![]() His signature is a sort of thorny, gentrified realism, and his films are filled with academics, artists, and commentators who make their living pulling meaning out of texts they’re the kinds of people who probably keep DeLillo novels on their nightstands. Baumbach, on the other hand, is a bad fit for DeLillo, albeit in an interesting way. Not many filmmakers have tried, and the only one who’s really succeeded so far is David Cronenberg, whose 2012 movie of the mock-epic Cosmopolis leaned smartly into its source material’s staccato artificiality. Those qualities are also what makes translasting his material to the movies so difficult. The sublimely paranoid qualities of DeLillo’s writing are what has led him to be labeled as a kind of literary prophet-a gonzo sociologist to put on the postmodern syllabus alongside Philip K. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. You don’t read White Noise so much as get infected by it. Conveyed through DeLillo’s insidiously engaging style-all short sentences and deadpan declarations-these worries become contagious. Some late intrigue involving a mysterious and addictive designer drug drives the plot forward a bit further, but for the most part the book idles furiously inside its characters’ heads, giving voice to anxieties about life, death, and the great beyond. When the threat finally dissipates, the characters return home only to find that the fear of death has followed them there. Forced to evacuate their home alongside their neighbors and sequestered together in their wood-paneled station wagon, DeLillo’s protagonists spend much of the novel under a literal cloud of fear-a condition that puts a witty spin on the post–World War II cliché of a “nuclear” family. ![]() The resultant pollution threatens to turn the heartland into Three Mile Island (the book was published the year before the meltdown at Chernobyl, giving its disaster elements an uncanny prescience). ![]() ![]() In its broadest outline, White Noise is a story about a blended family whose lives are briefly but profoundly uprooted by an “airborne toxic event” caused by a chemical spill outside a small Midwestern college town. If they make it through it at all, that is.Īn Introduction to ‘White Noise,’ Don DeLillo’s Defining and Unfilmable Novel ![]() Meanwhile it’s hard to say what the people who haven’t read the novel-which is to say, the likely majority of viewers who’ll be guided toward it on Netflix whether by hype or algorithm-will make of the movie. For those who’ve already read the book, watching Baumbach’s film is less like seeing a classic come to life than bearing witness to a cautionary tale that makes you wish you could return to that first experience in your mind’s eye. The bad news is that White Noise is a botch. In a year without a clear Oscar front-runner, the presence of an expensive, pedigreed epic taking on big, weighty themes would seem auspicious. Now the line doubles as a review of Noah Baumbach’s much-anticipated adaptation of DeLillo’s masterpiece. “It is possible,” writes Don DeLillo in his 1985 novel White Noise, to be “homesick for a place even when you are there.” It’s a beautiful line that distills something true and troubling about human nature-the perpetual and unrequited longing that shadows even our happiest moments, exposing a gap between despair and fulfillment that’s deep enough to drown in. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |