Set in the American Midwest in 1985, much of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is dominated by an “Airborne Toxic Event” unleashed from a Spielbergian head-on collision between a freight train and truck. The infinite cargo tanks of the train concertina endlessly into one another, ignited by the truck’s inferno. The “black billowing cloud” that spews forth spreads existential dread through the population, wretched malignant tendrils obscuring the comforting light of capitalism’s lies. Lightning strikes reveal bruised purple innards, the corruption of Reaganomics rendered sentient like the Smog Monster Hedorah. This is Three Mile Island for the masses, the Union Carbide disaster in India brought home to America, Iran-Contra smothering Reagan’s second term.
The “Toxic Event” feels like a catastrophic accident but it’s a lot more fun to believe that it is the manifest destiny of Jack Gladley, a professor of Hitler Studies, to spread his fear of death to a larger audience so that he might have a tangible reason to face death rather than contend with the mundane spectacle of dying of natural causes. Where is the academic angst in that? Donning Nuremberg Trial style glasses, and an equally billowing Max Shreck cape, Jack summons the cloud into being by a bravura performance lecture to his students. At points he appears to be levitating above them in a post-modern delirium, sandwiched between the Sesame Street rainbow art on the walls of the lecture theatre, and the black and white footage of Hitler and the Nazis Baumbach punctuates the scene with.
Jack believes that once a plot is set in motion then it only ever moves “deathwards”, the “Toxic Event” now the driver of his own mortality. Adam Driver plays Jack like Woody Allen piloting a warrior’s body, his internal monologues delivered in an insecure stream of consciousness, constantly at war with himself and his place in the world. Is he a fraud like Konrad Kujau who forged the Hitler Diaries? Surely, he’s only one goosestep away from wearing an SS uniform. His fellow professors, safe in their inner circle, clap and fawn over their own genius but what use is studying Hitler and Elvis when you are caught up in a mass evacuation, complete with thudding helicopters, nameless men in hazmat suits, and cheek-to-jowl station wagons, jammed like sardine tins on the highways?
Equally afraid of dying is Jack’s fourth wife Babette, played by a strung-out Greta Gerwig. She is secretly addicted to a drug called Dylar, a quack medicine that supposedly eradicates the fear of death in the user’s mind. Ironically the more she uses it the more morbid and terrified of death Babette becomes. Perhaps it is the constant lies she must tell Jack and their blended family of children from previous marriages that turbo charge her morbid phobia? Only if Babette accepts that there is no cure for death, and only by accepting the reality of death, will she be able to live a fulfilled life. In fact, the children in White Noise are far more composed and together than their parents. Perhaps they are not burdened yet with the crushing inevitability of death, and once they are fully aware of their mortality, they will retreat into the same pseudo-academia as their parents to pretend they can explain life’s greatest mystery.
Frequently, the characters in White Noise return to the hyperreality of the supermarket, the hi-def colours of consumerism saturating their minds, “psychic data” flooding their brains with endorphins to simulate their final moments just before they die. In the final flash-mob dance sequence we know the academics can see through capitalism’s Day-Glo illusion. Their ‘insight’ strips the lane they occupy bare of its packaging They Live style, but they still take part in quasi-religious experience anyway. They are just as compelled to obey as anyone else. Jack believes that death is a series of sounds and the constant ‘beeping’ of the checkout scanners mark the end with a mundane certainty. What would those sounds be today? No doubt our Pavlovian responses to the bells and whistles that constantly chime from our social media accounts.
So, are we fulfilled with Baumbach’s 80-million-dollar attempt at taking a swing at DeLillo’s unfilmable novel? If death really is a series of sounds, then what could be more post-modern, more meta, than watching Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of White Noise for Netflix introduced by the ubiquitous, ‘Ta Dum” of the logo, directed in the style of Steven Spielberg, starring Kylo Ren from the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and then voting for whether we liked it or not? The Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld might enlighten us, “Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfilment.”