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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