The “Immensity of Things”: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and the Consumer Sublime

Abstract

The “Immensity of Things”: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and the Consumer Sublime Eileen G’Sell (bio) Thirty years before White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern paean to the pleasures—and perils—of consumer culture, Allen Ginsberg raved about “shopping for images” in his prose poem “A Supermarket in California.” “What peaches and what penumbras!” he extols in its third paragraph. “Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!” Swap Berkeley, California, for the fictional “Blacksmith,” Ohio, the peaches for packages of sugar-free chewing gum, the avocados for honeydew melons, and you have the alimental abundance spilling across White Noise in double-bagged abandon. “[I]n the mass and variety of our purchases . . . the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering,” reflects narrator Jack Gladney in the fifth chapter, “in the sense of replenishment we felt . . . the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.” As is clear from his extensive filmography, Noah Baumbach knows a thing or two about loneliness, so his choice, however audacious, to adapt the canonical title for the screen is not all that surprising. From The Squid and the Whale (2005) to Greenberg (2010) to Marriage Story (2019), Baumbach has made his mark plumbing the (often pathetic) depths of a very male sort of alienation. If anything, DeLillo’s deliciously stylized, comically droll prose serves to temper the director’s penchant for autobiographical self-seriousness, a type of self-seriousness that can sometimes overshadow the seriousness of his films. DeLillo purists might be justifiably wary that a movie version could adequately translate the “noise” conjured on the novel’s page—both externally in the incessant, stilted yet rhythmic chatter between characters, and internally in the narrator’s rumbling existential panic, often punctuated by a triad of brand name products (“Clorets, Velamints, Freedent”), as though to varnish his dread with the dazzle of adspeak. But as the novel is divided into three parts—“Waves and Radiation,” “The Airborne Toxic Event,” and “Dylarama”—translating its plot to the three acts of a film has a kind of easy logic to which Baumbach mostly adheres. The characters and [End Page 114] events stay much the same, albeit with some creative, and mostly effective, casting. Middle-aged Jack Gladney, founder of “Nazi Studies” at a small, Midwestern liberal arts college, is played by a somewhat younger Adam Driver, if with plausible poor posture. His fourth wife, Babette, is played by Greta Gerwig, silly yet sympathetic in her jogging suit and wild perm. Murray Siskind, Jack’s best friend and academic colleague (and Jewish in the novel), is played by Don Cheadle with wry charm and pedantic hilarity. “Brilliant” neurochemist Winnie Richards is played a bit incongruously by Jodie Turner-Smith, a terrific actor (take After Yang), but not at all the jittery, awkward beanpole so poignant in the original. Jack’s doctor, originally of Indian descent as Sundar Chakravarty, is now a man of Chinese descent, Chester Lu (Francis Jue), a performance unfortunately verging on caricature. Wilder (Dean Moore) doesn’t stay a toddler, but remains sagaciously mute as the youngest of Jack and Babette’s voluble brood. Part of what Baumbach honors in the film is its very mid-80s context—rife with its most visually salient signifiers, from wood-paneled station wagons and plastic visors to pre-hipster mom jeans and Minnie Mouse sweats. And part of the film’s delightful appeal is how it channels our late-capitalist contemporary angst—whether about socioeconomic precarity, environmental degradation, the erosion of the nuclear family, or addiction to screens—into a time period in which all of these concerns were already present, if at a lower volume, presciently probed by DeLillo. In both the novel and the film, what characters swallow, breathe in, ingest, and consume—whether gustatory, audiovisual, or ideological—is both taken for granted and dangerous. The very things that distract us from death are...