Review: White Noise (2022)

A train carrying dangerous chemicals crashes in central Ohio, generating an “airborne toxic event.” Professors at elite liberal arts colleges increasingly spend their time lecturing on fascism and celebrity. People desperately seek pharmaceutical solutions to their fear of death, while elevating consumer culture as the peak of the American experience. These plot details and more from Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern novel, White Noise, sound increasingly relevant in our current cultural moment, which is why it’s such a shame that Noah Baumbach’s fairly literal-minded adaptation of the novel for Netflix is such a dud. It’s not that the film itself is awful—one can find moments and performances worthy of praise—but that it presents what seems to be a missed opportunity.

On the other hand, perhaps White Noise, one of the quintessential novels of American postmodern literature, was always unadaptable. DeLillo’s novel is told in the first-person by Jack Gladney (played in the film by Adam Driver) a middle-aged academic and founder of “Hitler studies” at College-on-the-Hill, a liberal arts university somewhere in the American midwest. The novel is full of observations and satirical vignettes about academia and the existential malaise of American life in the late-twentieth century, which move the reader back and forth between humour and horror. No matter how you slice it, White Noise was going to be a whiplash of a film that pushes beyond the typical genre structures and interrogates wide swathes of late-twentieth century American life.

However, the novel’s idiosyncratic and aloof style of irony, a hallmark of literary postmodernism, has thoroughly permeated cultural discourse in the time since. Capturing the impact of the novel on screen was going to take more than simple pastiche. Perhaps a documentary essay-film in the style of someone like Adam Curtis might have captured some of the friction that DeLillo sought to engender in his readers. Baumbach, himself a product of the very upper middle-class, irony-addled academic culture DeLillo satirizes (his brother teaches film studies at Columbia), was likely not the right director to tackle the adaptation, despite my having enjoyed his last few films a great deal. Nonetheless, he puts together a promising cast including Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, with smaller supporting turns from André Benjamin and Jodie Turner-Smith.

Baumbach mostly follows the plotting of the novel, altering some minor details and leaving a few significant scenes from the novel out, such as the photographing of “The Most Famous Barn in America,” one of the novel’s most poignant and serious interrogations of the role of art and media in contemporary culture. On the whole, White Noise provides a fairly faithful recreation of the structure and content of the novel, but misses some of the smaller details that made it such a landmark. The film, retaining the novel’s mid-80s setting, opens with professor Murray Siskind (Cheadle) lecturing on the invigorating and healthy role that car crashes play in American cinema. Against a backdrop supercut of Hollywood car crashes (how exactly he secured and edited such a thing on film in the mid-eighties remains one of the moments that takes myself, a real-life media scholar and academic, out of the film), Murray contends that American culture finds good-humour and catharsis in such depictions of cinematic violence, despite the blood and death they often entail.

At the start of the film, the campus is welcoming the arrival of a new cohort at College-on-the-Hill, set in the film explicitly in Ohio rather than the vague midwestern details of novel (while most of the filming occurred in and around the University of Akron, some of the film’s extras are indeed residents of East Palestine, Ohio where the real-life “toxic airborne event” recently occurred!). Jack Gladney narrates his pleasure with this annual ritual after which he introduces the viewers to his home and the blended family he and his fourth wife, Babette (Gerwig), share. These opening scenes of the chaotic family recall, in their style and framing, something like a good-natured riff on the family scenes from the beginning of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The orange glow of sunlight through a pharmacist’s pill bottle reflects off the eldest daughter’s face in a kind of ironic inversion of the Spielbergian awestruck shot. In its overlapping, cleverly constructed dialogue, adapting the voice of the novel, White Noise is surprisingly easy to follow. No Altman-esque overlapping dialogue here. Each character’s pronouncements are ladled out in literary exposition that is given plenty of attention.Which is perhaps appropriate, given the film is sharpest in its moments specifically satirizing the academic world. 

Jack has pioneered the field of Hitler studies, which in one sense is a humourous parody of the specific niches that academics have created for themselves. But when at one point he notes he needs to get to his lecture on “advanced facism,” the double-sided interpretation of liberal professors teaching facism isn’t lost on this viewer. The film also does a good job of conveying the self-aggrandizement and lionizing of so-called experts, particularly in a moment in which Jack and Murray perform a dual-lecture, weaving an exposition on Hitler and Elvis Presley together in a tour-de-force academic performance. It’s extra goofy that Jack, despite his area of study and planning for the hosting of an upcoming Hitler studies conference, doesn’t speak German, something that repeatedly comes up in the film.

The cinematic medium is especially drawn to action in a way a novel need not be. Thus, the film is quick to move us to the novel’s central crisis: “The Toxic Airborne Event.” Cinematically, this is rendered in full on action cinema-style, recalling Murray’s opening lecture. A truck carrying flammable material crashes into a train carrying dangerous chemicals, emitting massive fireballs of flaming gas. The residents of the town, including Jack, Babette and their family must evacuate College-on-the-Hill for nearby Iron City, and the film’s central section is focused on the disruption this causes to their lives, the uncertainty over the impact of the train crash and the chemicals dispersed, as well as the lack of media attention on the event. While these aspects of the film cannot be faulted for failing to follow through on the way reality has seemed to imitate fiction, in the book these scenes do more to link the larger confusion over evacuation processes with Jack and Babette’s increasing fear of death as they reach middle age.

The last section of the story follows Babette’s addition to a drug called Dylar, which eliminates fear of death in exchange for other side-effects, and Jack’s increasing anxiety over acquiring it for himself as well as confronting the pharmaceutical agent who is trading it to Babette in exchange for sexual favours. Jack is eventually driven to commit violence himself, tracking down and shooting the agent “Mr. Gray” (Lars Eidinger) before taking him to a hospital run by German nuns. After this, the film resolves with the characters mostly returning to their daily lives, having learned little about their own self-reflections, and culminating in a song-and-dance routine (not in the original novel) set in a supermarket to a song by LCD Soundsystem.

As you can see from my summary of the film’s plot and themes, it’s a bit haphazard. While many of the themes of the novel—fear of death, the role of violence and pharmacology in American life—survive the process of adaptation, they don’t have the same kind of impact that they have in DeLillo’s novel. Perhaps because of the casting, or Baumbach’s familiarity with the kinds of characters satirized within, the film lacks the bite and salience of the novel. Driver and Gerwig make Jack and Babette too likable, despite their idiocy. Instead of capitalizing on the enduring resonance of the events and themes of the novel, it attempts to recreate the novel and thereby drain it of urgency. If anything, the film by its ending seems to suggest that there is a kind of hope found in going on day to day for these characters, striving for a happy ending that one might easily read earnestly. It left me feeling dissatisfied and somewhat confused as to whether the filmmakers actually understood the novel they chose to adapt.

White Noise, as a novel, still has something to say to readers and audiences today; unfortunately, Baumbach’s film, despite Driver and Gerwig doing their best, doesn’t quite convince the audience that that is the case. I’m cautious about critiquing the film we don’t get rather than the one we do, but such is the danger one courts when attempting to adapt such a famous work of literature. Perhaps the enduring relevance of the novel’s themes and concerns is itself part of the lesson of postmodern art, and literature in particular. These works attempted to critique the grand narratives and theories of the modernist past by showing they have no power to solve our persistent problems. All that’s left is a pastiche of style and subject matter. Likewise, the film’s inability to do more than simply translate the outlines and structures of the novel on screen shows the kind of death of creativity and of those classic literary modes in our time. Either way, it’s hard for me not to see White Noise as a kind of failed, if noble, attempt at adapting a major work of literature.

4 out of 10

White Noise (2022, USA)

Directed by Noah Baumbach; Screenplay by Noah Baumbach based on the novel by Don DeLillo; starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Lars Eidinger, André Benjamin, Jodie Smith-Turner.

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