In “White Noise” the director Noah Baumbach surprises with a large production that sometimes reminds of disaster movies, and presents an effective description of America as a sick society collapsing under excessive consumption
related topics
“White Noise”, Noah Baumbach’s new film (“Marriage Story”) that premiered this weekend on Netflix, begins with a lecture in the cinema. Against a montage scene of crashing and exploding cars, an American mass culture lecturer at a small college explains to a class of male and female students that scenes of car crashes represent the essence of the American spirit. These, according to him, are scenes of freedom, liberation and freedom, not of destruction and death. These, in his opinion, are cinematic representations of moments that celebrate life. Exactly half an hour later such an explosion of vehicles – when a fuel tanker collides with a freight train loaded with toxic substances and explodes in a photogenic and festive (and ironic) fireball – will change the course of the plot of the film and the characters.
Baumbach is associated with small and chamber family dramas, about families in moments of disintegration. From the divorcing parents in “Living Between the Lines” to the divorcing parents in “Marriage Story”, from Ben Stiller in distress in “Greenberg” to Ben Stiller in distress in “Meyrovitch Stories”. Therefore, on the face of it, the choice of one of the talented and polished directors and screenwriters currently working on the outskirts of Hollywood to adapt Don DeLillo’s 1985 book to the cinema seems unusual: suddenly a period film, set in the 1980s, which requires a relatively large production, which moves away from the prickly realism, the Aleni Vedic for episodes , of his previous films, and chooses symbolic representations over decisive directness. But at its heart, “White Noise” is exactly the same typical Bambuchi film: this time it is not a family that is falling apart, but a family that has been put together by spouses and their children from their four previous marriages, and even though the current situations seem to be taken from a disaster movie, the reality remains absurd, ironic, that finds humor in bitter moments.
As always with Baumbach, the protagonists are an intellectual couple, who live the life of the spirit and mind, and not a life of externality and aesthetics. After all, this is the eighties. Adam Driver plays a college professor, head of the Hitler studies department, who lives with his wife (Greta Gerwig) in a sleepy town with their four children. Just before the truck collides with the train, he conducts an intellectual duel with his colleague from the opening of the film, in which they present to each other how similar the life stories of Elvis and Hitler were. In the deconstruction that “white noise” does to American culture, admiration and tyranny are both ours, and mass culture is an introduction to fascism.
At the heart of the film – just like the book – is a catastrophic event, when a toxic cloud from the same train accident disperses in the air and requires the evacuation of the residents of the university town. DeLillo’s symbolic story from 37 years ago receives a contemporary satirical context in the hands of Baumbach when it seems that everything that is happening in this medical emergency is remarkably similar to what we heard from the authorities in the first days of the corona epidemic: partial information, contradictory instructions, an attempt to calm and convey control, and on the other hand panic-inducing chaos. Should we evacuate or stay at home? To wear masks or not? Run away with everyone or go against the flow? The literary parable of America living according to the abyss of an artificial, postmodern life, of consumer products and media images, becomes in the film a situation that feels close, familiar and disturbing, and above all not speculative at all.
But “white noise” is not a social gimmick of post-pandemic days. It is a description of an America suffering from a social disease, of a society collapsing under over-consumerism, which succumbs to brands and capitalism that calms anxiety like a drug. The most grandiose image in the film is of a huge supermarket, which is presented in the film as a kind of transit station between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the place where America comes to recover from its fear of death, a place always lit, with infinite abundance, where everything is available and inviting. The supermarket and the world of consumption are an image of brain death, of a life without values - neither moral values nor nutritional values. And that’s where the film’s heroes gather for its phenomenal closing credits scene, which turns “White Noise” into a disco party. Baumbach’s film lacks the polish, precision and sharpness of his previous films, and it has perfect moments alongside moments where the plot turns helplessly around itself. But this final scene is worth it all – it makes the absurd make sense, and an insane reality normal.