A note on Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” which I was finally able to watch on Netflix last night. When it still was in theaters, I tried desperately to watch the Bollywood credit roll, which sounded like the high point of the movie in reviews. No dice. I loved DeLillo’s novel, and Baumbach’s last movie, “Marriage Stoty,” so I was pretty excited about streaming the movie, reviews notwithstanding. It was a big letdown. Not that it didn’t do the novel justice—I can’t care one way or another because good movies are made of bad books all the time. It was well-written, and funny, but in all the wrong places, usually a function of embarrassment on my part: it was excruciating to watch the two stars struggle to authenticate these cartoon characters, both of whom are about as adult as Homer Simpson.
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The movie seemed way arch and downright repellant, too stupid for belief, when the adults were talking, especially but not only the academics, who rendered everything in sight as a "sign" of, what else, a sign: this is not an A & P, a major character in this script. But they were also aware of good and evil only as something personified and purposeful, Hitler, Elvis, and so forth. The kids, by contrast, were pretty interesting, and believable, because they were aware that bad and/or dangerous things come in anonymous, abstract, arbitrary, external, natural forms, like accidents, "toxic events" that have no deliberate or individual origin, nothing to tie them to "facial recognition" or a person with motives.
So the movie reminded me of how the horror genre became mainstream in the 1980s, by depicting adults—cops, teachers, parents, politicians—as unbelievably naive bearers of quaint notions regarding good, evil, and the allocation of causation or the assignment of consequence, particularly of blame. Crime and punishment are irrelevant categories. “Halloween” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” are the templates here. In “White Noise,” unlike these horror/slasher masterpieces, the adults get most of the screen time, but their emptiness is so pathetic that we're always looking over their shoulders at the kids, hoping that they'll save the dialogue and the day.
We're thankful that they—the kids--are always milling or jostling around in the background or the back seat, saying believable things about their parents and the world outside the house and the car (the exception being the students in the classroom, but they're already quasi-adults in thrall to the bullshit being peddled by the Elvis and Hitler impersonators).
So it's a movie that works according to the logic that Daniel Mendelssohn applied to “Mad Men”—as a narrative shaped covertly by the childrens' point of view. But it again works badly, and becomes boring even as the adults get emotional (or is it merely drug-addled?), because the kids don't get enough of the dialogue.
And then the ending, in the acre of the A & P, the anti-exuberance of the feeble attempt at a Busby-Bollywood dance number to wrap up the meta-commentary on how fiction and film perform their magic function(s). “See, audience, this was all artifice, we've been choreographed down to the marks on the floor we're supposed to hit!” Problem is, there's no joy in the performance which proves the artifice, no excess in the gestural reach of the choreographer or the dancers—certainly nothing like the pelvic stutter Elvis perfected, or the ecstatic idiocy Hitler induced, or just the happy stupidity of Bollywood endings. In the aisles, there was nothing sexy and threatening to anyone's proprieties, and from the camera above you can see only the small, meticulous movements of farmed ants.
In sum: Ugh!
I haven't seen it yet, but I wonder if DeLillo novel could be filmed successfully.