“White Noise” (2022)
Noah Baumbach and the spectre of death.
Noah Baumbach and the spectre of death.
Roughly twenty minutes into Noah Baumbach’s twelfth all time credited directorial film, “Jack Gladney” (Adam Driver), a professor of “Hitler Studies” and a “teacher of advanced Nazism at the college on the hill” arrives for a pre-arranged and somewhat choreographed verbal joust with fellow professor “Murray Siskind” (Don Cheadle), a professor of American Studies and particularly, the study of Elvis Presley. The topic for their verbal sparring in front of an enraptured college audience? The love that both Adolf Hitler and Elvis Presley had for their respective mothers. Beaten and taking his seat amongst the audience after taking a verbal beating he was arguably happy enough to lose, Siskind can only watch in wonder as Gladney, now theatrically, and with a growing audience in the palm of his hand, rises like a roaring phoenix bringing his audience now, his audience, to their feet in complete joyous appreciation. He then dons his tinted over-sized sunglasses, his academic cloak hanging loosely from his shoulders. He cuts a figure akin to Jim Jones of Jonestown infamy and yes, this is all as bizarre as it sounds.
Minutes later we are into the film’s second Act entitled “The Airborne Toxic Event”. Also known and repeatedly referred to as the “black billowing cloud”, life is all rather surreal and absurd as Jack Gladley, his neurotic wife “Babette Gladney” (Greta Gerwig) and their four incredibly expressive, alert and talented children from four different marriages, appear to simply carry on with a life of the white noise of aeroplanes flying low overhead, the wail of police sirens and the rest of their neighbours now fleeing from the very black billowing cloud they would in fact drive into not mere minutes later as the Gladney family now throw all their possessions into their station wagon and an enforced evacuation. With traffic grid-locked in all directions, biblical rain signifies the film’s shift now to “disaster movie mode” as the Gladney’s try in vain to outrun the catastrophic geological event slowly engulfing them. Finding shelter in a refugee camp with many thousands of others, it’s almost as though life and the very individualistic lives of the now refugees are carrying on as though they haven’t escaped a world ending catastrophe whilst Jack bumps into Murray, and his college professor friend hands him a gun.
“It was nine days before they told us we could go back home”.
Act 3 (entitled “Dylarama”) is another distinct act in this turgid play all of its own yet it’s also soaked through with the themes of the film that dominate this 136 minute film: mortality, existential dread, the countdown to death and the ever present overwhelming spectre of death. Over two hours of death via an almost evangelical beginning through a disaster movie and onward to the ennui of an existentialism I know well before well, back to death again! One of Jack’s earliest inner monologues posits the question “Maybe there’s no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands” before, eerily imitating the far, far superior musing on death that is the 2010 Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu directed Biutiful, “What if death is nothing but a sound?”.
Based upon the 1985 novel of the same name written by Don DeLillo, I saw flashes of Tarantino in Baumbach’s direction as well as seeing a film I would have loved to have seen Wes Anderson directing instead. There’s another spectre: Covid, a reactionary inspirational theme I’d join with last year’s Jordan Peele directed Nope and the unspecified early 1980’s town of “Blacksmith” had the distinct feel of the unreal façade of last year’s Don’t Worry Darling. Rolling cameras often frame a seemingly unreal and picture postcard America of the 1980’s, especially so the absurdist and surreal almost Andy Warhol inspired supermarket. It’s deliberate and a small highlight in an otherwise incredibly unlikeable film.
I really enjoyed Meyerowitz Stories in 2017 and two years later, Marriage Story broke my heart into tiny pieces. White Noise is an unlikeable dissection of the spectre of death and the worst film I’ve seen in a long time.
Thanks for reading. Just for larks as always, and always a human reaction rather than spoilers galore. My three most recently published film articles are linked below or there’s over 200 blog articles (with 400+ individual film reviews) within my archives from which to choose:
“No Country For Old Men” (2007)
My Coen Brothers Top Ten — Vol 4.medium.com
“Trainspotting” (1996)
“We called him Mother Superior on account of the length of his habit”.medium.com
“The Pale Blue Eye” (2022)
“The man you are looking for is a poet”.medium.com