White Noise: Life in a Postmodern World
REVIEW ESSAY
White Noise
directed by Noah Baumbach
Netflix, 2022, 136 minutes
Critics often describe author Don DeLillo as prescient. His novels from the 1970s and 1980s—the most famous one being White Noise—explore themes that feel highly contemporary: paranoia and technology, hyper-consumerism, and the impact of mass media on the American psyche. But DeLillo wouldn’t describe himself as a prophet of twenty-first-century life. “I don’t think anyone is prescient,” he said to Entertainment Weekly in a (rare) interview from 2003. “What artists sometimes do is see things a little sooner than other people see them, that’s all.” DeLillo doesn’t see the future in his fiction. He illuminates the invisible forces of late capitalism that have been shaping American culture for decades.
While DeLillo engages with similarly “prescient” ideas in his earlier novels, White Noise packages those ideas in a story with more traditional character development and a plot, making it accessible to a larger audience. White Noise catapulted DeLillo from a novelist on the fringes of American culture to the literary mainstream. It received immediate critical acclaim, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985. Almost forty years later, it’s still taught in university classrooms as a masterpiece of late twentieth-century American fiction, and one that seems to grow increasingly relevant as we advance into the future.
Forces in the Air
White Noise is narrated by Jack Gladney, a “Hitler Studies” professor at College-on-the-Hill in the fictional suburban town of Blacksmith. The story follows Jack, his wife Babette, and their five precocious children as they spend their days attending school and work, watching television, browsing the colorful aisles at the supermarket, and going to the mall. In the second part of the book, the Gladneys become unmoored from their routine existence when a nearby truck crash causes a chemical spill that unleashes an “airborne toxic event” on their town. Lost in a new world of uncertainty, the Gladneys attempt to ground themselves through consumption. They feverishly absorb the flow of media images and information streaming from their radios and television sets, quieting their fear of death with the sounds of white noise.
White Noise both satirizes quotidian American life and functions as a cautionary tale about diving headfirst into a high-tech, media-saturated world. With its complex tone and its elusive message, White Noise transcends genre. It does fit into the tradition of the “systems novel,” a term coined by literary critic Tom LeClair in the 1980s to refer to novels that fictionalize concepts of systems theory. Systems novels depict worlds of interconnectedness, wherein characters’ words and actions are not governed by individual agency, but by larger forces operating in the ideological frameworks in which they live. While DeLillo served as LeClair’s blueprint for the “systems novelist,” the author’s fictional worlds are in the company of those depicted by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), William Gaddis in The Recognitions (1955), and Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
In a similar line of thinking, DeLillo’s approach to fiction writing has been compared to that of a nomothetic historian. In his essay “Why Oswald Missed: Don DeLillo’s ‘Libra,’” David T. Courtwright discusses how—unlike idiographic historians who attempt to understand historical events by reconstructing the choices made by individual actors—nomothetic historians “subordinate the individual to powerful physical, biological, economic, social, [and] psychological forces that they believe are the keys to understanding the human past.” Swept up in systems, DeLillo’s characters cannot be held responsible for their actions on an individual level. As the character Guy Banister says in DeLillo’s 1988 novel Libra, “There are forces in the air that compel men to act.”
Characters in White Noise are easily influenced; their words and actions shaped by ideologies of technology and consumerism. Brand names disrupt passages of prose—“MasterCard, Visa, American Express”—like intrusive thoughts lent an aura of sacredness. One night, Jack overhears his nine-year-old daughter Steffie say “Toyota Celica” in her sleep. These passages illustrate how the language we speak does not always belong to us. Characters repeat words and phrases they hear on television, words and phrases designed to resonate with them by people in distant offices who exploit their psychological vulnerabilities by pitching consumer goods to fill voids in their lives. DeLillo used to be one of them. In the early 1960s, he worked as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather in New York City, until he quit his job so he could “go to the movies on weekday afternoons.” He then began writing novels.
In scenes where Jack interacts with technologies like computers and the ATM, we get the sense that something existential is at stake. In “White Noise and Everyday Technologies,” Susana S. Martins writes that DeLillo’s narration suggests everyday interactions with certain machines “produce a cumulative effect of technology on everyday life that evokes an apparatus of power, or a system of signification that can be only partially discerned.” When Jack checks his balance at the ATM, he is aware that he is not just interacting with a machine, but an abstract, interconnected system:
The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. . . . The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. . . . The system was invisible, which made 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.
Jack experiences conflicting feelings of pleasure and unease as he executes a transaction that appears so seamless it’s almost magical: perhaps the 1980s equivalent of summoning toilet paper on Amazon Prime. His overly serious narration of a mundane interaction renders this scene comical while the subtext remains sharp. Yes, Jack is a cog at the mercy of a machine proxy for a large, technological system that will determine his fate, but he is also just getting cash at the ATM.
A Novel of Postmodernity
Many critics describe White Noise as a quintessential postmodern novel, but it does not quite belong to this category in terms of literary style. There is a distinction to be drawn between the terms postmodernism—the aesthetic style of art and literature characterized by traits of self-referentiality, pastiche, and fragmentation—and postmodernity, the cultural condition of a society existing after modernity (i.e., after around 1980). Postmodernism arose as an aesthetic response to this new era of cultural development. By fictionalizing concepts from popular cultural theories, White Noise comments on life in postmodernity. More specifically, it investigates the “postmodern condition,” a new kind of malleable subjectivity emerging in our media-saturated world. Where DeLillo incorporates elements of postmodern style in White Noise, he does so as a means of illustrating how characters’ subjectivities are colonized by media and consumer capitalism (“MasterCard, Visa, American Express”). DeLillo would further explore the idea of a postmodern condition in his next novel, Libra, a fictional account of the JFK assassination in which the character of Lee Harvey Oswald is easily influenced and lacks interiority.
Jack and his colleague Murray Siskind, a visiting lecturer on “living icons,” function as mouthpieces through which DeLillo voices competing interpretations of postmodern culture. Jack represents a modernist whose quest for meaning and authentic self-definition, as well as his hyper-awareness of his mortality, displace him in a postmodern world. As Leonard Wilcox writes in “Baudrillard, DeLillo’s ‘White Noise,’ and the End of the Heroic Narrative,” Jack “confronts a new order in which life is increasingly lived in a world of simulacra, where images and electronic representations replace direct experience.” Murray, on the other hand, represents a postmodernist who has enthusiastically embraced this new order. He tells Jack that in the information society, there is no need to search for meaning beneath the surface of things—that he should submit to the euphoric flow of the data, the information, the signs.
When Murray and Jack visit “The Most Photographed Barn in America,” a tourist attraction epitomizing Jean Baudrillard’s theory of “simulacra,” Murray explains the logic of a world where representation trumps physical reality. “We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one,” Murray says. “Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? The accumulation of nameless energies.” In Murray’s eyes, a visit to the most photographed barn—reminiscent of photo-centric sites like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty—is a sacred pilgrimage. Tourists do not visit to see the barn itself; it’s not even possible to see it through the cloud of its representations. They visit to spiritually surrender to the process of upholding the aura of the barn’s image.
Death hangs in the background of the pages of White Noise: in the supermarket, at the mall, in Jack’s nightmares. DeLillo has cited Ernst Becker’s 1974 book The Denial of Death as an influence. Becker builds on the work of Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Otto Rank, and other thinkers to argue that human civilization—everything we do in life to find meaning, or to escape through hedonistic pursuits—is an elaborate coping mechanism to help us forget about our mortality. Characters in the novel cope with their fear of death by immersing themselves in the “white noise” of the media-saturated world. When Jack ruminates on death, his subjectivity seems to become more porous and postmodern. His thoughts are suddenly invaded by lists of brand names, as if the prospect of consumption grounds him. In these instances, Jack delays his feelings of existential dread by foraying into the postmodern condition. DeLillo prompts readers today to reflect on what we’re distracting ourselves from when we absentmindedly absorb meaningless information, when we watch “ambient” Netflix, when we scroll.
As the symbolic modernist, Jack is preoccupied with his fear of death. He is aware that “all plots tend to move deathward” and that without death, there would be no meaning in stories or in life. If Jack were a postmodernist, like Murray, he would reject this notion of a metanarrative in favor of something more experimental. He would abandon his search for deep meaning, trading his existential angst for euphoric delirium. In the novel’s third act, death enters the plot in the form of an experimental drug called “Dylar” that promises to erase the awareness of mortality. Dylar represents a one-way ticket to the postmodern perspective that Jack ultimately does not take. He maintains his individual subjectivity instead of sacrificing it to capitalist forces for harvestable peace of mind. The ending of White Noise suggests that Jack’s awareness of death remains intact, but perhaps he has made peace with it. Jack and Babette’s son Wilder rides his tricycle across the freeway and magically survives, in the sublime light of a “postmodern sunset.” Back at the supermarket, Jack stands in the checkout line and considers the tabloids in the racks, their cults of “the famous and the dead.”
DeLillo offers White Noise to provide readers with a semblance of order in an otherwise chaotic reality. We can take shelter in the story’s clean, three-act structure as we’re prompted to reflect on life in postmodernity. Libra signifies a logical next step for DeLillo. In the novel, he would develop his concept of postmodern subjectivity, as well as his project of utilizing fiction as an organizational apparatus in a “world of randomness and ambiguity.”
Filming the Unfilmable
White Noise has long been deemed “unfilmable” in Hollywood. Many of the novel’s defining characteristics pose challenges to adaptation, from the density of its ideas to the systems world it depicts, wherein characters lack traditional notions of subjectivity and agency. It’s difficult to imagine a film accurately rebuilding DeLillo’s world using cinematic language. But still, in a postmodern cultural landscape where the old is made new over and over again, and there is always “content” to be consumed, it’s impressive that a novel as popular as White Noise has resisted adaptation for so long. Thus, I was not surprised when I read that a White Noise film was in the works, although I would not have guessed that writer-director Noah Baumbach would be the one to make it.
Like DeLillo, Baumbach is a stylist. But whereas DeLillo depicts characters using a systems lens to conduct cultural analysis, Baumbach paints naturalistic portraits of characters navigating different phases in life (i.e., coming-of-age, marriage, and divorce). I saw White Noise (2022) at the New York Film Festival, where Baumbach’s film Marriage Story (2019) was the centerpiece three years prior. One could speculate about the reasons why Baumbach chose to depart from his universe of talky, New York City naturalism to pursue a project so foreign. Perhaps it was the “prescience” of DeLillo’s “airborne toxic event” from the perspective of life after Covid-19. Perhaps it was the precarious future of the film industry, given that context. Perhaps it was the freedom written into the director’s multi-film contract with Netflix, exercised in the form of a roughly $140 million budget to make White Noise. Perhaps there were other forces in the air.
Much of the media coverage surrounding the White Noise adaptation focused on the novel’s “unfilmable” label to drum up anticipation for its release. “I don’t know what unfilmable means,” Baumbach told Entertainment Weekly, the same outlet DeLillo spoke with when he denied his prescience back in 2003. Baumbach said the “unfilmable” label didn’t enter his mind when he decided to adapt White Noise. But it must have, since he began his screenwriting process in the middle of the book—the “most cinematic section”—to see if he could translate it for the screen. With an action-packed “airborne toxic event” sequence that kicks off with a CGI train crash, Baumbach’s White Noise more closely resembles a Hollywood disaster blockbuster than a DeLillo novel.
White Noise is based on DeLillo’s personal observations about quotidian American life, exaggerated to the point of satire. He writes in this mode to offer readers a look at America through fresh eyes. The results are often humorous, like in the scene in which Jack visits the ATM, but we get the sense that DeLillo understands his protagonist’s anxieties; that he has been at this ATM before. DeLillo incorporates Becker’s “fear of death” theory to elucidate characters’ psychological conditions—why they do the things they do, where their existential angst comes from. Baumbach’s film effectively reduces Jack’s “fear of death” to a plot device. We do not get the sense that the director empathizes with him, or honors the real feelings and observations from which DeLillo’s satire springs.
In Every Day I Write the Book, critic Amitava Kumar discusses how the most evocative writing comes from a place of “acute vulnerability.” He writes, “Books that have a distinct authorial presence, especially a presence that reveals its author’s humanity or weakness, leave a greater impression on the reader’s mind.” This applies to film as well. As a viewer, it’s clear when you’re watching the product of a director’s emotional investment, and when you’re not. One speculates about what compelled Baumbach to make White Noise, because the film does not bear the fruits of “acute vulnerability”; it lacks the humanity at the core of the novel. The opposite is true of Baumbach’s 2005 film The Squid and the Whale, a witty and heartfelt portrait of a family adjusting to life after the parents’ divorce.
Baumbach executes a clear vision in White Noise in terms of aesthetic style. The film pays homage to Hollywood cinema of the 1980s by interweaving references to visual tropes from the era, both Spielbergian and noir. A sprawling, decadent epic, White Noise indulges in nostalgic 1980s imagery to evoke the aura of the decade: from Jack’s jewel-toned bomber to Babette’s high-waisted trousers and her sprightly, permed curls. And the shining Mecca of the supermarket: its aisles of sugary cereals and addictive snacks packaged in brightly colored boxes with bold graphics. Production designer Jess Gonchor said he used a Rubik’s cube, the iconic puzzle hailing from the 1980s, as a visual reference. Baumbach’s choice to make a nostalgic period piece out of White Noise makes sense, in its stylistic reflection of postmodern themes. But the film ultimately adds to a cultural landscape wherein images of the past are already inescapable, albeit an addition that’s deliberate in its nostalgia and pastiche.
The film’s “airborne toxic event” section will trigger memories of the uncertain, early days of Covid-19 for anyone who experienced them. Family dynamics are Baumbach’s specialty, and scenes of the Gladneys passing time at home, while catastrophe unfolds outside, are rendered well. The Gladneys anxiously consume and parrot incoming information from the news, much of which proves meaningless. The name of the event keeps changing—it’s a “feathering plume”; it’s a “black billowing cloud”; it’s an “airborne toxic event”—as do the symptoms of exposure. The radio says “sweaty palms” are a potential symptom, and their daughter Denise starts touching her hands, before she runs to the sink and frantically starts washing them. “She’s showing outdated symptoms!” their son Heinrich says. As in the book, these scenes illustrate how suggestible we become in a moment of crisis; how malleable we are under the influence of media. If Denise were a teenager today, she would likely be diagnosed with TikTok Tourette’s.
Since the 1980s, the forms of media we consume have dramatically evolved, as well as the frequency at which we consume them. Insights about living with a media-saturated consciousness, a thematic cornerstone in DeLillo’s novel, surface only in fleeting moments in the film. In this respect, Baumbach’s White Noise represents a missed opportunity to engage with the contemporary relevance of DeLillo’s work. To adapt the novel into a nostalgic period piece is to push it back into the past, even though the “postmodern condition” is more relevant than ever in the present.
The film ends with an extended sequence of characters dancing at the supermarket, like a consumer flash mob. Baumbach’s suggested message is: Yes, we fill our lives with stuff to distract ourselves from death, but let’s have fun while we do it. This awkward ending is unsurprising, as the novel has produced countless interpretations of its message and tone. Does DeLillo subscribe to the dystopian narratives of cultural decline offered by theorists Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard? Or does he have a more optimistic outlook on life in the postmodern world? I would argue that DeLillo’s goal in White Noise is not to send a message. He draws out aspects of contemporary culture that become hard to see when we’re so close to them. White Noise prompts us to live—to engage with media and technology—more consciously, considering the forces in the air.
A Different Kind of Truth
In Libra, DeLillo develops many of the themes he introduced in White Noise—the postmodern condition; the human desire for certainty; the rhythm of mundanity punctuated by catastrophe that characterizes American life. In his 1983 essay “American Blood,” a precursor to Libra, DeLillo cites the JFK assassination as the event that unraveled our “sense of coherent reality,” ushering in an era of paranoid meaning-making. To the chagrin of readers expecting a more traditional historical fiction novel, Libra does not fill in the blanks of what really happened that day in Dallas. Instead, it thematizes the impossibility of obtaining historical certainty in postmodern times—and the futility of attempting to locate Lee Harvey Oswald’s motive.
In “American Blood,” DeLillo lists materials collected as evidence in the Warren Commission report:
Detailed descriptions of pubic hair strands. Visas, memos, transcripts, tear sheets, change-of-address cards, ledger sheets, embassy files, insurance claims, property lists, postoperative X-rays, Jack Ruby’s 1956 tax return, Governor Connally’s necktie, photographs of fences, tire imprints, pieces of knotted string—the amassed debris of a surprisingly small number of lives.
In uncertain times, it’s human nature to assign meaning to any piece of data that we believe contains the potential to answer the questions we ask. Anything is a piece of evidence; any piece of evidence is a card in a Rorschach test. DeLillo crafted Libra’s Oswald using only information about the real Oswald that was publicly available. Thus, the character lacks interiority and a stable sense of self. Shaped by powerful forces, Oswald epitomizes the postmodern condition. His emptiness also presents a blank canvas onto which we project, in an attempt to fill in the blanks of all that we don’t know.
What do we make of all of the information in the information society? As exemplified in the “ruined city of trivia” provided by the Warren Commission, the one who searches for answers is the one who decides what intelligence is. In Libra, DeLillo continues down the path that he was on in White Noise, and into the rabbit hole. The postmodern world is revealed as a subjective hall of mirrors. In uncertain times, when we pose questions to the internet, the answers we find may only tell us more about ourselves. To feel at home in a “world of randomness and ambiguity” is to be comfortable with a different kind of truth, one that contains shades of mystery.