White Noise

Film critic Peter Travers shares his review of director Noah Baumbach's new film "White Noise," starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and more.

“White Noise,” which goes flooey more often than it hits the mark, needed more of that. “White Noise” plays like a Baumbach collaboration with DeLillo, a sign of respect to a virtuoso. The last two are the gifted offspring of actors Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer.

Don DeLillo's book “White Noise,” newly adapted for the screen by Noah Baumbach, precisely diagnosed the modern condition, Dana Spiotta writes.

All these feats of linguistic alchemy make it so that when you finish “White Noise,” you see the “colloquial density” in a new way. TV with its “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power” has been supplanted by the internet and iPhones, but we are more than ever overloaded by “the incessant bombardment of information” described in the novel. More than ever “we are the sum total of our data.” I put my finger on my touchscreen and tap the New York Times app. And there is Dylar, a drug that has the side effect of making people unable to “distinguish between words and things.” The book’s attention to the “unlocatable roar” of our age also plays out in how the characters react to events in which language both identifies and obscures what is happening. “White Noise” is a campus novel, “White Noise” is a family romance, “White Noise” is proto-cli-fi, with man-made environmental contaminations. What is first described as a “feathery plume,” then “a black billowing cloud,” finally becomes the “airborne toxic event,” as tracking each iteration or recitation becomes more powerful than the experience of the thing itself. When the children start reporting their symptoms to their parents, they are informed that they are exhibiting “outdated symptoms,” as the news reportage is more attended than the actual experience. Noah Baumbach’s funny and very stylish film adaptation of “White Noise” is a great invitation to return to the source material, Don DeLillo’s novel from almost 40 years ago. But of course, these aren’t random when we read them in “White Noise.” They are chosen, arranged, invented for us to laugh at but also to listen closely to. Spaced out in the novel, often in its own paragraph apropos of nothing before it, we get lines of three brand names separated by commas: “Dacron, Orlon, Lycra Spandex,” “Mastercard, Visa, American Express,” “Tegrin, Denorex, Selsun Blue.” The pattern is constructed, artful. “White Noise” doesn’t have the historical reach of DeLillo’s books “Underworld” or “Libra,” or the international gravitas of “The Names,” all extraordinary novels.

So feels Jack Gladney, whose own life seems in tip-top shape. He's a well-respected professor at College on the Hill, a dynamic liberal arts school that draws ...

We can infer that the movie’s title is really about all the metaphorical whistling we do in the dark. There’s some suggestion that Babette and pert near everyone else is taking plenty of prescription medication to solve various woes, but the most important drug we hear about is Dylar. One says yes—adding that the partner was topless and it was one of the two or three greatest experiences he’s ever had. The cloud of poisonous gas is said to cause a multitude of symptoms (which officials change and amend regularly), but most think that it’s definitely bad for you. When asked how it’s going, the expert laments that the bodies aren’t quite laid out as they would be in an actual simulation, but “you have to make allowances for the fact that everything you see tonight is real.” A truck collides with a train, derailing most of the latter and surely killing, at the very least, the truck driver. Kennedy in heaven hangs on a wall, and Babette asks if that reflects the current concept of heaven for the Catholic church. (One man is not so lucky: He’s hit by a car and smashes against the windshield, though the low-speed collision doesn’t appear to have been fatal.) At the outset of the film, we see Murray leading a college lecture on the art of cinematic car crashes. Near the end of the movie, Babette, Jack and another man rush to a hospital-like care facility located in a church. Jack plucks an erotic novel from the bottom of one of their drawers and prepares to read. A man speculates that déjà vu is truly a premonition of the future: “Maybe when we die our first thought will be, ‘I know this feeling.

White Noise starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig is now streaming on Netflix! Here's everything to know about the soundtrack, including the last song.

[on Spotify here](https://open.spotify.com/album/0NIz7gtDhMS3pqFnCgcZCy?si=ZaBN57nXQlytO0ZjeDheXw) and [Apple Music here](https://music.apple.com/us/album/new-body-rhumba-from-the-film-white-noise-single/1644779579). However, if you were looking to download the song that plays in the credits of White Noise, you won’t find it on the soundtrack. The song [was recently nominated at the Critics Choice Awards](https://netflixlife.com/2022/12/14/netflix-critics-choice-awards-2022-nominations/). We’re not sure why the song in the end credits is not included in the official White Noise soundtrack as it was written for the movie, but that’s okay! White Noise features an original score written by Danny Elfman that’s really awesome, and it’s available now! 30, and we have a feeling it’ll be a popular one for the streamer.

Hitler Studies pioneer Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and Elvis Presley scholar Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) converge in a center ...

Those who have followed his career know Baumbach's character-driven strengths, and to no surprise that's an area where "White Noise" excels. Baumbach extends his playful jesting to academia through the scenes with Jack at the university. Baumbach uses his third film for Netflix as a valiant attempt to corral the novel's many big ideas and make cinematic sense of it all. Yet Baumbach stays the course, telling his postmodern epic and cultural deconstruction in a style truly all his own. His wife, Babette (the always great Greta Gerwig), with her poodle-permed hair and deflecting smile, works with senior citizens at a local center. His latest, "White Noise," may be the cake-topper.

The film, based on a novel written by Don DeLillo, stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig in the lead roles. So, let's try to understand if there could be any ...

A ban was put on the psychobiology experiment, and that is why Babette had to find another way to get the drug. Jack was told that he was ultimately going to die because he was exposed to the chemical rain. Jack sat there listening to the absurd conversation, and he couldn’t help but realize how right Siskind was in saying that family was the cradle of the world’s misfortune. The drug hadn’t worked, and that is why Babette had stopped going to the motel. Professor Siskind said that the king of rock and roll was what Hitler was for Jack, and he wanted Jack to drop by his class and help his cause with his influential presence. Jack told his family that there was nothing to worry about and that if they stayed in their homes, they would easily evade the danger. The college-on-the-hill was hosting a conference on Hitler, and Jack felt the need to learn German because he knew that it would seem very weird if he claimed to be an expert on a native German subject matter and didn’t know the language. Just then, in another part of the city, a truck carrying some flammable material crashed into a speeding train, and the result was an airborne toxic event that had the potential to impact the lives of each and every resident of the city. He spoke about Babette in the third person even when he was talking directly to her and considered her the flawless model of moral uprightness. That day, while the family was having breakfast and getting ready to leave the house, Denise noticed that Babette was taking some medicine, and she threw the box in the dustbin. The concept is bizarre, and it sets the tone for the kind of “White Noise” that the viewers are going to hear for the next couple of hours. At times it becomes too tedious, and it is almost challenging to keep watching it, but then that is the whole point of it.

Hitler Studies pioneer Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and Elvis Presley scholar Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) converge in a center ...

Those who have followed his career know Baumbach's character-driven strengths, and to no surprise that's an area where "White Noise" excels. Baumbach extends his playful jesting to academia through the scenes with Jack at the university. Baumbach uses his third film for Netflix as a valiant attempt to corral the novel's many big ideas and make cinematic sense of it all. Yet Baumbach stays the course, telling his postmodern epic and cultural deconstruction in a style truly all his own. His wife, Babette (the always great Greta Gerwig), with her poodle-permed hair and deflecting smile, works with senior citizens at a local center. His latest, "White Noise," may be the cake-topper.

Noah Baumbach's White Noise is now streaming on Netflix, based on the book by Don DeLillo. Is the drug in the movie, Dylar, real?

However, Dylar itself is not real and to our knowledge never was. If you’re like me, you were probably wondering the whole time while watching White Noise whether or not Dylar was actually a real drug in the 1980s. White Noise follows a family as they survive something called the Airborne Toxic Event after a train accident causes chemicals to contaminate the air.

A family in 1980s garb. Greta Gerwig, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola, and Raffey Cassidy in White Noise. Wilson Webb / Netflix.

The cults of the famous and the dead.” “The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. “Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He paints it in almost religious terms: “Being here is kind of a spiritual surrender. But like the white noise machine I need to sleep, even though there’s nothing to drown out anymore, we’ve become so dependent on our cultural white noise that the idea of living without it is almost unbearable. He instead focuses on the larger existential point at the heart of the novel: that all of this white noise we’ve generated for ourselves — a drive to buy things, a fascination with catastrophes, technologies always humming in the background — is a way of distracting ourselves from the horrifying realization that we will die. It’s why people become obsessed with celebrities (like Elvis) or leaders who falsely promise us the world (like Hitler); in becoming part of a crowd, in losing ourselves to the emotional high of the performer, we can stop the feeling for a while. When they arrive, there are “forty cars and a tour bus” in the lot, and a lot of people standing nearby with photographic gear, taking pictures of the barn. Jack frequently muses on misinformation and disinformation (“the family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” he says at one point) — something that comes from the human brain’s inability to process everything flying at it, and our need to make sense of it with conspiracy theories. [lengthy](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208561) [peer](https://www.jstor.org/stable/25112247)- [reviewed](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831638) [papers](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40588075) and dissertations on White Noise, because it is not really just a story, though it’s plenty entertaining on the surface. It’s called “the most photographed barn in America,” and they start seeing signs for it long before they get there. What a strange and largely unremarked-upon choice — but the movie and the novel treat this as if it’s a totally normal sort of academic department to found. Jack can’t really believe that a disaster would happen to him because he is a well-off college professor, not the kind of person to whom disasters happen — which is to say, a person on TV.