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Director Noah Baumbach tackles misinformation in 'White Noise,' wryly1
As theaters went dark and the world ground to a halt in 2020, filmmaker Noah Baumbach picked up a novel that spoke3 of a different apocalyptic4 tragedy. Baumbach hadn't read Don DeLillo's White Noise since it came out in 1985, when he was a teenager.
"It had a big effect on me at the time," Baumbach told NPR's Steven Inskeep about the film, now out in U.S. and U.K. theaters. "I kept stopping and reading it aloud to Greta (Gerwig, his partner) or to anybody who would listen and just saying, I can't believe how much this book speaks really to all time... then it coincided with the pandemic. And that's really when I thought, well, maybe I'll try to see if there's a movie here."
Baumbach's eponymous film, like DeLillo's novel, is a highly stylized, preposterous5 satire6 of consumerism and mass media that also manages to parody7 academia, reflect on family life ("the cradle of misinformation") and middle age, and wrap it all in an extravagant8 disaster plot.
"I kept turning on the TV news and seeing toxic9 spills and it occurred to me that people regard these events not as events in the real world, but as television — pure television," DeLillo himself told NPR at the time that White Noise was published. The novel won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
In the film, the supermarket doubles as a kind of candy-colored temple. Don Cheadle's character, Professor Murray Siskind, extols10 its merits as a "gateway11" between death and spiritual rebirth.
"Look how bright. Look how full of psychic12 data, waves and radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum13, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases," he says. "You just have to know how to decipher it."
Jack14 Gladney (played by Adam Driver), the head of the Hitler studies department at a small liberal arts college, narrates15 the film. Gladney is also behind the very concept of Hitler studies. He lives a comfortable life in a Midwestern suburb with his fourth wife, Babette (played by Gerwig) and four children from their collective six previous marriages. That comfort is upended by a menacing cloud — or airborne toxic event, as it's called in the film.
With its $100 million budget, White Noise is the most ambitious project to date for Baumbach, whose breakout film was The Squid and the Whale (2005) and whose last film was the critically acclaimed16 Marriage Story (2019).
Baumbach describes the movie, shot on film, as a "period piece." The costumes and cars very much belong to the 1980s and it features a complex car chase (with a flying family station wagon) and a fully17 staged train crash.
"It was a rig but it was pulled into the train and timed out and everything. We did a lot of the detail work separately of the canisters hitting each other," Baumbach said. "It does have a lot of visual effects in it as well, but they're designed to work with the same aesthetic18."
Baumbach describes the eeriness19 that permeates20 his film as "this sort of otherness, this other reality that's like floating above the ground" — in short, the same sort of strangeness that accompanied pandemic era lockdowns.
"We all recognize when we have those times in our lives, you know, when we we we acknowledge that the world feels very strange to us. It's like things are familiar and not familiar," Baumbach said.
In one scene, Gladney gives a lecture on the crowds that listened to Hitler, and in the process inadvertently reveals his preoccupation with death.
"To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone," he tells assembled students and professors, his black cape21 spread out like some bird of doom22. The scene is superimposed with images of the crash between a tractor-trailer carrying toxic waste and a train, which triggers the catastrophe23.
Throughout the story there are competing narratives24 for what is or isn't "the truth." The Gladneys constantly speaking over one another combines with the incessant25 drone of the television and radio to create a cacophony26 of sound that sometimes becomes a symphony.
"That was even my direction to the kids. I said, you're like a radio that was turned down at the beginning of the movie and then you're just on for the whole time. So even even when you're off camera, just imagine you're still having this conversation," Baumbach said. "I saw the family in this movie as a kind of microcosm of the culture at large, which is how we both contribute to and also collaborate27 in false information. This story opens it up to the culture at large, this notion of fake news that we've been living with for the last few years."
1 wryly | |
adv. 挖苦地,嘲弄地 | |
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2 transcript | |
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书 | |
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3 spoke | |
n.(车轮的)辐条;轮辐;破坏某人的计划;阻挠某人的行动 v.讲,谈(speak的过去式);说;演说;从某种观点来说 | |
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4 apocalyptic | |
adj.预示灾祸的,启示的 | |
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5 preposterous | |
adj.荒谬的,可笑的 | |
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6 satire | |
n.讽刺,讽刺文学,讽刺作品 | |
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7 parody | |
n.打油诗文,诙谐的改编诗文,拙劣的模仿;v.拙劣模仿,作模仿诗文 | |
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8 extravagant | |
adj.奢侈的;过分的;(言行等)放肆的 | |
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9 toxic | |
adj.有毒的,因中毒引起的 | |
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10 extols | |
v.赞颂,赞扬,赞美( extol的第三人称单数 ) | |
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11 gateway | |
n.大门口,出入口,途径,方法 | |
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12 psychic | |
n.对超自然力敏感的人;adj.有超自然力的 | |
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13 spectrum | |
n.谱,光谱,频谱;范围,幅度,系列 | |
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14 jack | |
n.插座,千斤顶,男人;v.抬起,提醒,扛举;n.(Jake)杰克 | |
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15 narrates | |
v.故事( narrate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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16 acclaimed | |
adj.受人欢迎的 | |
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17 fully | |
adv.完全地,全部地,彻底地;充分地 | |
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18 aesthetic | |
adj.美学的,审美的,有美感 | |
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19 eeriness | |
n.怪诞,胆怯,阴森 | |
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20 permeates | |
弥漫( permeate的第三人称单数 ); 遍布; 渗入; 渗透 | |
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21 cape | |
n.海角,岬;披肩,短披风 | |
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22 doom | |
n.厄运,劫数;v.注定,命定 | |
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23 catastrophe | |
n.大灾难,大祸 | |
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24 narratives | |
记叙文( narrative的名词复数 ); 故事; 叙述; 叙述部分 | |
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25 incessant | |
adj.不停的,连续的 | |
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26 cacophony | |
n.刺耳的声音 | |
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27 collaborate | |
vi.协作,合作;协调 | |
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