Straining A Signal From The Movie White Noise

Fair warning, I don’t reach a satisfying conclusion. But the journey has merit regardless.

It’s been a long-running question, how much of the dystopian media produced by Hollywood over the last several decades has been predictive programming. The question is no longer academic, with the revelation that the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio was a reenactment of the just-released movie White Noise.

Was the movie a gloat about what was planned, or was the real event inspired by the movie? I don’t have an angle on the latter… but if it was a gloat, the people who funded & developed White Noise might be literally credited with it.

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)

White Noise is a 2022 absurdist comedy-drama film, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, adapted from the 1985 novel with the same title by Don DeLillo. It is Baumbach’s first directed feature not to be based on an original story of his own.

We practically started with a smoking gun!

White Noise had its world premiere at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2022, and was released in select cinemas on November 25, 2022, before its streaming release on December 30, by Netflix.

In 1984, Jack Gladney is a professor of “Hitler studies” (a field he founded) at the College-on-the-Hill in Ohio. Despite his specialism, he speaks no German and is secretly taking basic lessons to prepare for a speech he is due to give at a conference. Jack is married to Babette, his fourth wife. Together, they raise a blended family with four children: Heinrich and Steffie, from two of Jack’s previous marriages; Denise, from Babette’s previous marriage; and Wilder, a child they conceived together. Denise spies on Babette and finds her secret prescription stash of Dylar, a mysterious drug not in the usual records. Jack experiences a dream about a mysterious man trying to kill him, alluding to an earlier conversation with Babette focused on their mutual fear of death. Jack’s colleague, Murray Siskind, a professor of American culture, wishes to develop a similarly niche field, “Elvis studies,” and convinces Jack to help him. They briefly become rivals as competition between their courses arises.

Hmm. This is supposed to be a departure from Baumbach’s normal movie-making?

There are two Hollywoods; you might well have never noticed. One is mainstream culture; adventures, comedies, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney, the stuff you think about when you think Hollywood. The other is specifically and uniquely Jewish culture. Neuroticism, paranoia and dysfunctional sexualities galore. The best indicator of the latter is when a movie you never heard of wins a millions awards, the critics rave about it and nobody you know has even seen it advertised. That’s because it wasn’t made for you, goyim.

You might think there’s crossover; you have no idea how different they are. I was once talked into screening Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s the heartwarming story of a professional identity thief being hired to body-double for a trust fund baby wasting his life on the Italian coast. Trust Fundie wants the thief to pose as him to his family so he can continue indulging hard drugs &  loose women despite his bankster family’s concerns. Unfortunately, the identity thief falls into homosexual obsession with Trust Fundie and ends up murdering him in a rage of unrequited love, assuming his identity and forced (thief being homo) to fornicate with his favorite woman as the police close in on his masturbatory double life.

Noah Baumbach is of that second Hollywood.

However, their lives are disrupted when a cataclysmic train accident casts a cloud of chemical waste over the town. This “Airborne Toxic Event” forces a massive evacuation, which leads to a major traffic jam on the highway. Jack drives to a gas station to refill his car, where he is inadvertently exposed to the cloud. The family and numerous others are forced into quarantine at a summer camp. Murray supplies Jack with a small palm-sized pistol to protect himself against the more dangerous survivalists in the camp. One day, chaos ensues when multiple families desperately try to escape the camp. The Gladneys almost make it out but ultimately end up with their car floating in the river. They later arrive in Iron City, where they encounter a man who rants about the lack of media attention on the evacuees and spots Jack, claiming he had seen him before looking at him. After nine days, the family manages to return home. However, since Jack was briefly exposed to the chemical waste, his fear of death becomes exacerbated.

Well, doesn’t that sound familiar. The synopsis devolves into hallucinations and hysteria, finally ending in a dance number. So says Wikipedia. I will not be screening this.

White Noise had its world premiere as the opening film of the 79th Venice International Film Festival on August 31, 2022, and also served as the opening film for the 2022 New York Film Festival on September 30. It also screened at the 31st Philadelphia Film Festival in October 2022. The film was theatrically released in the United States by Netflix on November 25, 2022, before its streaming release on December 30.

I’m not sure how well it ran with mainstream audiences. Rotten Tomatoes said 6.4/10. But its being the opener of two major, insider film festivals is curious.

The movie rights got passed around since at least 2004 per Wikipedia, which argues against this being a gloat; it was a movie that Hollyweird wanted to do for a long time. It was finally done by Noah Baumbach who claims he was inspired by Covid. That suggests the Ohio Derailment was premeditated for at least three years.

Noah Baumbach on White Noise and Psychotropic Fantasies of the 1980s

h ttps://www.vogue.com/article/noah-baumbach-white-noise-interview

By Erik Morse, 27 December 2022

Noah Baumbach’s White Noise opens like many so-called metafilms: with a movie within a movie. The image of a whirring reel projector dissolves into a supercut of automobile collisions. But these images are not of “real” accidents; rather, they are action sequences from other movies, cropped and sutured together to produce a tribute to the great American car crash. “Don’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act,” intones the tweedy Professor Murray Siskind… “No, these collisions are part of a long tradition of American optimism. The movie moves away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something loud and fiery and head-on…. There is a wonderful, brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

Ominous. America burning but we deserve it, because we’re easily distracted? And the violence we see is secretly fake?

The time and place of White Noise is the peak of the Reagan revolution in the fictional, middle-American college town of Blacksmith, home to upwardly mobile suburban families like the Gladneys, made up of patriarch Jack, a paunchy humanities professor at the nearby College-on-the-Hill, where he heads the highly prized Hitler Studies program…

Obsession/projection much? “Here’s a stable, typical, middle-class American who life is all about Hitler.”

…Babette, his loving wife—with a distinctively curled coiffure—who teaches posture to local geriatrics; and their horde of manic children, who are assembled from previous, failed marriages.

Dysfunctional sexuality, check.

But there are troubling secrets beneath the veneer of the Gladney household, including Babette’s mysterious pill regimen and Jack’s shameful lack of fluency in German, which he learns sub rosa from an eccentric local. And then there are the sinister nightmares that Jack has.

Neuroticism, check. Drugs.

Jack remains unfazed by the looming disaster and assures the family that nothing bad ever happens in Blacksmith. “It’s the poor and uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters,” he tells Babette between discussions over the dinner menu. “Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?”

But the cloud’s growth eventually sends it over the town, forcing the Gladneys and the rest of Blacksmith to scramble into their station wagons—just like in a TV-scripted disaster.

One point for gloating. “Disaster only happens to other people. OH NO, disaster just happened to us!”

Vogue Magazine caption: Adam Driver as Jack and Greta Gerwig as Babette in White Noise.

My caption: That’s the marriage of Noah’s parents. Dad was Jewish, Mom was Protestant. This film has a big-nosed guy with a visually American wife? Hmm. Noah’s parents divorced when Noah was young and, I glance over his movie credits, Noah never recovered.

Noah had a child with Greta Gerwig in 2019. Then he cast her as another man’s wife in his White Noise. Are you getting the neurotic sexual dysfunction vibe yet?

In fact, the elder Baumbach hovers over the themes of fatherhood and family that have always been integral to his son’s work, particularly 2005’s The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical domestic drama that examined parental-adolescent relationships and the traumas rent by divorce. “The theme of divorce was a way to explore the family bubble in a few of my movies,” he says. “The lengths that people go to defend themselves or their families or children from perceived or unperceived dangers of the outside while ignoring the fissures that are occurring inside.”

QED. Textbook neuroticism. More projection. Eternal hatred of outsiders, especially if the outsiders have happy families.

Which argues against Noah knowing about the movie being a gloat. His long & successful media career makes him unlikely to hold affiliation with the agents responsible for the Derailment. He’s already found an outlet for his frustrations.

Heh, the ((Squid)) and the Protestant Whale.

…Baumbach says that he was intrigued by [author] DeLillo’s status as a fellow urbanite chronicling the mores of suburban America. He calls it an “outsider look at the country.” “DeLillo…was an Italian from the Bronx writing about suburban life, and I’m from Brooklyn and Jewish.”

Yet another immigration fail.

My conclusion is that if White Noise was a premediated gloat, it’s one that its producer didn’t know about. Baumbach is just a damaged person who made a career of projecting his internal insecurities onto a country that should hate his people but doesn’t.

So then, who gave him the idea for the train derailment context? Let’s follow the money.

Noah Baumbach on His Ambitious ‘White Noise’ Budget and What the Film Says About America Today

h ttps://www.indiewire.com/2022/09/noah-baumbach-interview-white-noise-1234768260/

By Eric Kohn, 30 September 2022

It might seem like a stretch to insert the themes of DeLillo’s oddball novel, which was so rooted in its time, into a 21st-century context. But the material invites big swings, including Baumbach’s own efforts to transform a book that for years has been considered unfilmable into a beguiling movie odyssey as strange and unclassifiable as its source.

Previous attempts to adapt “White Noise” by James L. Brooks and Barry Sonnenfeld went nowhere, and the director of grounded dramedies like “Marriage Story” and “Greenberg” might not seem like the obvious fit to figure it out. Baumbach, however, was drawn to the way the novel merged analytical thinking with otherworldly twists, because the latter provided a template for the former…

One way that movie may have seemed unreal was its scale. Reports of the Netflix production having a budget that stretched past $80 – 100 million has led to much speculation about where that money was going. Some of that is evident on the screen, from an explosive train crash to a car chase through the woods that takes more than few surprising twists and the scariest CGI cloud this side of “Nope.” Baumbach also shot the movie on 35mm anamorphic film, which isn’t exactly the most cost-effective approach.

“Netflix was great and gave us the support we needed to make the movie,” Baumbach said. “The book has this airborne toxic event, which is a big spectacle, and it becomes a big movie as a result.” He added that the streamer, which produced Baumbach’s last two movies, knew what it was getting into.

The money trail ends at Netflix. They wanted this movie to happen badly enough to throw money at it. Those last two movies…

[2019] Marriage Story: Noah Baumbach’s incisive and compassionate look at a marriage breaking up and a family staying together.

[2017] The Meyerowitz Stories: An estranged family gathers together in New York City for an event celebrating the artistic work of their father.

…are helpful only in establishing how much a disaster set in Ohio is a major break from Baumbach’s normal career of filming ((family dysfunction)) in Brooklyn. They certainly weren’t made for profit.

I get the sense that DeLillo’s book is significant to the Tribe. My last gasp is to review its original themes.

h ttps://www.sparknotes.com/lit/whitenoise/themes/

The Fear of Death

The fear of death lies at the center of White Noise. As Babette notes when she confesses her fear to Jack, “What is more underlying than death?” Everything in the novel—from Hitler to the supermarket, from the airborne toxic event to the white noise of the novel’s title—circles back to human beings’ primal, deep-seated fear of dying. DeLillo’s novel details how modern life attempts to push this fear out of sight, and yet, as in the character of Jack Gladney, the fear continues to resurface and fill us with dread.

The Tension Between Reality and Artifice

Throughout White Noise, the authentic and the artificial often blur together, and substance seems interchangeable with surface. This confusion between appearance and reality represents an essential part of Jack’s own existence. Although Jack has created a venerable, professorial persona for himself, he remains painfully aware of the total fabrication of this character.

At the same time, DeLillo satirizes postmodern human beings’ inability to discern the genuine from the fabricated.

The Pervasiveness of Technology

In White Noise, the pervasive presence of technology proves both menacing and comforting. Throughout the novel, in counterpoint to the human babble of Jack’s friends, family, and neighbors, modern technology asserts itself through the humming of machines and the constant stream of media sounds and images. Technology has become as much a part of the texture of daily of life as humans are themselves.

Faceless and beyond the grasp of the individual, technology makes everyone anonymous.

A satire upon the obvious failings of postmodernism, then. We Christians suffer none of these problems: the terror of death, the tension between real and fake, and “we shall be as gods, until the lights go out.”

But I digress. DeLillo’s book is not unique, if it’s only a polemic against postmodernism.

The airborne toxic event, a dense, threatening cloud of dangerous chemicals, provides a particularly frightening image of technology gone terribly, fatally awry. Yet even this seemingly overt symbol of technology’s capacity for destruction proves more complex than it first appears, as the airborne toxic event paradoxically causes the most beautiful sunsets the region has ever seen. The chemical cloud is noxious and lethal, but it also creates beauty. When Steffie mumbles “Toyota Celica” in her sleep, a similar tension is being evoked, as a crass marketing term becomes transformed, in Jack’s eyes, into something mystical and beautiful. The phrase, which seems to represent cold, mechanized modernity, ends up expressing something primal and deeply human.

Then again, if the book describes a mass-death event as beautiful, there might be a psychopathy theme that didn’t make the Cliff’s Notes.

The Ohio Derailment frustrates me because I cannot prove what I know. The coincidences are far too much, yet the plausible deniability is solid. I could even convince myself that this was just infrastructure collapse followed by a rushed coverup, except there are no coincidences anymore. Such as this book quotation:

“The system was invisible, which makes it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies.”