Let’s be brutally frank — we’re all going to die. There’s a sense of thanatophobia in all of us, and for some, it’s an extreme fear that is capable of governing our lives. In its most morbid and macabre form, life is essentially an unrelenting, one-way ticket to a burial, six feet under in a wooden box, or being run through a scorching-hot furnace, where after Salt Bae will shamelessly scatter your ashes on an unsuspecting customer’s gold-encrusted steak. Or, as William Faulkner wrote, “Most of life is just a preparation for getting ready to be dead for a very long period of time.”
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The ineluctability of death is, for the most part, pretty damn scary. So it comes as no surprise that we spend our entire lives consciously fending off the thought of our demise, to the extent that our own mortality is simply reduced to a possibility rather than an inevitability. It’s like that unpaid bill — stick that at the bottom of the pile, or better still, into a shredder and the issue is no longer there (until the bailiffs turn up at the door and repossess the TV). Out of sight, out of mind. Death is those bailiffs, the unwelcome visitor, which will one day turn up at our doorsteps and reclaim our lifelong debts. It’s predestined.
What Is White Noise About?
Netflix
Now that you’re panicking about your own expiration date, you’re in the mindset of White Noise’s protagonists Jack (J.A.K) Gladney and his wife Babette, who are in a perpetually irrational state of fear over their own and each-other’s deaths. Noah Baumbach’s new film, which is set to be released on Netflix on 30th December after opening the New York Film Festival, obsessively confronts the matter of meeting our maker.
The ever-inventive Baumbach relies on Don DeLillo’s ’80s novel of the same name, which tells the story of a mélange of weird and whacky characters, specifically the Gladney family. In typical Noah Baumbach fashion, the movie traverses an unconventional family dynamic, as seen in his scripts for The Squid and the Whale, Marriage Story, and The Meyerowitz Stories. Consisting of patriarch Jack Gladney (a physically transformed Adam Driver), a world-acclaimed professor of “Hitler Studies” at the College on the Hill, matriarch Babette (a funny, nonchalant Greta Gerwig), and their assortment of four children all, bar one, from previous marriages. The dark satire follows the story of the family and how they deal with a “Airborne Toxic Event,” while contending with issues around love, death, and misinformation.
Death and the Diversion of Consumerism
White Noise is very much a film split in two — the contrast between pre-“Airborne Toxic Event” and post is drastically different, and has a feel of almost an entirely different film. However, one of the predominant crossovers is the insatiable fixation on death; the inescapable prospect of it looms over Jack and Babette like a poisonous cloud… In an intimate scene where the couple lies face-to-face in bed, we learn of their anguish over their all-consuming fear of the other dying before them.
Babette’s oldest, Denise (Raffey Cassidy), along with an increasingly concerned Jack, is suspicious of Babette’s intake of an experimental pharmaceutical named “Dylar,” and its effect on Babette’s memory. As with anyone with a mild case of hypochondriases, the two quickly begin to link it to early onset-dementia. Meanwhile, the so-called “Airborne Toxic Event” has unknown side effects on everyone who breathes it in, though we never truly get to the bottom of what threat these noxious molecules pose. In many ways, the toxic event is just a stand-in for the realization of mortality itself, as Jack is told that, after being exposed to it, he’ll die someday. Jack faces his own battle with existentialism and his near head-on-collision with death.
Whether it be in the uniformity of Jess Gonchor’s fabulous supermarket set design, that appears as if it’s been collaboratively curated by the OCD minds of Andy Warhol, Wes Anderson, and Roy Lichtenstein, or Babette’s apparent addiction to the questionably counterfeit drug “Dylar,” Baumbach does a magnificent job at pointing out the utter profanity in the lengths people will go to not only circumvent processing thoughts of death but to avoid dying entirely. Through a pill shrouded in ambiguity (that we never really ascertain the reason for, other than it’s being trialed as a death-defying medicine by a psychotic scientist played by Lars Eidinger), White Noise speaks to the immortality of unbridled consumerism and the rationale consumers employ.
The Era of Misinformation
Although the film, based on a book written and set in the 1980s, wouldn’t have been able to forecast the future happenings of another “Airborne Toxic Event” in the shape of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Baumbach sensationally and satirically encapsulates the continuous stream of unratified misinformation that the world has been subject to as a result of media agenda, and unverified sources on social media. From the scaremongering of their precocious children who are persistent and wholehearted in their rhetoric that this event will have cataclysmic ramifications, and the anxiety-inducing updates on potential symptoms of being “infected” by the explosion’s toxins, to the unqualified “simuevac” employees who flagrantly dish out prognoses to desperately gullible people.
Perhaps the most eye-opening portrayal of the aforementioned is the links made to the gathering of mass crowds under Hitler’s regime, and the fact people are mere followers wanting to be a part of a whole, demonstrated in the collective frenzy that ensues after frantically being told to evacuate by those entrusted with key responsibilities, and because, well, everyone else is doing it. White Noise subtly mocks the credulous nature of today’s society, and the simultaneous acts of disregarding expert knowledge as hearsay, while unquestioningly accepting information from extremely dubious sources.
Ultimately the titular White Noise could refer to a variety of things — the constant noise of media, advertisements, and misinformation; the subconscious humming in the hearts of humans that reminds them of death; the inability to point out anything meaningful when everything is reduced to the same level of importance. For now, white noise refers to one of the year’s best movies.
