‘White Noise’ or — The Crime (and Pleasure) of Accessibility?

“Well, this is a bloody embarrassment,” I found myself muttering under my breath half an hour into Noah Baumbach’s 2022 adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel ‘White Noise’. It’s my favourite novel by one of my favourite authors but watching it transformed into the waves and radiation of film only confirmed my suspicion that hearing DeLillo’s language read out loud instantly renders it utterly laughable. Try this experiment for yourself at home — go to your bookshelf and pick up your (presumably) well-thumbed copy of ‘White Noise’, open a page at random, read it out loud and… see what I mean? Sounds silly as can be so it’s not that DeLillo’s work is unfilmable but more that, outside the quiet context of print, it’s unwatchable.

DeLillo’s turns of phrase rely almost exclusively on sly absurdity combined with jaw-dropping audacity which could account for why I sometimes find myself laughing less for his wit and more for his massive balls. “You seriously think you can get away with writing a sentence as ridiculous as THAT, Don?!”

For example, take — “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.” Or how about “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots.” Or how about the classic “Some people are larger than life. Hitler was larger than death”? Who the hell speaks like that? No one, that’s who! And when you hear and see those words pouring out of a living human being’s mouth the only appropriate response is that of rocking, mocking laughter.

The thing is I kept on laughing… and laughing. But what shocked me most was the staggering variety of laughter I was emitting; the full invisible spectrum of oscillating guffaws and hollers ranging all the way from cool-blue snorts of snark to hot-red howls of delight. It was a sort of multi-dimensional superimposition of comedic reactions where I was both laughing at and WITH the movie simultaneously. I had no idea such a baffling state of mirth could exist.

By the time the Toxic Airborne Event occurred I was so confused I gave up attempting to analyse myself or the movie and to simply go with it and I’m glad I did because there’s one thing I can say about Baumbach’s film for certain — it has a huge load of heart.

‘White Noise’ concerns a bustling and loving family yet DeLillo portrays this unit with a clinical coldness that prevents any sentimentality seeping in through any carefully sealed cracks. Instead, Baumbach (wisely in my opinion) recognises the audience has to emotionally connect with this family so leans heavily into the feels, the squidgy heart-mush, that dewy-eyed closeness that only comes from physical proximity with others. And I suspect it is this jettisoning of DeLillo’s icy detachment that the postmodernist die-hards are lamenting as they beat their chests and tear their hair at the fact that Baumbach has made ‘White Noise’ — gasp in horror — accessible to the public?!

The most telling sentence occurs towards the end of the movie when a man bleeding from a gunshot wound starts rambling about certain millipedes having countless eyes to which Jack and Babette both yell at him to “Shut up!” as though the film is saying to the us all “Look, we know these constant DeLillo-isms we’ve been subjecting you to for the last two hours can get on the nerves, right.” It’s both a mocking of and a celebration of the writer’s style and, personally, I loved that it did that. And let’s face it — DeLillo is annoying anyway, and deliberately so.

The movie is also frequently gorgeous to look at. There’s a great moment when Jack is filling up his car whilst, behind him, the Toxic Airborne Event passes in front of the petrol station’s signage slowly turning the night a demonic, poisonous red. This is a very colourful film and, for a movie about death, also surprisingly non-morbid. In fact, it’s positively upbeat.

Some may feel Baumbach might’ve missed the point of ‘White Noise’ but, for me, he nails the pleasure. I was happy sitting there hearing DeLillo’s lines of dialogue flooding from the screen and giggling away and knowing that when I reverted back to the usual multiplex fare that I’d kill for a single sentence as good (or appalling) as any of the ones contained here.

This is not a film about death. It’s a film about life. I kinda love it for that. Oh, that and the closing credits.