Weekly Readings #44 (12/05/22-12/11/22)
hell is when no one believes
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
For my new review, I took on what else but Cormac McCarthy’s Stella Maris, the “sister” novel to The Passenger, released in October, which I wrote about here. A new interview with McCarthy—well, it’s more a monologue by physicist Lawrence Krauss, punctuated with laconic interjections by McCarthy—has the almost 90-year-old writer pronouncing himself a “materialist.” This is a real “trust the tale, not the teller” situation if I’ve ever seen one. Stella Maris gives the impression that the materialist can come to only one conclusion, one McCarthy didn’t live to be 90 by arriving at himself. For more on what I mean, please read my piece, which argues (against the novel’s protagonist) for the superiority of literature over mathematics and ends with a quotation from Dante.
For my Wednesday post, in light of continued controversies over sexual avant-gardism among cultural elites, I revisited my essay on French philosopher Georges Bataille’s classic pornographic novel The Story of the Eye (1928). I evaluate the philosophical, religious, and political bases of sexual avant-gardism in this essay written in the hallucinatory heat of the eve of the 2016 election.
Below, for this week’s newsletter, I offer my review of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation.
More Magic, Less Dread: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise
[The following review both avoids plot summary while not avoiding spoilers. It might be appreciated most by people who have already seen the film and want to compare their reaction to someone else’s. For my approach to DeLillo’s novel, please see this essay and this lecture.]
“It sucks,” Robert Rubsam pronounced in Gawker of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise. His main complaint, echoed in other negative reviews, is that the film has a quality of nostalgic pastiche—I believe it was Tori Amos who once sang of the “glory of the ’80s”—alien to the novel’s edgy, anxious ultra-contemporaneity. The novel was about the present, not “the ’80s.”
He shoots White Noise with the gauzy glow of an Amblin film, or more accurately our contemporary idea of what 1980s family fare ought to look like, warmly lit and garishly costumed. There is a certain promise to this, in a theoretical sense: imagine one of Spielberg’s dramedies invaded by our post-modern derangement.
But Baumbach commits to this approach in scare-quotes; we are watching an “80s film,” not a film that actually represents the 1980s. His sets are flimsy, full of brightly branded cereal boxes and awash in pastels. He drapes his characters in the sorts of gaudy tracksuits that we, the contemporary audience, associate with the decade, rather than the sort of clothes a professor and his wife might actually have worn. And worst of all his actors deliver their absurd dialogue with a faint smirk, as if to say: isn’t consumerism wild?
For one thing, all literary classics fall prey to this nostalgia insofar as they are literary classics. Jane Austen, like DeLillo, wrote with a hard-headed and arch wit about the demands of her tumultuous time. She might have been surprised to find her novels at the center of a Regency-fantasy wish-fulfillment romance cult. We could say the same of the Joycean tourist trade, as if Joyce did not portray Dublin as a “center of paralysis” and not a boozy party-town rife with Irish blarney. Pretentious as the tactic seems, theater and film directors’ incorrigible habit of staging Shakespeare plays in every historical moment but the one in which they’re set, if they do not in fact stage them on Mars or the moon, at least avoids the pitfalls of the nostalgia approach.
I could imagine a systematically updated White Noise, a less faithful adaptation set in our present, incorporating social media alongside the originals’ portrayal of broadcast media, and updating DeLillo’s satire on early cultural studies to embrace the social-justice thinking with which the field later became rife.
Even Rubsam grants Baumbach’s theoretical purpose in extending the novel’s postmodern concerns to the film’s form, however. DeLillo’s chilly deadpan in the novel, often theorizing the postmodern, mostly stands outside of it the better to portray and define. The novel is postmodernist in theme, modernist in technique. Baumbach’s zany postmodernist metafilmic techniques—all the quotation marks the film puts around the “1980s” and around the action more generally—weds theme even more solidly to form. Hence, Rubsam notes, Baumbach took out the novel’s textbook postmodernist moments: he mentions the “Most Photographed Barn in America” and “Toyota Celica” scenes among the excisions, but not my own favorite, Jack’s argument with Heinrich in the rain about whether or not one can say with any certainty that it’s raining. Unless I missed it in the film’s overlapping-lines chattiness, Baumbach also declined to include the novel’s most famous phrase—“American magic and dread”—presumably judging these words, also, to be implicit in the action.
Marco Roth, in his review for Tablet, begins with a similar evaluation of Baumbach’s period pastiche before going on to fault the film for removing the novel’s social core, with its all-male and all-white cultural studies professors drawn from ranks of Italian-, Greek-, and Jewish-American tough guys:
its portrayal of white ethnics’ fascination with the cultural tropes of mainstream white America and the readiness of these white ethnics to embrace the fascist potential always latent in these conformist rituals in the interest of living—not forever—but safely within the comforts of the mass.
By casting Don Cheadle as the novel’s Jewish oracle, Murray Jay Siskind, Baumbach ahistorically confuses this issue, or so Roth argues, by changing the characters’ race without changing the character, even though DeLillo’s gentile-Jewish friendship plays differently than a white-black one.
In each case, I would still argue, the non-ethnically-marked white man Gladney receives from Siskind the gift of courage to take his life in his own hands by committing violence. In the film, Siskind even gives Gladney the gun he will use at the climax, even though in the novel the gun comes from Gladney’s right-wing cowboyish father-in-law, suggesting another vector entirely for the white male intellectual’s liberating violence. In other words, the appealingly dangerous masculinity Gladney wants to adopt is in the film a black-Jewish gift, while in the novel it is inherited from an older model of white masculinity.
Like Rubsam, Roth also complains about the actors’ delivery of the novel’s patented staccato and absurdist dialogue:
With the notable exception of Greta Gerwig, who channels peak 1980s Melanie Griffith to imbue her Babette with a zany, neurotic edginess, the rest of the cast’s leading members, particularly Adam Driver as Gladney, keep everything pitched between reassuring tones for talking to toddlers and a cool deadpan speech affect that didn’t really enter everyday life until the mid to late 1990s, with an added dash of upbeat valedictorian panegyric for classroom lectures.
This is true, but, as with the 1980s pastiche, I would defend it as a canny metafictional technique. In the 1980s, everybody didn’t talk like a DeLillo character, but DeLillo is undoubtedly one of the high-culture influences on later mass culture that ensured everyone soon would. So what Rubsam calls the “smirking” ahistorical quality of the performances actually makes a historical argument about where that style of speech originated, namely, in novels like DeLillo’s.
All in all, I enjoyed the film. Baumbach sometimes dials the zaniness up too high and doesn’t always catch the poignance in DeLillo’s humor. The genius chemist Winnie Richards is a haunting or lonely figure in the novel despite the slight surrealism in her interactions with Gladney, not, as she appears in the film, a Yoohoo-swilling mad scientist with bubbling beakers in a cartoon lab. But Baumbach catches the awful, medieval, carcinogenic sublimity of the Airborne Toxic Event perfectly. He creates a dizzying visual correlate, lightning-scored and pink neon, a true 1980s nightmare, for the novel’s description:
The enormous dark mass moved like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armored creatures with spiral wings.
He does restore a measure of familial warmth to DeLillo’s cooler canvas of American domesticity, but this grounds the film in emotions other than Gladney’s existential terror, sympathetic on the page and in the first person but harder to suggest on film.
And when Gladney echoes Siskind’s earlier remark, transforming its theoretical cynicism into gratitude for his prattling children during the Toxic Event, “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation,” Baumbach tips his hand. When was the last time we heard from an artifact of metropolitan culture the word “misinformation” said fondly, as if it were not a threat to “our democracy” but rather the very spice of demotic life? The film likewise portrays the wearing of medical masks to be a symptom of childish neuroticism and if anything exaggerates DeLillo’s satire on threateningly expansive but worryingly incompetent medical authority.
As in the novel, faith gets the final word, with the surreal hospital of German nuns where Jack goes to be treated after his conflict with Mr. Gray looking warmer and more redemptive than any clinical setting we’d seen earlier in the film. “Hell is when no one believes,” the nun says in both the film and the novel, to which she adds in the film, cueing Jack and Babette’s marital reconciliation, “so maybe you should try to believe in each other.” Because the film is more cartoonish than the novel, it doesn’t rely so much for consistency on the “cool” in DeLillo’s tone; therefore, by my count, it earns this culminating sentimentalism.
And then there is Baumbach’s true conclusion: the orgiastic dance number in the supermarket which spills extravagantly through the whole of the closing credits. True, Baumbach mutes the deathly menace DeLillo sees in such consumerist settings, their pale air of Bardo, but he amplifies the transcendence DeLillo likewise perceives in these transient but communal spaces. With this consumerist bacchanal, Baumbach, inspired to make the film after reading the novel during lockdown, drives home his implicit judgment against the “social distance” imposed by techno-authoritarianism over the last few years. This may not have been DeLillo’s point, but, allowing that an adaptation must live in its own life, it’s a point worth making nevertheless.
