Streaming Review: White Noise
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Streaming Review: White Noise
28 January 2023
Filmmaker Noah Baumbach creates an absurd and post-modern version of the 1985 text ‘White Noise’ by Don DeLillo in the Netflix film of the same name, highlighting that fear of death and the meaning of life crosses every generation. Photo: Wilson Webb/Netflix.
Many don’t like White Noise. The latest film, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, has polarised audiences who don’t know what to make of its absurdity and different tones. The one part that has garnered universal praise is a fun dance sequence in a supermarket at the film’s closing credits. The main characters grasp at products as they move towards the checkouts. The sequence functions as an image of a materialist life, soon to end, and reflects the questions at the heart of White Noise; how do we live when we know our lives will end? What do we believe about death if we believe nothing at all?
Adam Driver (centre) leads the cast of White Noise as the dysfunctional Jack Babney, a father bent on protecting his blended family at all costs in the wake of global catastrophe alongside his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig). Photo: Netflix.
Baumbach has adapted White Noise from Don Delillo’s 1985 novel of the same title. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is an academic living with his blended family in Ohio in the 1980s, teaching at a nearby university. The Gladneys are a family defined by wants and consumption, sharing a rambling suburban house filled with supermarket food, toys and consumer goods.
After finding some mysterious pills in the house, Jack fears that his wife Babette, played by writer/director Gretta Gerwig, has developed a dependency on medication. Their lives are further disrupted when a nearby chemical disaster creates a poisonous cloud of black smoke that drives the entire town from their homes. Jack’s suspicions about his wife’s problems are brought to the fore as the family deals with the existential threat in the skies above, and the truth about the mysterious pills is revealed.
Baumbach is a filmmaker often associated with intellectual dramas reminiscent of American New Wave cinema in the 1970s. Baumbach makes movies about complicated couples and families, often artists living in New York City, but White Noise functions like a pastiche of 1980s genre films, changing tone from act to act as the characters work through their feelings. Jack seems incapable of assessing the risk around him, unwilling to admit that he might one day die, even as the dark threat moves over him. Babette is afraid of death, not simply due to the disaster they are striving to escape but the thought of her own mortality. The characters reflect the angst of the consumer class, unable to answer existential questions of life and death in their secular world.
Taking us back to the retro fun of the 1980s, the Gladney family blends four children across Jack and Babbette’s cumulative seven marriages, bringing a sense of chaos to their need for order. (From left) Heinrich (Sam Nivola), Wilder (Henry/Dean Moore), Denise (Raffey Cassidy), and Steffie (May Nivola) Photo: Netflix.
Jack and Babette come together to confront the truth of the mysterious pills. The confrontation results in an emergency trip to a dilapidated Catholic hospital where the injured are wheeled away in shopping trolleys beneath icons of the cross. A nun comes to attend them, and Babette asks, “What does the church say about heaven these days? Is death the end?’ The nun’s sceptical faith is not what Jack and Babette are expecting, and she carries the same doubts as them. The nun chooses to believe, not for answers about death, but to bring a purpose to her life; her service to others.
Baumbach’s film doesn’t provide easy answers, but it asks the right questions without judgment and treats its characters with empathy. Many don’t like White Noise’s absurdity. Many don’t like the thought of death for the same reason. While White Noise may be an atypical film, it can also be wildly entertaining with its broad performances, its creeping sense of dread, a farcical car chase, and a new track by LCD Soundsystem.
In the supermarket of life, we’re all on the way to the checkouts. What we believe about death is important, but only in as much as it shapes how we live our lives, and how we connect with others.
White Noise is rated M for mature themes, violence and coarse language. Streaming now on Netflix.
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