Better to Have a Constant Sense of Dread Than Be Dead (Or Is It?): Noah Baumbach Revives White Noise at a Moment We Need to be Reminded of Our Inherent Doom

A long-held fear is being dredged up in the artistic output of late. The one that Woody Allen made an entire career out of before everyone suddenly remembered his 1992 sexual abuse allegation. That fear, of course, is death. “The march toward nonexistence,” as Babette (Greta Gerwig) phrases it in Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, White Noise. It’s a “march” we’re all told we must face, sooner or later. No matter how many advancements in medical care and plastic surgery, or how much money one has at their disposal to stave off Death for as long as possible.

For a while, it seemed as though our collective society had forgotten about death… at least as a muse for artistic inspiration. Or perhaps it had become too much of a cliché to keep bringing it up in art. Plus, the more recent obsession with the carnival of horrors known as modern politics is what’s been keeping most artists preoccupied with regard to what shows up in their work. Yet that general sense of anxiety always leads back to one core fear: it’s all going to end. Both for the individual and the world at large. To that point, Baumbach is here to remind us of what DeLillo (and every other writer) has been saying since time immemorial—by adapting the author’s most well-known (and possibly most beloved) work. And, although not similar in caliber or subject matter, another recently-adapted novel from Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is In Trouble, evokes the same sense of middle-age-related doom and gloom. As Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg in the limited series) puts it, “This is what our ancestors died for: the right for us to be middle-aged and bored and miserable.” And yet, despite this misery, not seeing death as something to be welcomed, so much as feared. With the ultimate fear always being the unknown—for that allows the human mind to build up fear to a much more intense, debilitating level.

In the decade when White Noise was released as a novel, the advent of American society’s own sense of “settling into middle-age” was at a peak: Reagan was president, the suburban “dream” was still a sought-after “ambition” and yuppie “culture” reigned supreme. By the same token, the postmodern “affliction” was crystallized by the arrival of MTV, with its “scandalizing” imagery that peddled—in the eyes of such pearl-clutchers as Nancy Reagan and Tipper Gore—sex, drugs and sin. Even though the latter was married to “liberal” Al Gore, she was known for being especially upset by Madonna (then in the height of her “Like A Virgin” vixen days), declaring, “Popular culture is morally bankrupt, flagrantly licentious and utterly materialistic—and Madonna is the worst of all.” Perhaps she took “Material Girl” too literally? A song, incidentally, that ironically mocks the Decade of Excess through a video that finds Madonna rebuffing her male suitors’ promises of diamonds and furs and other assorted trappings of wealth in favor of a simple bouquet of flowers. Appropriately, this song also came out the year White Noise did, a book hailed as the “cornerstone of postmodern literature” (sorry Less Than Zero). As such, it’s only natural that White Noise should exist within the timeframe of the 1980s, when the American population naively assumed the information-action ratio couldn’t ever possibly get worse. Little did they know… The Internet.

The eighties were also distinct in offering some of the first thoroughly modern instances of just how much technological “snafus” could wreak havoc on the average joe—and the environment (see: the Exxon Valdez oil spill). But more than that, there was an overall aura of contempt for authority spurred by decades of disappointment brought on by the perpetually lying U.S. government (a trend that persisted in the 80s with the Iran-Contra affair). Maybe that’s what stoked a brewing rage within the quiet and complacent. The American ilk that so love their car crashes because they just want to watch something burn, if not the world itself. This could be why Baumbach chooses to commence the film not with the scene of station wagons dropping their kids off at College-on-the-Hill, where Jack “J.A.K.” Gladney (Adam Driver) works as the chairman of the Department of Hitler Studies (this being a dig at the rise of “novelty academic intellectualism”), but rather, with a lecture from his colleague, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle).

Echoing the machine-fetishizing themes J. G. Ballard presented in Crash (another novel that’s become increasingly prophetic/relevant of late), Siskind tells his students, “Don’t think of a car crash in a movie as a ‘violent act.’ No, these collisions are part of a long tradition of American optimism. A reaffirmation of traditional beliefs and values… Think of these crashes like you would Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. On these days, we don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. No, these are days of secular optimism. Of self-celebration. Each crash is meant to be better than the last.” As Siskind’s montage of ever-advancing and escalating car crashes is shown on a film reel to the class, Baumbach offers us a shot of a car exploding and its nuclear-esque mushroom cloud reflecting back in the glasses of a rapt student.

This hard-on for watching crashes—a.k.a. the suffering and death of others—is part of a unique form of schadenfreude that only materialized in American culture with the dawning of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, itself a type of “white noise” after a while. Indeed, the reiteration of the distinct types of “postmodern” white noise are mentioned often in DeLillo’s novel, replete with phrases like, “There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.”

With all the noise and clamoring for attention brought on by media oversaturation and conspicuous consumerism, everything seems and sounds like “dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.” And every “cataclysm”—rendered so meaningless from constant replays on TV—is reduced to mere “event.” Especially that of the environmental catastrophe variety. This being why, during the segment called “The Airborne Toxic Event,” Jack is quick to dismiss Babette and their children’s (most of whom are from Jack and Babette’s previous marriages) fears of what the “feathery plume”-turned-“black billowing cloud” might do to their well-being. To him, the thought of it actually affecting him and his family is so remote, he assures Babette, “These things [read: negative effects of chemicals wreaking environmental mayhem] happen to people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up, I mean sadly, in such a way that it’s the poor and uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters.” “It is sad,” Babette replies in her obligatory white guilt manner. Jack adds, “Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?”

Alas, even those formerly comforted by the theoretical cocoon of their white privilege, like the Gladneys, are slowly (oh so slowly) coming to grips with the reality that, since the continued use of 80s-era business and consumer practices, the environment has lately offered us nothing but the same energy we’ve been giving it for too long in return.

So it is that the fear of death in the postmodern 80s (complete with “incidents” such as the Chernobyl disaster) has been compounded in the present by being among the first generations to see truly apocalyptic climate change phenomena signaling the potential extinction of humans. A double layer of fearing death. And yet, in the face of humans knowing that pretty much everything they do and love is a threat to the very environment that allows them to live, they still engage in the same behavior. Ergo, the simultaneous fear of death combined with constantly engaging in “death wish” activities centered around the American passion for chemical substances in everything they consume is the great dichotomy of the twentieth century, and now, the twenty-first.  

Talking of consumerism (as one finds practically unavoidable whether discussing White Noise or not), the unspoken additional main character in White Noise is product placement itself (with DeLillo originally wanting to title his novel Panasonic—obviously, the corporation was not inclined to oblige). This is appropriate not only because DeLillo was a former copywriter, but because products are the “great cultural achievement” of the modern era. A reflection of all the choices we’ve been able to forge for ourselves only to become paralyzed by too much choice all signifying the same end. Coke, Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Velveeta, Grey Poupon, Tide—everywhere the eye wanders during a scene of the film, there’s sure to be a recognizable brand. This, too, is the mark of our postmodern panic. Our disaffected dystopia. The fact that the things that consume us (under the pretense of us consuming them) exist in liminal non-spaces only adds to the overarching feeling of constant dread. As though we’ve fully realized how to make life as purgatory-esque as possible before that final step into the abyss. Another polite word for “death.”

All lives must end and “all plots move deathward,” as Jack remarks to his class early on in the film, which is perhaps why the movie and the book meta-ly attempt to avoid full-tilt plot altogether. Hence, the “montage effect” of White Noise that became the norm with the dawning of the MTV generation. So fond of their “slick” edits and apropos-of-nothing jump cuts. Many likely wish that life itself could be experienced that way. That we could skip over the numerous (and primarily) mind-numbing parts just to feel slightly more alive. But without all that “filler” time (so much of which is occupied by waiting in lines—even online… just ask the Taylor Swift fans who tried to buy Eras Tour tickets), we would be edging closer and faster toward death. The “filler” portions of existence are what we’ve been conditioned to believe elongate the life experience—even if hours spent doing menial tasks like making money and then spending it on grocery shopping hardly equate to living.

The supermarket as a purgatorial landscape outside of time and space was also something many were forced to reconcile with during the lockdowns of 2020, when the grocery store was the only “legal” outing permitted. Further emphasizing that the supermarket is where “life”—this modern non-life we’ve all agreed to—is at its most manifest. It provides everything one needs to live within the confines of the totally ersatz. Which is why it’s only right for White Noise to end at the giant A&P we’ve come to know so well over the course of the film, with Jack stating of it all, “I feel sad for us and the queer part we play in our own disasters. But out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope. And this is where we wait…together.”

And with that, the consumers break out into a music video-worthy dance sequence to the tune of LCD Soundsystem’s “New Body Rhumba” (custom-made just for this movie). James Murphy, no stranger to lyrical depictions of existential dread, accordingly mirrors the increased sensation of anxiety and trepidation that arrives with middle-age by singing, “I need a new body, I need a new party/To represent my needs.” A younger body that might help evade the reaper for just a bit longer.

The “new body” of the future, of course, could lie within the idea of “uploading consciousness.” As Grimes said, “Baby, you’re not even alive/If you’re not backed up on a drive.” In the meantime, there are plenty of products (and pharmaceuticals) to console you, to make you think you might somehow be delaying the bottom line. Shopping, after all, is a supposed means to avoid death. “Buy or die,” as the American-backed “philosophy” goes. Just as it was in the 80s, so it is now. Which is why it’s still easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.