I have never read Don DeLilloās White Noise nor in fact any of his novels. This seems like an astonishing fact to me because I was such a crazed David Foster Wallace acolyte and it seemed like just an inevitable splashing of the proximal bathtub contents that if you were really into the one novelist you would be into the one who so thoroughly influenced them. But it never took. Something about DeLillo seemed less than (n)-dimensional to me whereas Wallace had all kinds of vivid moving parts and capabilities and drawers-inside-drawers. A Wunderkammer. I suppose if someone came to me and said āYeah but he got that from DeLillo,ā I would have to defer and agree with them. I canāt explain it. I never read him and only got any sense of his writing by proxy, by reading other people talking about him.
I knew bits and pieces about White Noise before I watched it on Netflix on December 30th, my birthday, but not everything. I felt a stubborn predisposition to be unfavorable to the movie before it started rolling that I canāt explain. I had a sense going in that the moviemakers had done something vain and quixotic in making the adaptation of one of the preeminent postmodern novels of the 1980s, a novel everybody talked about in reverent tones like it was firmly ensconced in the 20th century hyper-canon.
I liked most of the movie. Like I said, I hadnāt read the novel so I was unprepared for the dialogue which was, compared to real American human being speech, both simultaneously very transparent and very opaque. The dialogue was puzzling and funny and irritating but in a purposeful way. I felt like the movieās greatest insights were the ones about how Americans reassure themselves that death and calamity are not ever present and breathing down their necks. Complacency in the households of people who are sheltered yet educated and should somehow know better. The airborne toxic event of the movieās middle provided the most riveting viewing. It was also the part that I felt had the most to say to audiences in 2022 who have resurfaced from the COVID-19 oil slick, considering it finished, a historical past tense that either became so since the threat has acceptably past or the national fatigue just wonāt allow us to remain in a state of hypervigilance. COVID-19 was nothing more than a season of a television show that, like the second seasons of the Walking Dead or the Wire, was annoying and boring and withheld rewarding payoffs from us. We learned the lesson and now we wanted to get back to the tv show about ānow,ā untouched by history. White Noise (the movie) was brilliant at presenting the fear of cataclysmic danger to us and showing how we are unable to truly absorb it properly. I loved the way the son became a well-liked know-it-all in the emergency camp. Also the absurd comedy routine between Jack and the person at the help desk wearing the āemergency simulationā armband was hilarious and had me nodding my head. This must be the good stuff from the novel.
And then it lost me with the sections about Dylar, which I detected was supposed to be the more profound metaphor or symbol or allegory than the black cloud that threatened the citizens in the middle of the movie. A pill that takes away fear of death: what a profound statement! It skewers all kinds of things, from pharmaceuticals to religion to suburban numbness. Itās āheavy.ā I think I missed the comic step, so crucial to the structure of the movie apparently, that took the pill from being a moving symbol of human fear and dread to being a kind of MacGuffin in a noir jealousy subplot. Maybe thatās the step. People canāt cope with the truth or the insight ā itās too large and horrifying ā so they quickly transfer to more commonplace selfish worries, and the entertainment follows the characters thusly. I found myself not liking Greta Gerwig as Baba in this section. I didnāt feel like she was really performing it well enough, for me. In my opinion they had gone with an inferior actor to deliver the tearful confession of infidelity and set that farce in motion. Was it like a nepotism hire or something? Iām sure I need to confront the parts of me that reduces the director of Little Women (didnāt see it), Lady Bird (I liked it but something was off) and the forthcoming Barbie, to a Woody Allen wife.Ā To Maggie Gyllenhall with frizzy hair. Is that Noah Baumbachās thing? I liked her in other scenes, like the swarming kitchen scenes where everyone is talking at once, letting off gnomic bursts that would tell everything, if only the other characters knew, and likewise the fleeing scenes in the station wagon. Much of the movie seemed like a cross between a Spielberg production like Jaws, Close Encounters, or ET (where the messy suburban family quarrels over quotidian domestic battlefields as a kind of penetrating set-up of recognition before the awe-inspiring, sublime spectacle hits) and David Byrneās True Stories where the colorful, goofy irony of the 80s in America was laid bare. Indeed the closing dance number seemed like it could have been from a Talking Heads video. That has good aspects and bad aspects. In the 80s this kind of revelation at the A&P (weāre under a heavy narcotic of consumerism while death jokes around in the next aisle) had a traction to it, a pull on the heartstrings. People seemed to be just gaining awareness of Elvisā pop-iconic significance was in death, media studies and lit crit was pointing out that everything is a text worthy of dissection. Andy Warholās bubble was starting to warp and shift under the turbulence of passing time. Iām not sure if Iām saying this right. I donāt understand the dance sequence well enough.
But is this in the novel? Iām impaired and shouldnāt be showing my inadequacies in this way. I havenāt read the most significant American novelist of the last third of the 20th century. I only watched the Netflix movie. It feels like something was not escaped, some juggernaut has caught up to us and trampled us and then we had 9/11 and the Internet and war and Billy Joelās fire he didnāt start kept burning an inexhaustible fuel of history. What lessons for 2022 (2023) does this narrative have now? Are supermarkets as rich with satirical meaning still? Did Stranger Things defang anything that the 1980s could signify for us now? Am I a poseur because I instead took the 1990s version and felt like that was good enough, and I didnāt need to read any further, in either historical direction?
I might watch the movie again. I might skip the Dylar stuff. I might read the novel. But I might not. I feel like shit is serious and deep enough now, and my perceptions of the complexity and dilemmas of the 80s are already too personally etched (I was born in 1975 and as a child I experienced something of the 80s, and by watching MTV I probably received, in some twisted way, the signal that a novelist like DeLillo was perhaps trying to send). A boat was missed. I just donāt feel as magnetized by the guyās books like I was magnetized by Wallaceās. Maybe one who came after the other summarized the other all too well and I feel like I got the t-shirt and moved on. You need to understand that for a very long time, there was Wallace and then there was nothing else, and it took some work to move into reading other writers. Updike. Nabokov. I never summoned the energy it would take to tackle DeLillo. I think I picked up Libra and the dialogue and the flatness and portentous vibe just made me put it down. I heard scary stories about how difficult Ratnerās Star was. Nothing really clicked. I feel bad about it. DeLillo wrote way more books than Wallace but thereās this DFW-shaped void in the fabric of obviousness and Iāve moved far away from it to explore other writers and not the writer that was right on the edge of the void, who defined the void as DeLillo obviously did. Maybe 2023 will be the year I try it again.
I just succumbed to a friend's pressure to read DeLillo's Underworld (it's on the TBR), now you're going to push me toward DFW... Connecting with other writers is making my life extremely complicated, lol! There's only 24 h in a day, dammit, and I have to write too. Now, seriously, thanks for the recommendation.
A probing review. I think I might have read "White Noise" back when it came out, but I don't remember it at all, and never had an urge to read more DeLillo. Will probably watch the movie. I like Gerwig well enough in movies like "Mistress America" and "Frances Ha", where she's the butt of the jokes, but I wonder about her stretching into this film. Curious to see. Adam Driver often leaves me cold, but I love "Patterson."