“I want to know how scared I should be,” says one of the children of Jack and Babette Gladney, played by Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, in the new teaser trailer for Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. The line doesn’t appear in the Don DeLillo novel that inspired the film, but perfectly captures the anxiety of the 1985 book, and of being alive today.
Unless we’ve cocooned ourselves from facts (and many have — kudos to them), we’re barraged by a constant hum of information that may be essential, or may just exist to make you worry: How much of a threat is COVID? Monkeypox? To your parents? Kids? What about recession? Inflation? Crime? That nuclear power plant in Ukraine? We won’t know what will finally get us, until it gets us. “Maybe when we die,” a talk show host says in DeLillo’s novel, “the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.”
The book was written when nuclear annihilation provided a constant background hum of fear. But isn’t that particular threat kind of worse now? I mean right now, this week? The cliche about the book being more relevant today than when it was written holds true. The airborne toxic event at the center of it might not draw a blink today.
“The supermarket shelves have been rearranged,” Gladney observes near the midpoint of the novel. “It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay on the faces of the older shoppers.” It’s an ominous sign in the book, but how quaint it would seem to today’s shoppers, after our dalliances with social distancing and bleached-down boxes and products doubling in price or just disappearing. “Milk is two dollars more now,” we tell ourselves in our best deadpan DeLillo. “This makes sense. Because gasoline — China.”
The effects of the airborne toxic event in White Noise are never totally clear: Is it really over? Or do we have long airborne toxic event? In the book, even when things are good, they’re bad, because as much as Jack and Babette love each other and their kids, and as happy as they are, there is always the question: “Who will die first?” Either Jack will outlive Babette, or Babette will outlive Jack. One will be lonely for the other, and the other will be dead. Even the happy ending doesn’t end happily.
White Noise might seem like a strange and very literary and abstract book to film now. Sure, there are little jokes from 1985 that may have seemed random then, and not so much now — Jack is a professor of Hitler Studies, for example, hopefully trying to prevent the next one. But he may just see Hitler as a good career move. “I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968,” Jack explains in the book. “It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler’s life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success.”
Jack’s livelihood is based on repackaging and disseminating dark information, perhaps to the benefit of no one but himself. A colleague praises his total ownership of Hitler as a field of study: “It’s what I want to do with Elvis.”
We try to escape the white noise, but can’t tell the white noise from what we urgently need to know. Did you think I was kidding when I said kudos to the people who can shield themselves from facts? You kind of need to block things, don’t you? The book and the movie make a mockery of our comforts — our Crown Vics or Country Squires or supermarkets. But we’re very small and they’re all we have. Oh, and of course each other. But who will die first?
Main image: Adam Driver as Jack Gladney in White Noise, written and directed by Noah Baumbach.
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