‘White Noise’ is American cinema shooting itself in the face
Nepo baby Noah Baumbach gives us nothing with which to oppose the domination of the blockbuster but the pretense of substance and redolent self-regard.
Noah Baumbach’s new Netflix film White Noise is American cinema shooting itself in the face. In the era of the blockbuster (which is lamentably our era), in which spectacle rules the multiplex and even the slightest hint of cinematic originality or intelligence is diligently crushed by corporate boards and box office handicappers, the United States—once home to the greatest of all movies—is desperate for something like a cinema of substance. Baumbach and his ilk constantly tell us that they are trying to provide us with precisely that.
In the form of White Noise, however, we have received instead the worst of things: The pretense of substance. A pretense coupled with a redolent narcissism wedded to incompetence and a chronic inability to grasp the most basic language of cinema, let alone its illimitable capacity for eloquence. Added to this is a haute bourgeoise contempt for all that is not haute bourgeoise, which renders White Noise distasteful at best and offensive at worst, most of all because one senses instantly and instinctively that it has been concocted by a smug, self-satisfied Ivy League nepo baby as seemingly bereft of talent as he is convinced that, by accident of birth, he possesses it.
White Noise, in short, is the art film at its most decadent, every bit as shallow and soulless as the latest Marvel sequel and lacking even the faintest hint of something beyond self-regard, which is the currency of today’s art cinema as surely as the first-weekend gross is the currency of the blockbuster.
To the extent that the film contains anything at all, it is the very thin story of a privileged middle class couple, a professor and his wife, who are content with expectorating pseudo-profundities at great length until their lives are disrupted by a train accident that releases a deadly toxin into the air. They rush to escape from it with their children but quickly return home, and then spend the rest of the film occasionally contemplating the fear of death, which leads to a clumsy attempt at slapping Big Pharma and then a ludicrous act of violence that is played for laughs but does not get them.
One almost feels pity for the actors attempting to breathe life into this wretched history. As the professor, the usually capable Adam Driver is forced into a theatrical series of demented academese-laden monologues, which are clearly intended to have no point, a pretense that succeeds but does not interest. Baumbach’s wife Greta Gerwig, as the professor’s significant other, is incapable of a competent line reading, making nepotism the only possible explanation for her casting (nepotism looms large over the entire enterprise).
The actors who round out the cast are mostly burdened with portraying dull academics. The usually brilliant Don Cheadle, for example, is beset by dialogue of bathetic pretension, made all the more excruciating because it is clear that Baumbach thinks Cheadle’s character is somehow profound, or at least amusing, though it is neither. The character also bears a blatantly Jewish name, a wink, perhaps, to stunt casting, the irony of which is so breathtakingly obvious as to cease to be ironic—irony, of course, depending at least somewhat on that which is not obvious. If there is any saving grace, it is that the child actors who portray the couple’s children are uniformly excellent, and provide the film with what feeble energy it manages to possess.
In the interests of fairness, it must be said that the film does contain one striking sequence, in which the family, caught in a traffic jam of evacuees, gazes up at a great, lightning-wracked cloud of chemical spume, overwhelmed by its omnipotent power. One is inclined to give Baumbach credit for this until one realizes that he is simply plagiarizing the aesthetic of 1970s Steven Spielberg, especially the extraordinary Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This, in turn, forces one to remember that Spielberg, unlike Baumbach, is at least a genius, however problematic some of the purposes to which he has put that genius might be. This leads to the further realization that Baumbach’s version of Spielberg, being many generations away from the master, pales in comparison, and that Baumbach cannot even effectively xerox the work of directors orders of magnitude more talented than him. Instead, he leaves us longing for the real Spielberg and slightly irritated that we cannot have him.
What White Noise ultimately leaves us with, however, is not nothing. As we depart, at long last, from its final sequence of the characters dancing about in an ultra-saturated supermarket as if they were in a 1930s musical, we are left with the explicit message—smashed into our heads for two-and-a-half hours—that American middle-class life is banal, empty, materialistic and philosophically dead. Baumbach clearly believes this to be some kind of world-historical insight on his part, but it has been a cliché since the days of Marx and Engels, and in the hands of the likes of Baumbach—with his degree from Vasser and parents who were proud members of the New York intellectual and artistic elite—becomes merely the bleating of someone so insulated and sheltered that the possibility that he might be capable of an unoriginal thought is unthinkable to him.
If there is any actual message in the very existence of White Noise itself, however, it may be that the collapse of American cinema is a class issue, though not the one Baumbach imagines. The men who built American cinema, whether Charlie Chaplin or Louis B. Mayer or a thousand others, were by and large hardscrabble men, hucksters and showmen, sometimes artists but just as often hustlers who happened to possess great talent. Almost none of them darkened the door of an academic institution, and several arrived in America from places unknown without a penny to their name. Yet they made pictures, real pictures, and often they were great pictures.
In the face of haute bourgeoise charlatans like Baumbach and his co-admirer Wes Anderson, who slaughter the cinema they claim to extol by the utter intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of their privilege, we long for the likes of Ben Hecht, the gutter journalist who became a poet of the streets and then the greatest screenwriter in Hollywood history; Alfred Hitchcock, son of a greengrocer who was so talented that every director who followed has, at one time or another, imitated him; John Ford, an Irish immigrant’s son made good, who essentially defined 20th century America’s sense of itself; or even Spielberg, the child of a broken petit bourgeoise home who made himself king of Hollywood by dint of raw talent and determination.
Along with them go a multitude of others, who managed to make American cinema what it was and no longer is, so we have now only the likes of Michael Bay, who whatever his other flaws at least understands the kinetic essence of cinema, and Baumbach, who understands nothing but himself and those like him and how wonderful they are—just another nepo baby making tributes to the worthiness of himself and his class with the aid of a sea of other nepo babies, all uninterested in anything other than the apotheosis of their own self-regard.
None of this bodes well for whatever future American cinema may have left, because it is swiftly becoming clear that, unless something changes, we will soon have nothing but mammoth blockbusters heavy in the budget and nonexistent in every other realm, alongside irritating exercises in NPR-style onanism like White Noise. Once Martin Scorsese passes away and Quentin Tarantino, as he continues to threaten, retires, there will be no real filmmakers left in America. Scorsese and Tarantino have no successors, no scrambling upstarts determined to crawl their way into a closed shop by their fingernails, driven by pure adoration of the infinite possibilities of their still-young art form. Perhaps there will be a great film here and there, but it will likely go straight to the streaming services, and who knows whether it will actually be watched, given that it will be drowned in the endless sea of content now surging through the world-spanning fiber-optic cables.
If there is any message for us to take from White Noise, it is that those of us who still love American cinema and believe in its possibilities must stand athwart history yelling “stop.” It may lie to those of us outside of the closed shop and the depraved and decadent class that closed it to continue to believe in and protect American cinema as best we can in our own small way, and perhaps we will do a better job of it than they did.
Photo by Eugene Wei