 1%, and I have no fascination, at this moment, about knowing more about those who are privileged and know not what to do with themselves.

Then she started watching season 2 and, tired one night, I sat through one of the first episodes.  Apparently the first season is set at a White Lotus resort in Hawaii, and this second season is set in a White Lotus resort in Sicily.  There was something about the vibe of the place that was intriguing – that the 1% inhabit resorts that are cheek by jowl with the world that the rest of us inhabit – and the beach resort did not feel that much different from some of the nicer hotels that we have stayed in…

So, we went back and watched the first episode, and I discovered that each of the seasons have been told in flashback.  The end of the week in paradise (in both seasons) is shown first, and in each, a woman discovers a body of one the hotel guests floating in the water, but we are not told who it is and we rewind to the beginning of the week.  The whodunit is really a who is it that gets killed, and I was hooked.  I wanted to know which of these despicable characters was going to achieve their just reward by the end of the week.

The characters, though played by familiar and sometimes beloved actors, were, indeed, not likeable.  The central four characters are two couples – the classic American Quarterback type, Cameron (Theo James) and his blond and attractive wife, Daphne (Meghann Fahy).  He is a graduate of Yale and married and had kids while becoming a very successful (and rich) money manager, though it also seems that he has come from money and has never wanted for anything.  He is getting together (in the adjoining suite) with his college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe), who is of indeterminant Asian descent.  Cameron “affectionately” bullied Ethan in college and, now that his roommate has successfully sold his tech startup and is fabulously wealthy, he has arranged for this get together.  Ethan brings his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), a straitlaced lawyer who self righteously sues men who violate women’s right to a safe work place.

Meanwhile, in the next set of rooms, we have three generations of men – grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and twenty-something-year-old son Albie (Adam DiMarco)– vacationing in Sicily to find their roots.  The grandfather left Sicily as a very young child and wants to take everyone back now that the family has made good and meet relatives he assumes to be living in the little town his family came from, but who knows?

And just down the hall are the only members of the first-year cohort who have come back to a White Lotus, the incredibly rich and incredibly narcissistic and empty woman Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) who found her husband, Greg (Jon Gries) in that other White Lotus.  He has insisted that they come on vacation together again.  She brings her “assistant” Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) with her, a young, clueless girl who is pretty fed up with assisting generally meaning helping Tanya pull herself back together after a crying jag started because she has been slighted by someone in yet another way.  Portia is also an unwanted interference in Tanya's husband's eyes, so she is supposed to just stay in her room - which she does not do. We discover pretty quickly that Tanya’s husband is as tired of his wife as the assistant is, and he jets off to a “business” meeting that is actually some kind of rendezvous with a lover.

This mess is overseen by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) the white gloves manager/ matron/ concierge/ front desk person overseeing the White Lotus, who is constantly fighting with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) the local sex worker providing services to multiple guests and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), Lucia’s friend, a singer who enjoys being party to some of Lucia’s sex work.

While I thought this series was going to be a whodunit or perhaps primarily about sex (and it is both of those), I think it is mostly about lies and lying.  We are introduced to the couples at the center when they have breakfast together and are getting reacquainted/acquainted with each other.  Cameron and Daphne are pretending to be deeply and comfortably in love with each other, but it is apparent very quickly they are not particularly committed to or knowledgeable about much of anything and it is hard to take them seriously as people.  Ethan, who is a bit remote, and Harper, by contrast, are dialed into various causes and concerns, they seem genuinely invested in a better and more just world and – here is the tell – they never lie to each other.

Even though Ethan and especially Harper are no fun and they are altogether too earnest and judgmental, I am immediately in their camp.  They are, it seems - and certainly by contrast with Cameron and Daphne, real.  And they are struggling with how to manage the changes that are occurring in their world when they, unlike Cameron and Daphne who have always been obscenely rich, are suddenly discovering themselves to be one percenters.  Hmm…  might they have what it takes to make the transition without selling out?  Could this be a hiding place for good solid American middle-class values in a false and insipid world?  For just a moment, we hope so.

There are no such hopes for our three gentlemen of Sicilian descent.  Bert’s wife has died, Dominic’s wife and daughter have refused to come on this vacation because Dominic is such a cad, and Albie, the innocent son, could help his mother and father reconcile, but knows too much about his father’s infidelities to help them do that because he would be deceiving his Mom if he touted his father.  And this is before we discover that Dominic has hired Lucia to service him on this vacation.  Bert tries to warn Dominic that he is playing with fire to be playing with Lucia right under Albie's nose, but Dominic counters that he learned from Bert to be a two timer – he grew up with it and the pain it caused his mother, while Bert refuses to imagine that his wife knew anything about his affairs and insists that she loved him.

In this group, we are introduced to the lies of omission.  The form of the lie is: I will not tell this information because it would only hurt you.  It is in your best interest for me to lie to you.  Being honest with you would only bring you pain, so why do that?  Of course, this lie is also tremendously self-serving, and contains within it a lie.  If I told you what would hurt you, I would be found out not to be wonderful, and you would insist that I change my behavior, and I don’t want to do that.  So this is a lie both to the other person, but also to and on behalf of the person telling the lie - and the wonderful irony is that the liar is NOT lying - he is not saying anything at all. 

This kind of lie has been showing up in my clinical practice all of a sudden.  I won’t tell him or her this or that because it would hurt them.  Sometimes the person is struggling to tell the truth – they are being forced to do that so that they can move on with their life – and sometimes when they do that the feared outcome does not happen.  The other person does not fall apart.  Not infrequently, the other person realizes there is a problem and pledges to work with the former liar to work on that shared difficulty.  They say, in effect, thank you for broaching that subject.  I, too, have been afraid to do that because it would be disruptive to face and address this central difficulty in our relationship, but if you are going to put the cards on the table, so will I, and we can now play a productive game.

While I wanted this kind of “healthy” outcome to occur, I was not convinced it would.  Where is the drama in that?

Lies of omission are not the only kind of lie.  There are many different kinds of lies – and we lie all the time – first and foremost to ourselves (this is the center of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – we keep things from ourselves – we defend against thoughts all the time), but we also lie to those around us, and especially those who are closest to us. 

Tanya is consistently lied to by those around her.  They don’t just omit things, they make things up.  Partly they do this because she is so fragile that they have to in order to keep her from falling apart, but partly they do this because she is so needy and clueless that she is drawn into the lies that others tell her, pretending that she has protected herself against her gullibility, but actually being used by others more and more egregiously.

The pleasure in Tanya's subplot comes from the ways in which Tanya, with Portia’s help, finally begins to see what is being done to her and, in a kind of dimwitted but bullheaded self-protective set of acts, outwits those who would take advantage of her.

Valentina, the front desk matron, who is trying to both cater to these various entitled people and ride herd on them, is ultimately a victim of the kind of lying that Freud warned us about – self-deception.  She is uncomfortable with her sexuality – something that stands out as a kind of naivete that is possible in a repressive, Catholic community, even in someone who is servicing individuals whose sexual more’s could not be more liberal and loose.  It is Mia, Lucia’s friend, who sees through Valentina’s horrible conflict and helps her feel safe enough to grow into herself.  Mia is not without cunning in doing this.  It is good for Valentina, yes, but it also helps her cement employment at the White Lotus.  This kind of open lie – Valentina is personally naïve but aware of what people want from her – seems to be the least concerning of the lies that are told.

It is the lies in the two couples that are most alarming.   It does not take long for Harper to suss out that Cameron and Daphne’s loving relationship is a sham, especially when Daphne kidnaps Harper, taking her to another city without telling her that she intends for them both to spend the night there.  This leaves the boys, Cameron and Ethan, on their own.  Daphne is punishing Cameron for former misdeeds by withdrawing from him – and she knows he is too immature to manage himself without her.  True to form, he enlists Ethan in escapades to manage his insecurities that sicken Ethan, but these escapades take place in Ethan and Harper’s room and when Harper returns, she thinks that Ethan is lying to her when he maintains that he did not engage in adulterous behavior.

And here is the turning point for the lies.  Harper knows that Ethan does not lie.  He is rigid about that – it is written into his character that he will not.  So how could he lie about this?  Well, the problem is that Ethan, who would never deliberately deceive Harper by telling a lie of commission, engages in lies of omission all the time.  Centrally, he has not directly told Harper that he is no longer attracted to her.  He has not acknowledged that there is an important deadness at the center of their marriage. 

As I alluded to earlier, this would be a moment that could go in very positive directions.  Ethan could confess, and they could work on this together and they could ride out of Dodge (or the White Lotus) on the moral high road, having the marriage that they want to have and that Cameron and Daphne could never dream of having.  Without spoiling more than I already have, this doesn’t happen.  Instead, Ethan’s lying is used by Harper as an excuse to engage in lies of her own, and this is what reignites the passion in their relationship.

I think that the lie that is being told by the writer here is that not knowing the other – being lied to by your partner – is what will maintain the relationship.  I get this.  Some mystery is required to keep a relationship going.  But it is my solidly middle-class belief that we are so vastly different from every other human, even those that we choose to spend the rest of our lives with, that there are always mysterious elements to be plumbed.  We don’t need to manufacture them, they exist, and our efforts to acknowledge them and work them out lead to moments of connection, but also moments of disconnection, and these bring us back to the table to understand the mysterious gulf between us again and again and again. 

I am beginning to think that the writer and I both agree that love is, at heart, driven by anxiety.  It is mysterious that someone else could love us.  We fear that, if they truly knew us, they would not love us.  For the writer, this is an invitation to deceive the other, so that they will find us desirable.  We are something that our lover cannot own, or we are desirable to someone else and therefore we are desirable to our lover.

Ironically, the writer includes a much more hopeful – or pedestrian version – of love in the resolution of the family men drama.  Albie, the naïve son, falls for Tanya’s assistant Portia, but Portia is drawn away, in a parallel fashion to Harper, to a bright and shiny object.  Albie finds solace in Lucia, who, as he says, plays him.  His father indulges Albie in a lesson about being played, Albie thanks his father by working to patch things up with his mother, and Albie and Portia are able to have a rom-com moment.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to spoil things further, but I did.  I wanted to make the point that if the writer wants to hang onto us, the audience, he has to throw us some slop.  There has to be the hope that, even amidst all this wealth and our own attraction to bright and shiny objects, we also can discover that having a direct and honest relationship contains within it ample rewards. 

I think that the complications must be soothing to those who don’t believe it is possible to come clean.  There is an alternate way to stay attached.  It is a dangerous and volatile way, but attachment through deception is possible.  On some level – thank God for the ability to have a stable relationship based on deception, for we can never be truly honest with ourselves, much less with others.  At the same time, though, I think we are likely to have a better relationship when we are striving to minimize deception even if we can't eliminate it.  

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White Noise: A Film About Its Time, and Our Own

 White Noise, Movie, Psychoanalysis, Themes of Death, Psychology of White Noise, Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don DeLillo movie

I had some of the best dreams I have had in some time last night.  They were stimulated by watching White Noise and then, in a weird double header, tuning into a football game where a player had nearly died and there was confusion about how to proceed with the game and the telecasters were flummoxed enough about dealing with the situation that I saw more dead air than I have seen on network television perhaps ever.

White Noise is a movie based on a novel that lives up to its title.  I haven’t read this Don Delillo novel, though I have read others by him.  His novels are supposedly impossible to turn into movies, but this was a credible attempt.  The Reluctant Stepdaughter had seen it with some friends over the weekend and she offered to rewatch it with me.  I gladly took her up on her offer – we have long had fruitful conversations about movies.  Had I turned off the TV immediately, I’m sure we would have had such a conversation, but just checking on the game turned into a weird kind of vigil – and presented its own white noise to cover what we might have thought about the film.  Interestingly, the reluctant stepdaughter, not a big fan of watching sports, was as drawn into the drama of the injury as I was.

The white noise in the film are thousands of loose ends that are not so much woven together as piled on top of each other so that it is hard to detect the important narrative threads – or more precisely to distinguish how they are related – they really feel, at times, to be just a pile of stuff and we seem to be careening from one unrelated thing to another.  I suppose the central theme is the fear of death.  This theme permeates each of the others.  So, the study of Hitler – and the German fascination with him is explicitly compared to the American (and especially White American) fascination with Elvis is couched within the idea of a transcendent hero that allows us to imagine ourselves out of our limited lives – which are perhaps a track leading inevitably towards death, but, through identification with the hero, to transcend our limits.  The parallels between the men are elaborated in a dizzyingly spectacular dual lecture by professor Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), founder of the Hitler Studies program at the fictional College on the Hill and professor Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), who wants to found a similar Elvis Presley program at the college.

Jack’s fourth wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their four kids - the eldest son from his first marriage, the older daughter from Babette’s earlier marriage, the younger daughter from Jack’s second or third marriage, and the youngest son, whom they bore together - have chaotic scene after chaotic scene in which they talk over and around and through each other and live up to the idea stated in the film that the family is the greatest source of misinformation – though there is also important information shared here.  The family sharing of information is white noise in and of itself, and it mirrors the white noise of the television saturated world.

Babette is addicted to an experimental drug, Dylar, that (spoiler alert if I haven’t ruined the movie already) is intended to help manage the fear of death and has the side effect of ruining her short term memory.  Meanwhile, a railroad crash, oddly foretold by Murray Siskind’s reel of movie footage of burning cars, which he characterizes as the loveliness of American filmmaking, unleashes a toxic cloud of waste over the small college town and everyone has to evacuate – which leads to gridlock and then to groups of people staying in shelters that maybe evoke Hitler’s concentration camps?  But maybe not.  In any case, Jack and Babette’s son comes into his own there as the authority on this cloud of death and draws a coterie of admirers to his impromptu lecture, emulating his father with whom he is locked in a fierce Oedipal struggle.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned the absurd conversations between professors that are strangely quite accurate to living in the academy and that mirror the babble of the interactions of the kids in the family.  There is noise, noise, noise all over the place.  And this might distract us from the central theme of managing the fear of death if it weren’t also an echo chamber for that theme – and if part of the noise – part of the confusion – isn’t Dylar and the lengths that Babette goes to in order to obtain it, and the rage this inspires in Jack, causing him to shift from being an observer of death – a dier – to a killer – one who has power over death.

Did I mention that this is set in 1985 and much of it takes place in an A & P store – the old Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, one of the first supermarkets and one that the Reluctant Stepdaughter has never heard of because it went belly up in the 1980s, before she was born, but it was a purveyor of everything inorganic (just like our current megachains) – Pringles, Doritos, and Tide are all prominently featured brand items – as well as the old block lettered generic brands of staple items – and we are reminded that consumption is also a means of distracting us from death and from the fact that those around us whom we love will die (all the while voraciously eating – literally consuming the planet…).

If you have stayed on top of this wave of noise, I think there are some themes that emerge for me out of the soup.  If the book is a postmodern novel – meaning, for a moment, one in which it is the readers responsibility to make meaning of it – it is not the author’s intent THAT is the central focus but the reader’s or viewer’s experience – there is much to be made of this postmodern film that has all the trappings of a Hollywood production.

First of all, it is prescient.  Written long before COVID, it speaks to many different aspects of the pandemic including, centrally, the fear of death that evoked in all of us.  It also presciently speaks to the opioid epidemic – and to the crack/cocaine epidemic before that – and may be based on the Milltown/valium epidemic of the sixties.  It touches on racial inequality in ironic ways – the Black professor of Elvis Studies.  It also speaks to the climate crisis and our privileging of consumption above all else – our attachment to creature comforts even if it kills us.  But mostly it speaks to our adoration of anti-heroes.  People who lie to us telling us what we want to hear – whether the lie is that we are a great nation or that we are loved by them when they croon. 

The complicated thing about these themes, and the other themes that are layered in this mess, is that they are all interrelated.  It is essentially impossible to talk about one of them without having the others be present, and that sounds like noise – white noise, which is innocuous, and White noise, which is the screeching of tremendously privileged individuals who are, despite their privilege, deeply dissatisfied with life and, apparently, the environment which is supporting them in the style to which they have become accustomed.  How can we gain so much pleasure from a life that, cruelly, will be snatched away from us, and does this cause us to be, rather than reverential and grateful about its brief but glorious moment, destructively angry, striking out against this glorious creation that we are so attached to that we have no ability to treasure it and see it as a joy to be passed on to others?

One of the remarkable things about the film is that it is depicting all of this noise in 1985, when there were no smart phones, no internet to speak of, no 24 hour news cycle, but even then there was a constant flood of information coming at us.  It was also a time when there was not as much wealth.  Even the cars are embarrassingly clunky, not sleek modern mobiles.  We live with much more effective and efficient machines and brands and advertising, but wow, all of that was in place in 1985 and it was all so glaringly obvious and obnoxious.  Now we are more refined in our tastes, more health conscious, our color palette is more subtle and organic, and this actually makes our world more sinister than the very dangerous one being depicted in the film.  We can’t see as clearly how much it is that the artificial world we have visited upon the earth is not, essentially, of the earth, but that it is foreign, ugly and unwanted.  We have figured out how to integrate more and more alien material more and more seamlessly into the problematic container that we can see more clearly perhaps, only in the rear-view mirror.

So this film, and the book apparently as well, does not end in the traditional sense.  It moves into an allegorical mode.  Since the ending of the film is a certain kind of death, it is interesting to think about the ways in which death, present throughout the film, is both the central anxiety of Jack, but also, strangely, does not motivate him.  He becomes more calm and distracted when the situation is urgent and he might actually die.  Instead of being activated, he seems strangely oblivious to the threats that are around him throughout the film – most notably the threat of the noxious cloud.  He is afraid of death in the abstract, but not in the concrete. 

The football game was the opposite of the film.  It was an instance where a player died on the field.  He was quickly attended to and his heart started beating again after CPR, but the players on the field, who have witnessed many players being hurt, were exposed to a whole new level of concern.  As one of the commentators finally said, football players could die any time they take the field.  This is a bit hyperbolic, but the football players, unlike Jack, are generally focused on winning the game, not the risk of death.  Similarly, the fans are there to watch a spectacle, to root for the home team and to be entertained.  Suddenly we become aware of how precious life is - and, if we are football commentators, used to discussing the action of the game, we become tongue tied and at a loss.  We don't know how to talk about death.  

In the immediate aftermath of the game, there was an outpouring of support for the player.  His charity, which buys toys for kids for Christmas in his home town, had previously netted something like $5,0000.  During the first hour of the broadcast, more than $700,000 in donations came in.  It is now a few days later and millions have poured in. 

One of my friends, who is a physician at the local hospital where the player was taken, noting the news crews and fans holding a vigil outside in the cold, couldn’t help but notice that the hospital was full of other people who were struggling with life and death issues, but this was not newsworthy.  My own thought was that things like the war in the Ukraine, where hundreds of people are dying daily, do not evoke the same level of sympathy, especially as the war drags on.  It is Zelensky’s full time job to keep us cognizant of what is going on there.  Perhaps they should hold an NFL game in Kyiv?

White noise – the kind that emanates out of our TV sets, our phones, and our internet screen, indeed this very post – serves multiple purposes.  On the one hand, it keeps us informed, but one of the most important purposes is to keep us focused on what needs to be done to make the world a better place which distracts us from an anxiety that might otherwise slow us down - we could die at any moment and we certainly will die sometime.  Ironically, Dylar, the medication in the film that has all kinds of side effects but not the desired effect, but that is still deeply desired, blunts feelings and awareness.  If only we didn't care so much about life, we wouldn't be anxious about losing it. 

As I mentioned, this movie evoked an unsettling but vivid dream for me – I was teaching a class and didn’t know what the subject was.  I didn’t know the names of any of the students, and it was supposed to be a discussion course (I thought, without really knowing what it was about or what the form was).  At some point the students started to work on a project that was interesting – apparently in part because I was not leading them.  I became fascinated by what they were doing.

A new semester is about to start.  I don’t know the students’ names or anything about them.  The syllabi and the computer support is all set up, but I haven’t really reviewed and prepared to get going.  The dream motivated me to come up with an exercise for the first day that hopefully will be fun.  The students in the film were really wallpaper – Jack observed them coming onto campus the first day and noted that Babette had missed her chance to see this event again, which she was upset by.  When there was a lecture, the students were passively absorbing what the professors were lecturing about.  I think the dream and my subsequent planning were a reaction to the distracted quality of Jack (and the others) in the film.  I am feeling distracted, living in a post COVID isolation world.  We’ll see if I can re-engage or whether I, like Jack and Babette at the end of this film, will just sort of drift away, disconnected from the world and all of the useless information that emerges from it.

Postscript: I used the exercise that I came up with today to engage students in talking about their interests in the subject matter of the class as an exercise on the first day.  I passed out cards and had them write three things that drew them to the class, collected the cards, shuffled them and returned them to the students.  Each student then offered something from the random card they received (and said what animal they would like to be reincarnated as), and we looked at how the responses clustered.  I think we are well begun...

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