White Noise

 Year 15, Day 140 - 5/20/23 - Movie #4,441

BEFORE: Because I needed to get up super early today, instead of watching a movie last night I mapped out a route to a couple Father's Day films. (The route to July 4 is still uncharted.) Is it the BEST possible list of films?  Impossible to determine - but it gets me to a couple films that are father-themed, and that's going to have to do.  I needed to know whether to watch ALL the Jude Law films next week, or to leave one for June - it turns out I do need one of them in June, but not the one I originally thought.  So, bottom line, I do need to watch a movie today, AFTER my theater shift, not before. C'est la vie. So I can't bookend the week with two films directed by Nicole Holofcener - if I'm going to make it to Memorial Day on time, I've got to watch this film directed by Noah Baumbach, as originally planned.  I can sleep in tomorrow, no big deal - and now that Hell Week is over, I've got a few days off next week, and then Memorial Day weekend, so I think I can stay on schedule, and then maybe program June with a few days off.  Maybe.

Bill Camp carries over again from "The Land of Steady Habits". 

THE PLOT: Dramatizes a comtemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. 

AFTER: Well, the next step for me is to find a film that's somehow about America, to program for July 4 - last year it was "WBCN and the American Revolution", which qualified on the strength of the title alone.  Other July 4 films from recent years have included "In America", "The Birth of a Nation", "The Fog of War" and "Miss Firecracker".  We'll see what I can come up with this year, maybe "American Assassin" or "The U.S. vs. Billie Holliday", we'll all have to wait and see where the linking will lead me.  But here, without even trying, I may have stumbled upon the most American film ever. Umm, I think.  It's kind of hard to encapsulate what this is really about, it's about so many things, and yet maybe it's about nothing at all in the end.  I'll try to explain. 

I've gradually eased my way into the world of Noah Baumbach - I think I kind of crept in because he co-wrote some of the Wes Anderson films, like "The Life Aquatic" and "Fantastic Mr. Fox". But then I watched films like "Greenberg" and "The Squid and the Whale", and "While We're Young", I even went back and watched "Kicking and Screaming" (not the Will Ferrell soccer movie) but I watched that thinking is was "Walking and Talking", long story.  Then I kind of developed a taste for Baumbach, I sought out his other films like "Frances Ha" and "Margot at the Wedding", and of course "Marriage Story" when it became available to me.  So yeah, when I found out he had a new film, "White Noise" I certainly put that on the list and tried to link to it sooner rather than later. 

But "White Noise" just isn't like the other Baumbach stories - I mean, it is and it isn't. It's adapted from a novel by Don DeLillo, and usually Baumbach writes (or at least co-writes) the films he directs.  The conversations bear similarities to those usually heard in a Baumbach piece - is it mumblecore or not? - but the subject matter is way out of his usual comfort zone.  The only thing I can think of here is that this is all a giant allegory for something - but for what?  My first guess is the COVID pandemic, because it was on everybody's minds for two years straight, and I really have NOT seen that many films made about the medical lockdown that affected the entire country, the world even.  There was "Locked Down" (watched in December 2021) and "Alone Together" (watched in February 2023).  That can't be it, can it?  Sure, we all watched "Bird Box" and "Contagion", but those were made BEFORE Covid-19.  Some films like "Borat 2" and "Glass Onion" mentioned it, but they weren't really ABOUT it. 

So, I think filmmakers found a way to make films about COVID-19 without making them directly about COVID-19.  In "White Noise" there is an "airborne toxic event" in the second act which forces families to evacuate their homes and seek medical attention - or, if they have stayed in their homes, they're advised to quarantine in place until the emergency is over.  Now, the film is set in 1984 (or so) so it clearly CAN NOT be about COVID-19, but come on, it's all about COVID-19.  People are seen at the shelter sites spreading misinformation about the toxic event, nobody really knows how to combat the invisible enemy (radiation? chemicals?) and some people just want to get in the car and drive away from the event, but it's in the air, so, umm, where are you gonna go?  And you've got to step out of the car at SOME point, so maybe just stay home until it all (literally) blows over. 

Now, the event is caused by a truck hitting a train, which releases the toxic materials in an ominous black cloud over a few cities - I'll admit in appearance this doesn't resemble COVID but it does look a lot like the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which took place a little over a month after "White Noise" was released on Netflix.  Was that why this film got so popular for a few weeks, because life was imitating art, and everybody wanted to watch the movie about the train crash that released toxins into the air?  I'm not sure - but since the filmmakers could not POSSIBLY have predicted the train crash, I'm going to go on record and say that the train crash in the film, and the resulting toxins in the air, is instead an allegory for the coronavirus.  

The first act of this film is the set-up, in which we learn all about this blended family living in Ohio (yes, it's the same state as the real train crash, but again, coincidence...) and it's the fourth marriage for both Jack Gladney and his wife, Babette. They both have kids from their previous marriages, plus they have one young one together.  Jack teaches at a college, but a special course that he created, called (wait for it...) "Hitler studies".  This may raise a few eyebrows, but I think it's just here for the shock value - or the absurdity of it all, when you put this many weird things together in one film, it starts to resemble something that Kurt Vonnegut might have written as a dark tragi-comedy.  Yes, I know Don DeLillo wrote this, but it reminds ME of Vonnegut. 

The family has meaningless conversations about this and that, and Babette's daughter catches her take a prescription drug, and also both Jack and Babette love each other dearly, to the point where they both wish to die first, so they won't have to endure the agony of living without their spouse.  I can't decide if that's really sweet and sentimental or just another of the many messed-up weird things here. Maybe both. 

Then there's the train crash, and the family lives in a new kind of fear, they debate whether the toxic fumes are going to head their way or not, and if so, what will happen?  Jack promises his kids that they're in no danger, but he doesn't really know for sure, does he?  Parents have a way of sugar-coating the truth, and families have a way of not talking about things like death or emergencies until they actually happen.  So this all rings true, again, everything so far has been VERY typically American.  But eventually the family agrees, they need to evacuate, and maybe it was the fact that everyone else on the block is GONE that was the tip-off. 

I remember back in high-school (which was, for me, in the 1980's) though we weren't taught to "duck and cover" under our desks in the event of nuclear war (come on, how would that even help?) we were aware that there was some kind of evacuation plan if there was some kind of apocalypse.  As residents of Massachusetts, we were supposed to drive up to New Hampshire or something - only, it would take days to get there because the highways would be jammed with everyone else doing the same thing.  Also, how would that help?  And where would the people of New Hampshire go, or were we just supposed to pick a family up there at random, and live with them until the radiation fallout was over?  It didn't seem to make much sense.

The Gladneys make it to their designated sheltering place, which is a Boy Scout camp outside town, and, well, things go a bit crazy at one point, and they're forced to relocate to Iron City, where the people in a different shelter are similarly uptight and intensely curious about what's going on outside and wondering when things will be safe again.  You know what, probably never, because Jack is led to believe that while he was filling up the family station wagon with gas, he was probably exposed to the toxins, so the man who's always been anxious about his own death might suddenly have to confront it much sooner than he planned. 

Act 3 of the movie is about - well, I actually don't want to get into it, because that's where all the spoilers are, and the story gets really intense about relationships and pharmaceuticals and I don't want to give too much about it away.  Possibly this part of the film is a metaphor for the opioid crisis, but honestly, I'm not really sure.  Jack confronts Babette about this mystery medication she's been taking, and man, it leads to a whole thing.  But if you came here for the pandemic allegory, then it's going to feel like the Act 3 story just really went right off the rails.  Umm, so to speak. 

Don't worry, it all ends with a dance number in a supermarket - you might have seen this as a music video made to promote the film, with a song by LCD Soundsystem.  But it's weird, in fact the whole film is very weird - but possibly also brilliant.  I'm kind of toggling between weirdly brilliant and incoherent nonsense, I'm not quite sure how a film can be both of these things at the same time, but if any film could be, then maybe this one is.  Various directors had tried for YEARS to adapt this story into a film, but it's notable that nobody started to actually DO that until January 2021, when Baumbach took over.  Yes, that's DURING the pandemic, so I think I'm safe in saying this is mostly a metaphor for what I think it is.  And Wikipedia is telling me that the train crash here WAS filmed in East Palestine, Ohio, so life DID imitate art - make of that what you will. 

I'm forced to cheat a little here, and look up what the novel is "about" on Wikipedia.  Again, without saying too much about the events of Act 3, the BOOK is about rampant consumerism, media saturation, novelty academic intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and reintegration of the family, human-made disasters, gun culture, obsession with death and the potentially regenerative nature of violence.  So, as I said before, this might be THE most American film when you look at what it's really about. 

Also starring Adam Driver (last seen in "House of Gucci"), Greta Gerwig (last seen in "Maggie's Plan"), Don Cheadle (last seen in "No Sudden Move"), Raffey Cassidy (last seen in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer"), Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith (last seen in "Without Remorse"), André Benjamin (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Sam Gold, Carlos Jacott (last seen in "She's All That"), Lars Eidinger (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Barbara Sukowa (last seen in "Gloria Bell"), Francis Jue, Henry Moore, Dean Moore, Gideon Glick (last seen in "The Pale Blue Eye"), Chloe Fineman, Kenneth Lonergan (last seen in "You Can Count on Me"), Meggie Loughran, J. David Hinze, Danny Wolohan (last seen in "Tallulah"), George Drakoulias (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), James Deforest Parker (last seen in "The Mule"), Dean Wareham (last seen in "Marriage Story"), Britta Phillips (last seen in "Frances Ha"), Sajjad Dolati (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Logan Fry, Daniel Repas, Thomas W. Wolf, with archive footage of Elvis Presley (last seen in "Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer"), Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Citizen Ashe")

RATING: 6 out of 10 German nuns (who don't believe in heaven?)