White Noise

The film, based on a novel written by Don DeLillo, stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig in the lead roles. So, let's try to understand if there could be any ...

A ban was put on the psychobiology experiment, and that is why Babette had to find another way to get the drug. Jack was told that he was ultimately going to die because he was exposed to the chemical rain. Jack sat there listening to the absurd conversation, and he couldn’t help but realize how right Siskind was in saying that family was the cradle of the world’s misfortune. The drug hadn’t worked, and that is why Babette had stopped going to the motel. Professor Siskind said that the king of rock and roll was what Hitler was for Jack, and he wanted Jack to drop by his class and help his cause with his influential presence. Jack told his family that there was nothing to worry about and that if they stayed in their homes, they would easily evade the danger. The college-on-the-hill was hosting a conference on Hitler, and Jack felt the need to learn German because he knew that it would seem very weird if he claimed to be an expert on a native German subject matter and didn’t know the language. Just then, in another part of the city, a truck carrying some flammable material crashed into a speeding train, and the result was an airborne toxic event that had the potential to impact the lives of each and every resident of the city. He spoke about Babette in the third person even when he was talking directly to her and considered her the flawless model of moral uprightness. That day, while the family was having breakfast and getting ready to leave the house, Denise noticed that Babette was taking some medicine, and she threw the box in the dustbin. The concept is bizarre, and it sets the tone for the kind of “White Noise” that the viewers are going to hear for the next couple of hours. At times it becomes too tedious, and it is almost challenging to keep watching it, but then that is the whole point of it.

A family in 1980s garb. Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola, and Raffey Cassidy in White Noise. Wilson Webb / Netflix.

The cults of the famous and the dead.” “The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He paints it in almost religious terms: “Being here is kind of a spiritual surrender. But like the white noise machine I need to sleep, even though there’s nothing to drown out anymore, we’ve become so dependent on our cultural white noise that the idea of living without it is almost unbearable. He instead focuses on the larger existential point at the heart of the novel: that all of this white noise we’ve generated for ourselves — a drive to buy things, a fascination with catastrophes, technologies always humming in the background — is a way of distracting ourselves from the horrifying realization that we will die. It’s why people become obsessed with celebrities (like Elvis) or leaders who falsely promise us the world (like Hitler); in becoming part of a crowd, in losing ourselves to the emotional high of the performer, we can stop the feeling for a while. When they arrive, there are “forty cars and a tour bus” in the lot, and a lot of people standing nearby with photographic gear, taking pictures of the barn. Jack frequently muses on misinformation and disinformation (“the family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” he says at one point) — something that comes from the human brain’s inability to process everything flying at it, and our need to make sense of it with conspiracy theories. [lengthy](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208561) [peer](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25112247)- [reviewed](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831638) [papers](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40588075) and dissertations on White Noise, because it is not really just a story, though it’s plenty entertaining on the surface. It’s called “the most photographed barn in America,” and they start seeing signs for it long before they get there. What a strange and largely unremarked-upon choice — but the movie and the novel treat this as if it’s a totally normal sort of academic department to found. Jack can’t really believe that a disaster would happen to him because he is a well-off college professor, not the kind of person to whom disasters happen — which is to say, a person on TV.

A husband, wife and their friend chat at the end of a supermarket aisle. Adam Driver as Jack, from left, Greta Gerwig as Babette and Don Cheadle as Murray in “ ...

[hasn’t been in front](https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-02-08/gerwig-best-director-oscars-women) of the camera for some time, or because the role falls too far outside of her typical woman-child repertoire. While the film elides a slew of minor characters and subplots, Murray’s omnivorous fascination is a counterpoint to Jack’s increasingly grim self-involvement. [Barbara Sukowa](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2021-02-04/review-two-of-us-french-romantic-drama-barbara-sukowa-martine-chevallier) presides at the German hospital where Jack lands near the story’s end (now with Babette in tow). In the process he draws a line from mass hysteria to human carelessness, the results of which can be similarly catastrophic. [Ann Roth](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-16-ca-herman16-story.html), who costumed De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill”). [Brian De Palma](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-brian-depalma-profile-documentary-20160606-snap-story.html), not a purveyor of innocent fun, who suggested Baumbach consider an adaptation to try things Baumbach’s own scripts wouldn’t allow. “Waves and Radiation” introduces us to the Gladney family and Jack’s academic work in his first-of-its-kind Hitler studies department. Case in point: In a closing supermarket scene, DeLillo described shoppers as “aimless and haunted.” In the film, the same moment ends in an eight-minute dance number incorporating the expansive cast. “Dylarama,” taking up the second half of both book and film, documents Babette’s clandestine participation in an unsanctioned medical trial. Yet framing this as a dichotomy glosses over the complexity of the source material. [White Noise](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-caw-paperback-writers3-2010jan03-story.html),” a scholarly friend discussing cinematic car crashes tells the story’s protagonist, “Look past the violence, Jack. Whereas the book built up a kind of fatalistic resignation,

I first read Don DeLillo's 'White Noise', the book that serves as the source material for Noah Baumbach's new eponymous film, as a precocious teen.

They all are great, and Driver particularly is scarily believable in the role of a man drowning in the fear of mortality. Literary critics who swear by Don DeLillo's tome would disagree, but I would go so far as to say that the film gets across what the novel wished to say more efficiently. A truck crashes into a train carrying some toxic chemical and the result is an explosion that creates a huge monster of a noxious cloud, which then rains. One of the film's most entertaining scenes has the two faux-competing over the respective figures in a classroom. Add the fear of death, a universal theme across all cultures, and you have a potent cocktail of ideas. I re-read the whole thing a decade or so later, and while I appreciated its layers and themes, it was still difficult to finish.

Baumbach's last film, the critically acclaimed divorce drama Marriage Story, was nominated for Best Picture in 2020 before the world shut down. It gave Netflix ...

Overall, Baumbach stretches everything he could possibly imagine doing in a film and takes the biggest swing of his career with this one. In fact, some of the best things about this film is how Baumbach utilizes his increased budget this time around to create a second act that has action stunts and set pieces that feel more early Spielberg than Baumbach’s previous work. It’s all a part of avoiding what confronts us all the time. It also gave us one of the best “memed” movies of that year, complete with arguing velociraptors. Based on the U.S. With projects like David Fincher’s The Killer & George C.

Filmmaker Noah Baumbach adapts Don DeLillo's “unfilmable” satire tackling Hitler, Big Pharma and consumerism for Netflix, streaming Dec. 30.

You’d have to expect as much from a movie so committed to evoking an era of movies that belonged to the movie brats and their peers. They aren’t always DeLillo’s ideas, to the extent that this is even a reasonable expectation. Whether talking to his precocious kids or his colleagues, Jack and the other characters swap bits of insight like so much product, dallying in neat, smart-sounding summaries of the world that will nevertheless bring them no closer to making peace with the inevitable. What Baumbach basically gets right is that none of these goings-on, none of what a lush, consumer-forward, aspirational era has to offer, is enough to make up for the fact that we will all die anyway. His wife, Babette ( [Greta Gerwig](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/how-greta-gerwig-turned-the-personal-lady-bird-into-a-perfect-movie-126300/)), is a bubbly woman with a bubbly name, crinkle-curled half to death, with enough smarts to keep up with Jack and enough of a handle on reality to seem comparatively normal. I admire that willingness to glory in these big gestures, even as the movie that results can feel like a mix of vibrant and unexpected approaches to the material paired with the dreary, misshapen delirium of incomplete ideas. The kind of world in which a scholar of Hitler can lord his performative authority over his audience in the way that Hitler did, leaning into his own mesmerism, proving a point about charismatic fascism while convincing himself that he is no fascist. A simple matter of marital infidelity can aspire to the broad importance of a pharmaceutical conspiracy — a way of feeling connected to history while nevertheless navel-gazing, zeroing in ourselves. (He’s working on it.) He is, among other things, a man with [Hitler](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/hitler/) on the mind, sharing with that monster a penchant for public performance, for taking his audience to church, in his own way. There was the prolonged and argumentative death of a marriage, on one hand, and another throughline — the much more interesting strand of the movie — about the cruel legal maneuvers of their divorce proceeding, populated by lawyers and their talent for seeing people not as people, but as clients, bit players in some grotesque, lucrative game. Baumbach’s take on the novel — which, thanks in part to the movie’s sizable budget, qualifies as the director’s biggest and most ambitious movie to date — is flawed. [Noah Baumbach](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/noah-baumbach/) up to in [White Noise](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/lcd-soundsystem-new-body-rhumba-white-noise-noah-baumbach-1234582828/)?

Noah Baumach's adaptation of the beloved novel is streaming on Netflix now. By Josh Zajdman Published: Dec 30, 2022. white ...

What it is and how it’s dealt with is just one facet of the story. Let’s hope that the adaptations of Libra, Underworld, and The Silence come to fruition. You have to read it and you have to read it before the forthcoming Netflix adaptation. Thrillingly, it’s also the work that is ushering in a new era of appreciation and attention for DeLillo from some unexpected corners—namely, Netflix. But, then there is White Noise, a modern classic if ever there was one and the book that DeLillo is arguably best known for. Deftly taking the reader from the Cold War to the turn of the century (and back again), Underworld is about everything and the way it’s all connected and how we too are all connected.

Noah Baumbach's adaptation of the 1985 Don DeLillo novel, starring Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, is a bizarre, messy, occasionally enthralling ...

Later, Baumbach shows he can mix action with comedy in a farcical station-wagon car chase that could easily hail from a Chevy Chase movie from the period in which White Noise is set. Although the showy, CGI train crash that precipitates the Airborne Toxic Event doesn’t really work — it bluntly literalizes a disaster that, in the book, is all the more ominous for being distant and vague — what follows is an extraordinary, sustained sequence that echoes Spielberg’s masterpiece of collective madness, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. (It’s also the first period piece he has attempted, and the heightened, day-glo interpretation of the 1980s in the costuming and production design is one of White Noise’s principal pleasures.) He rises to the challenge in unexpected ways. An accident unleashes a poisonous cloud known as the Airborne Toxic Event, and the Gladneys are caught up in a wave of panic. Adapted from the beloved 1985 Don DeLillo novel, White Noise is a baffling, uneven, sporadically enthralling movie about the collective psychosis of 1980s America and a dry run for the end of the world. The besotted pair compete over which of them is more anxious about dying, but something seems genuinely wrong with Babette, and an ominous cloud is gathering on the horizon — literally.

Noah Baumbach takes us behind the scenes of that joyful supermarket dance in his Netflix movie "White Noise," starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig.

"There's something great, after all the dark things that happen in the film, to have a (scene) that helps us navigate that emotional terrain," Neumann says. ("I wanted Jodie to be front and center," Neumann says. “I wanted the cast to be able to improv and find moments and be inspired by the set," Gonchor says. “The dance vocabulary you see is tightly choreographed, and then it’s directed to feel more relaxed,” Neumann says. The goal was to create a "heavenly place where the whole town got lost in this white noise of consumption," Gonchor says. So by the time we're shooting the dance sequence, the camera can roam on its own, see what's down different aisles, go up high, and peek around the corner." ](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/09/30/adam-driver-fights-death-white-noise-new-york-film-festival/10460731002/) Although they still fear death, the couple is newly grateful for the life and family they share, and they begin to dance blithely alongside their fellow shoppers. "We made everything climbable; the aisles were wider; the supermarket carts were bigger. "I also ended up doing a lot of on-the-ground research just being a weirdo in a supermarket and watching people shop." "We wanted real people you would see shopping in a supermarket." Along with movie musicals, Baumbach says that he and choreographer David Neumann pulled inspiration from "dances of death and mourning in different cultures." By dancing with abandon down the condiments aisle, Jack and Babette are savoring the simple pleasures of everyday errands, knowing that tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

Noah Baumbach shows newfound directorial vision in his adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel.

And then, in the final throes of the final act, we get a discussion of the pragmatism and idealism of religion, the movie having covered the pointed pointlessness of everything but theology, and that’s a big one, so hey, we better toss it in there. It’s such a weird experience, this film; it shows the intricacy and diligence of a visionary work, but none of the coherence. Case in point: The characters use big words to try to understand the un-understandables of their reality, and here I am, using big words like “recalcitrant existential quandaries” to try to understand the un-understandables of this movie. [The Life Aquatic](https://decider.com/movie/the-life-aquatic-with-steve-zissou/) and [Fantastic Mr. The supermarket is the hub of community activity, with its splashy arrays of luridly packaged snacks and cleaning products. There’s a scene in which she swallows something and Jack interrogates her and she says it’s just a name-brand candy, cherry flavor, but he wants to know why she didn’t suck on it first, because it’s the type of candy you don’t just swallow like that, and she says of her swallowing, “That was just saliva I didn’t know what to do with.” Notably, the local movie theater is showing Krull – or perhaps that’s not notable. The BRANDS clutter the counters and tabletops and shelves of the Gladney home as various dramas unfold, most notably the Airborne Toxic Event, which I must note is merely a piece of the loopy plotline here, and how Babette is secretly taking mystery pills, a drug called Dylar. This, after he and Babette have a borderline-insane conversation in which each hopes he/she dies first because he/she can’t bear the thought of going on without him/her. Eventually the edits and overlapping dialogue settle down so we can count four kids as they pile into the station wagon to escape the Airborne Toxic Event, evolved from a “feathery plume” to a “billowy cloud,” a thick, black, smoky pollutant that threatens the townsfolk after a drunk tanker-truck driver collides with a train hauling its own tankers of explosive goop. As they navigate a chaotic evacuation, Jack is exposed to the Airborne Toxic Event, and it might eventually kill him, maybe, perhaps. The Gist: It’s the early 1980s, which might mean something, or it might not. [Marriage Story](https://decider.com/movie/marriage-story/), [Frances Ha](https://decider.com/movie/frances-ha/)), but adapts someone else’s story.

Adam Driver's latest film White Noise has received a Rotten Tomatoes score of 63%, following its release on Netflix.

"A strange brew. [Is Adam Driver's new Netflix movie White Noise worth watchin](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42238666/white-noise-review/) [In its four-star review of the film,](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42238666/white-noise-review/) Digital Spy wrote: "How much you like White Noise will depend on your willingness to succumb to the strictures of its storytelling world. [Movie Mom](https://moviemom.com/white-noise-2/) [Empire Magazine](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/white-noise/) [White Noise ending explained - what the hell was that about?](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a42266707/white-noise-ending-explained-netflix/) [ABC News](https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Culture/review-white-noise-sign-respect-virtuoso-completely-breaks/story?id=95940625) [White Noise](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a41050237/adam-driver-netflix-movie-white-noise-first-reviews/) has received its Rotten Tomatoes score, following its release on [Netflix](https://www.digitalspy.com/netflix/).

A movie based on one of the great novels from the previous century has been released. It is based on Don DeLillo's book "White Noise."

The 1951 [DeLillo](/topic/delillo)has published 17 novels (perhaps 18 without verifying one written under an identity), five plays, a screenplay, and a collection of short stories throughout the course of a career spanning more than fifty years. For instance, the underworld.

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig star in Noah Baumbach's new dark comedy, White Noise. Here's how tall the star stands and other info!

19, 1983 in San Diego, and before becoming the successful actor he is today, he was in the Marines. [multiple reports](https://www.menshealth.com/entertainment/a30196109/adam-driver-facts/), the 39-year-old House of Gucci star stands around 6’2″. Driver’s latest film is [White Noise ](https://netflixlife.com/2022/12/30/white-noise-is-dylar-real-drug/)directed by frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach, which he stars alongside Greta Gerwig.

Noah Baumbach's White Noise is a bold but deeply flawed adaptation of Don DeLillo's classic 1985 novel of the same name. The film is streaming now on ...

White Noise, in turn, returns to the same level of emotional separation throughout its final third that had previously dominated its opening act. Behind the camera, Baumbach shoots White Noise’s midpoint evacuation scenes with a kind of energy and slick style that he’s never employed in any of his prior films. That said, while White Noise firmly ranks as one of the most emotionally lifeless films of Baumbach’s career, its story does allow him to flex his muscles as a director in ways he’s never truly been allowed to before. There’s something admirable about White Noise’s overbearing strangeness, in fact, and the way in which it utterly refuses to ever even pretend that it exists in a world that resembles or feels like our own. Throughout its opening act, Baumbach’s latest film introduces viewers to not only the Gladneys, but also the off-kilter version of 1980s America that the film takes place in — one where nearly everyone talks with a stilted cadence and the kind of obnoxious, overly formal manner of speaking that can usually only be heard in the most oblivious and self-involved of college social circles. At times, the film feels so purposefully artificial and satirical that it more closely resembles the movies made by iconic film absurdists like Robert Downey Sr.

The actor earned a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of Jack. The film from Noah Baumbach is now streaming on Netflix.

See our [latest prediction champs](https://www.goldderby.com/best-prediction-scores/awards/league-data/). [the 2023 Oscar nominees through January 24](https://www.goldderby.com/leagues/) [Make your predictions](https://www.goldderby.com/leagues/) at Gold Derby now. [White Noise](https://www.goldderby.com/t/white-noise/)” receives its [Netflix](https://www.goldderby.com/t/netflix/) launch on December 30. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our [famous forums](https://www.goldderby.com/forums/) where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Download our free and easy app for [Apple/iPhone devices](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1460576753) or [Android (Google Play)](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pmc.goldDerby) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. [Adam Driver](https://www.goldderby.com/t/adam-driver/) has received a Golden Globe nomination for [Best Film Comedy/Musical Actor](https://www.goldderby.com/odds/graph/golden-globes-film-2023-predictions/best-film-comedy-musical-actor/) for his starring role as Jack. “Death, and the existential angst swarming around the anticipation of death, is, ostensibly, the overarching theme of White Noise; unfortunately, it’s also a theme which Baumbach seems incapable of meeting in its attendant seriousness and depth.” None of the performances are singled out as notable but “Baumbach does more interesting work in three minutes than he does in the remaining 134, evoking the profundity of familial silences in the lucidly comic, yet restrained, manner that populates his best work. That this, and the ensuing scenes of the family’s struggle to remain calm as they sit in traffic while evacuating their home, is eventually drowned out by a poorly constructed car chase that results in little but lame slapstick is a tidy example of the film’s failings.” In the end, the “most rewarding scene is a bravura grocery store dance number over the closing credits.” “A well-intentioned disaster, Baumbach’s attempt at the ‘unfilmmable’ project can never find its footing, because DeLillo never did, either.” He adds, “Originally authored in 1985, ‘White Noise‘s’ sensibilities don’t feel rooted in anything contemporary.” The director might connect with the script but the cast does not. The truth is we feel somewhat less invested here – even when witnessing the intimate, reassuring bedtime discussions between Jack and Babette.” Saying that, Driver shines and “embodies smug academic and showman Jack who presides over all, enrapturing his students, though never quite acknowledging any of them either. Still, the entire cast is pitch-perfect, everyone inhabiting their roles with an expert ease.”

Why does Netflix's adaptation of the Don DeLillo classic end with a dance sequence in a supermarket? Director Noah Baumbach breaks it down.

“I’d like to think it captures that sense of the absurd that I loved about the novel.” “But when I saw the movie, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess this makes sense.’ ” “With the dance itself, I don’t know that I ever fully understood what it was and why we were doing it,’ ” Cheadle says. “We had people come in off the street and just grab a shopping cart and start going up and down the aisles,” Gonchor says. “I had to provide a space that the dancers could tell a story through, using the aisles and shopping carts, with enough room to film a beautiful sequence.” “Some of the products in there were actually real — you’re like, ‘Why is this real meat?’ But the scope of it was amazing.” “I reached out to James while we were shooting and I told him I’d like him to write an upbeat song about death,” Baumbach says. “Even when it’s not an entertaining dance number, I like to have that time to just sit with the experience at the end of a movie. I don’t want to be immediately engaging in the meaning and saying, ‘What did you think?’ I want some time to just sit with the feeling.” “There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers,” DeLillo writes. I went to a lot of supermarkets with a different sense of observation, thinking, ‘What was Don DeLillo saying?’” Animated films like “Shrek” or “Despicable Me.” Even the odd raucous comedy like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

Noah Baumbach's "White Noise" is not meant for everybody, but if you realize that chaos is the only thing that makes sense in our mortal lives, ...

“White Noise” makes us privy to the futility of our actions, our distractions, our fears, and our behavioral tendencies and gives us an unabridged version of what human life is all about. Like Jack and Babbette, most of us are not ready to accept that fact, and it takes a catastrophe to come to terms with the inevitable. Throughout the absurd events and conversations, one thing that remains common is the constant talk of death and how much the characters fear impending doom. The supermarket in “White Noise” represents not only the concept of consumerism but also a transitional zone between death and rebirth. Also, the whole concept of a supermarket is to make the customers think that they need something when, in reality, they do not. One of the worst aspects that came to light when the pandemic hit was how corrupted and disreputable the media had become over time.