The “Immensity of Things”: Noah Baumbach’s White Noise and the Consumer Sublime

Thirty years before White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern paean to the pleasures—and perils—of consumer culture, Allen Ginsberg raved about “shopping for images” in his prose poem “A Supermarket in California.” “What peaches and what penumbras!” he extols in its third paragraph. “Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!”

Swap Berkeley, California, for the fictional “Blacksmith,” Ohio, the peaches for packages of sugar-free chewing gum, the avocados for honeydew melons, and you have the alimental abundance spilling across White Noise in double-bagged abandon. “[I]n the mass and variety of our purchases . . . the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering,” reflects narrator Jack Gladney in the fifth chapter, “in the sense of replenishment we felt . . . the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.”

As is clear from his extensive filmography, Noah Baumbach knows a thing or two about loneliness, so his choice, however audacious, to adapt the canonical title for the screen is not all that surprising. From The Squid and the Whale (2005) to Greenberg (2010) to Marriage Story (2019), Baumbach has made his mark plumbing the (often pathetic) depths of a very male sort of alienation. If anything, DeLillo’s deliciously stylized, comically droll prose serves to temper the director’s penchant for autobiographical self-seriousness, a type of self-seriousness that can sometimes overshadow the seriousness of his films.

DeLillo purists might be justifiably wary that a movie version could adequately translate the “noise” conjured on the novel’s page—both externally in the incessant, stilted yet rhythmic chatter between characters, and internally in the narrator’s rumbling existential panic, often punctuated by a triad of brand name products (“Clorets, Velamints, Freedent”), as though to varnish his dread with the dazzle of adspeak. But as the novel is divided into three parts—“Waves and Radiation,” “The Airborne Toxic Event,” and “Dylarama”—translating its plot to the three acts of a film has a kind of easy logic to which Baumbach mostly adheres. The characters and events stay much the same, albeit with some creative, and mostly effective, casting. Middle-aged Jack Gladney, founder of “Nazi Studies” at a small, Midwestern liberal arts college, is played by a somewhat younger Adam Driver, if with plausible poor posture. His fourth wife, Babette, is played by Greta Gerwig, silly yet sympathetic in her jogging suit and wild perm. Murray Siskind, Jack’s best friend and academic colleague (and Jewish in the novel), is played by Don Cheadle with wry charm and pedantic hilarity. “Brilliant” neurochemist Winnie Richards is played a bit incongruously by Jodie Turner-Smith, a terrific actor (take After Yang), but not at all the jittery, awkward beanpole so poignant in the original. Jack’s doctor, originally of Indian descent as Sundar Chakravarty, is now a man of Chinese descent, Chester Lu (Francis Jue), a performance unfortunately verging on caricature. Wilder (Dean Moore) doesn’t stay a toddler, but remains sagaciously mute as the youngest of Jack and Babette’s voluble brood.

Part of what Baumbach honors in the film is its very mid-80s context—rife with its most visually salient signifiers, from wood-paneled station wagons and plastic visors to pre-hipster mom jeans and Minnie Mouse sweats. And part of the film’s delightful appeal is how it channels our late-capitalist contemporary angst—whether about socioeconomic precarity, environmental degradation, the erosion of the nuclear family, or addiction to screens—into a time period in which all of these concerns were already present, if at a lower volume, presciently probed by DeLillo. In both the novel and the film, what characters swallow, breathe in, ingest, and consume—whether gustatory, audiovisual, or ideological—is both taken for granted and dangerous. The very things that distract us from death are the things that will likely do us in.

In the novel, Murray describes “brain fade” as coming from “the wrong kind of attentiveness” to television ads, radio spots, and short-form broadcast news, a kind of perpetual neural enervation that has arguably only intensified in the Digital Age. But rather than indulge nostalgically in the idea that mid-80s consumption was somehow less harmful to our quality of life and sense of authentic selfhood, Baumbach’s adaptation suggests that our analog selves were all too eager to glom onto any and all media spectacles, the emptier the better. At the same time, the sheer excess of stuff in the film—often blazoned with retired product logos and cheerfully colorful mascots—might inspire a longing for an age in which the tangible still triumphed. Our commodities—as our social exchanges—were clunky, cluttered, and all the more comforting for it.

Shot on 35 mm with an anamorphic lens, the film’s wide, deep frame invites us to gaze across its many planes for objects or patterns of nostalgic register, quite often promotional merchandise and iconic packaging that no longer exist. McDonald’s Grimace glasses and Pixy Stix centerpieces and marigold boxes of Tide detergent; Kix cereal covers, Pringles tubes, and pastel hula hoops. The art and production designers must have had a field day. The film begins with Jack voyeuristically watching the families of his soon-to-be undergrads at “College on the Hill” roll in for the fall term with their tennis rackets, Walkmans, and personal computers, after their “summer bloated with criminal pleasures.” “Do the women wear plaid skirts, cable-knit sweaters?” Babette asks, sorry to miss the parade of affluence. “Are the men in hacking jackets? What’s a hacking jacket?”

A kind of glib regard to status and its accompanying signifiers filters through the film, whether in Jack’s pompous academic lectures or the sophomoric showmanship between tenured professors. By the second act—named for the “Airborne Toxic Event” that erupts when a “billowing black cloud” fills the air after a chemical spill involving a rail car—all of Blacksmith must suddenly escape the area and cohabitate at a Boy Scouts camp several miles away. Noxious amounts of “Nyodene D” are in the air, which Jack has haplessly immersed himself in when filling his family’s auto tank. But right when things could get really bleak, Baumbach’s film approaches a level of slapstick family adventuring to rival a Rick Moranis movie—complete with a sylvan car chase and paternal incompetence. In light of his imminent demise from inhaling the toxic chemical, Jack takes to decluttering in a way that might prompt applause from Marie Kondo. “The more things I threw away, the more I found,” he recounts in the film’s third act. “The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality.”

By its spectacular conclusion—which home streaming cannot duly honor—White Noise shifts into full-on musical mode, set to a seven-minute track from lcd Soundsystem. The entire Blacksmith supermarket erupts into syncopated song and dance, bobbing through its gleaming, fluorescent-lit aisles with a bevy of household props—from toilet paper rolls to Granny Smith apples. “So this is the end, or near to the end,” they lip-sync in polychromatic glory. “Let’s say goodbye to our beautiful friend . . . let’s close the eyes of our beautiful friend.” The ensemble’s choreographed consumerism, at once awful and inspiring, conflates our ability to look and buy with the illusion of immortality.

“What America did you have,” asks Ginsberg of Walt Whitman at the end of “Supermarket,” “when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?” In 2023 as in 1985, we have an America of endlessly accessible commodities—whether on the shelves of Ralph’s or Wegmans or in our virtual carts at Amazon and Instacart. Netflix itself plays a hefty role in abetting our “binge” approach to consumption. That the subscription streaming service also produced White Noise is about as ironic—and postmodern—as you can get these days.