“I watch the kids like I’m watching a whole movie on a radio station,” Baumbach added. “If you happen to dial it, they’ll still go on.” In addition to TVs and radios, children are surrounded by boxes of sugar cereal, frozen meals, soda and chips — all hallmarks of middle-class crap consumerism . (“It’s all these things I was rejected as a kid,” the director admits.)
White Noise‘ as early as in college The narrative conflict between comfort and danger is on stark display as soon as Baumbach begins sketching out the anticipated scenarios for the film after the pandemic hit New York 2020. Within months, the cracks in the social safety net were on full display on television screens: disastrous images of quarantines, empty neighborhoods and destroyed supermarkets, and the president’s press conferences about bleach and insect repellent. The DeLillo story of air poisoning was viewed around the world as threatening and inauthentic. “It felt like a movie, going to the supermarket sometimes – no toilet paper, we’ve all been through this craziness,” he recalls. “So I have both DeLillo’s supermarket and what we’ve been through.” Like Jack and Babette, middle-class America is suddenly confronted with a psychotropic drug that cannot pass neoliberal fiscal policy or mood-enhancing drugs to stop the death force.
It is therefore no coincidence that Baumbach ultimately chooses to end the film in a supermarket. “[It’s] the visual equivalent of white noise,” he says of the scene’s surreal song-and-dance routine through various consumables. “But we’ve lost a lot of that ‘going to the store’ feeling because of the internet. So I’m also thinking about supermarkets as if we’re inside the internet. It’s a way of visualizing what we’re doing on the screen a lot of the time. way – a place where everything is next to each other. It’s like you go to college and have Hitler [next to] Elvis Presley because they’re in the same room for class. It’s suddenly leveling them. In a way, they’re become equivalent.”
The psychedelic colors, synchronized bodies and twitching theme song throughout the sequence, courtesy of LCD Soundsystem, do evoke augmented reality content or YouTube flash mobs The specificity, and perfectly telescopes the film’s meta-angst and rapturously absurd message. Yet it also hints at some of the intimate human relationships formed by worldly rituals and material culture, even in the most innocuous of circumstances. In other words, for all its bland indictment of the modern world, Baumbach’s White Noise retains a degree of redemption, or Jack Guerra Jack Gladney optimistically observes our human capacity for “surprise”—”we create hope all the time”—even as he wanders the aisles in search of more coffee creamer.
2020
