White Noise

And Prison Doomsday Preppers

Shame on me for not mentioning it, but Happy Banned Books Week!

I read this Don DeLillo novel in my halfway house, and I have to be honest – it’s one of the last books I really rammed myself through. Once I got a hold of a smartphone, every book after that (and there weren’t many) was something of a slog. I had to commit to sitting down and finishing them, ignoring the phone, and bypassing the many movies I’d be streaming for this particular project. I don’t know how ANYONE is a book reader anymore, and I love books!

DeLillo’s absurdist tome was an engaging and enjoyable read that circled around the idea of what does or does not count as an apocalypse, and whether or not you’d truly be of use. It’s a comedy, and on the page it reads with a singular voice, of an event you otherwise couldn’t imagine. But Noah Baumbach’s glossy Netflix adaptation is nakedly occurring within a cinematic vocabulary we all know from large-scale disaster films, traffic jams and encampments and character actors feuding over supply. Does he truly subvert the form, or is it just a slightly-mocking version of what we all know?

This is the biggest Baumbach film yet, and it probably will remain his biggest ever. Even though it’s from two years ago, it feels like a relic to me, not only because it’s a movie that came out while I was incarcerated, but because it sounds like Netflix is in the tentpole blockbuster business now, making stuff with Dwayne Johnson or Jennifer Lopez to appeal to each personality’s least-demanding fans. Noah Baumbach is never again going to get top dollar to adapt Don DeLillo. The Beatles are dead, the dinosaurs are never coming back, etc. etc.

The movie is as similarly discursive as the book, following an eccentric family as they cope with an environmental tragedy that has affected the Earth but has yet to be one of their top three interests that day. Adam Driver, playing somewhat older than his age, is a college professor known for the field of “Hitler Studies”, incongruously matched up with a friend (Don Cheadle) who, teaching “Elvis Studies”, seems to have a lot of postmodern theories on the topic. Cheadle has been a little stiff in bigger movies lately, so it’s nice to see him let loose in something a bit lighter.

Driver has a sweet chemistry with his wife (Greta Gerwig, delightful), and their romance is largely preserved from the page, though the movie lingers on a tough Third Act betrayal that seems (almost farcically) more severe than it is in the book. The kids, varying ages of pre-tween to teen, all have their own neuroses, and are appropriately portrayed by two children of journeyman actor Alessandro Nivola as well as the more decorated Raffey Cassidy (who I did recall from “Tomorrowland”, which we watched in prison).

The world is slowly dismantling itself, but like most DeLillo and Baumbach characters, these people can’t stop talking about the small nuances they find in every detail of their daily life. So when they’re stuck in a dangerous traffic jam, they begin to opine on the people surrounding them, the people walking out of cars, the lost wanderers. And as camps devolve into possible cult behavior, the end result is that these people can’t stop questioning everything with this frozen deadpan expression. Gerwig finds the warmth underneath this, and gives the strongest performance, though each actor deserves recognition for making the flighty DeLillo language palatable. And the whole thing ends in a singalong to a new LCD Soundsystem song, so, how bad can the apocalypse really be? To allude to another NYC music legend, “White Noise” the book feels like a very funny doomsday screed. But the movie is very much like being inside a David Byrne track.

In prison, you encounter a lot of doomsday people. Depending on where your prison is, you’re going to be dealing with more than a few off-the-grid types who calmly, rationally believe that an end is near, maybe not THE end, but something resembling a particular end. Amusingly, there’s a whole industry dedicated to marketing towards those people, because they’re certainly spenders. Much of it takes the form of magazines and leaflets, mostly about how to remain anonymous while still participating in use of the internet and communicating with each other. While I’m not sure it’s written anywhere, I saw many newsletters and tiny magazines dedicated to the making of ham radios get confiscated by the guards. It’s an interesting demographic, and I’m kind of glad prison gave me a new perspective on these guys.

We will return with more book-to-movie adaptations soon. But next week, it’s OCTOBER. We’re beginning SCARETOBERFEST, a WHOLE MONTH of HORROR, and we’re starting with a week of ZOMBIES.