Editor’s note: The following is an article written by Charles E. Charles: a film and literary critic who refuses to look up facts and can’t remember details from the film and literature he’s critiquing, and is in fact so forgetful in general that he occasionally fails to remember his weekly film and literary criticism column is not a stream-of-consciousness personal therapeutic diary.
“I read and then watched ‘WHITE NOISE.’ You ‘WON’T BELIEVE’ What Happened Next!”
By Charles E. Charles
I fell asleep. That’s what happened after I read and then watched ‘WHITE NOISE,’ pausing to take a short 15-year gap in between the book and the movie.
It was New Year’s Eve. I woke up in an old man’s body full of covid and pizza, with just enough time to watch Miley Cyrus, Dolly Parton, and decrepit old man David Byrne auld lang syne me into obscurity.
Before watching the Netflix movie, I couldn’t remember anything about White Noise except it was one of my favorite books in high school and that band named themselves after it, got one hit stuck in my mind for a while before it disappeared forever, like the book’s basic plot details. What’s stayed with me most about White Noise, the book, are the fading flashes of my life around the time I read it.
The book was forced upon me by a high school English teacher who probably wouldn’t approve of this sentence’s passive voice and adverb overuse. In his spare time, while teaching White Noise, or reclining in his chair while we filled out some forgettable worksheet, Mr. S read DeLillo’s Underworld. The book cover had the Twin Towers on it, published four years prior to the then-recent Real Airborne Toxic Event. In the artwork, the tops of the buildings were obscured under ominous but peaceful clouds.*
One day I asked Mr. S if he ever wanted to be a writer. Yes, he always wanted to be. But then he got older and he decided he wanted to be a teacher instead. It was more meaningful. More fulfilling.
Back then, I regarded him as a failure. An example of “those who cannot do…” A cautionary tale.
I still think of him that way. But now that I’m roughly the same age as he was then—in my teenage years, everyone over 30 but under 80 was, simply, “old,” but not “decrepit old”—I think of myself as a failure, too. Except I’m worse off, because I don’t have a meaningful career, like high school music teacher. Since this is my personal diary, whoever’s sneakily reading this while I’m oblivious in the other room might not know that for my day job, I’m a film and literary critic. Completely meaningless, I know.
For the past six months, the same edition of Underworld, copped from a used bookstore in the valley that recently became the target of a possibly anti-Semitic arson attack, has sat unread atop my desk. What would the Hitler Studies professor from White Noise think about that? I’ve tried to read Underworld, but its density is overwhelming. The reason I want to read it is because I vaguely remember, in what feels like a different lifetime, liking White Noise. But I can’t get into DeLillo’s other work. I am not my former self.
The reason I wanted to watch White Noise, the Netflix movie, is because White Noise, the book, resonated with me as a teenager. Revisiting the story now reveals why it resonated with Mr. S back then, when he was my current age. For those that make it beyond their 20s, who were too unsuccessful to join the 27 club even if they wanted to, family and our collective impending doom is a constant obsession. I can’t remember why I liked White Noise, but I must have been scared of death when I was a teenager like I am now. It isn’t a new fear, but its intensity has grown to unhealthy levels in recent years. I notice it more often and actively work on it. I worry about death so much that I can’t waste my living moments looking up facts and details from the books and movies I write about. Death is still an abstraction, but every day it gets a little realer. I understand it is an inevitability, and that that inevitability gives life meaning, just like I know that the fly that just landed on me couldn’t possibly have given me Zika. I worry nonetheless.
I crave a quick-fix solution like Dylar: the pills the main character of White Noise’s wife gets caught using in a failed attempt to quell her fear of death. I already have chronic forgetfulness, so I could deal with the side-effects. I need that pill. For the past who-knows-how-long I have been grumbling existential ruminations like White Noise’s main character, oscillating between being Too Worried and Not Worried Enough about the most recent Real Airborne Toxic Event. Semi-relevant side-note that may be useful for an article on White Noise someday: Because I’m not going to waste my time referencing the source material in order to better know how the film compares, I’m not sure if my experience of the covid-19 pandemic impacted my interpretation of White Noise the movie, or if White Noise the movie added lines like “fever, nausea and shortness of breath” as potential Airborne Toxic Event symptoms in a Glass Onion-esque eyeroll emoji-inducing nod to the current times.
Like Mr. S I have always wanted to be a writer. I have always been writing. But lately I’ve been judging myself for a relative lack of perceived success in the face of impending eternal nothingness. I know it’s ridiculous, and I do my best to let the intrusive thoughts pass without judgment, but it takes a lot to change my brain’s automatic responses. Sometimes in my lowest moments I forget that I’m an employed film and literary critic, who when not writing personal therapeutic diary entries gets paid to write about things I read and watched, like ‘WHITE NOISE.’ That was a dream of mine, once. I fear I could achieve all my dreams and still feel empty. That I will carry on thinking about death all the time, rejecting its inevitable spiral into emptiness by filling my head with as many thoughts, inevitably mostly about death, as possible. It’s really not as bad as I’m making it sound.
Damn, if I could go back to high school now, I could write an A-plus essay about the themes of Thanatophobia in White Noise (a term which I swear I didn’t just look up). Before watching the Netflix movie, I didn’t remember that White Noise was about the fear of death, though. Just that I liked the book, as a teenager. After watching the movie, I speculate that one reason I latched onto it as a kid was because that fear of death was already in me. I was exposed to it for a brief duration, like the main character of White Noise to the toxic gas, but that was enough to doom me in the near-future.
Death isn’t the only thing I’ve always been afraid of. White Noise also made me reckon with my extreme fear of Adam Driver. He repulses me. His performance as the main character of White Noise—a Hitler Studies professor at the fictional College-on-the-Hill who’s obsessed with death and dying—is impeccable. He nails the facial expressions and speech patterns of a man who wants to but can’t stop his family and himself from stressing over a possible apocalypse and its potentially apocalyptic aftermath. Since this is my personal diary, I should confess that my most significant emotional breakthrough of the year so far is this epiphany: I despise Adam Driver because he is such a great actor.
Driver’s role in Girls perturbed me. He was perfectly unlikeable as Kylo Ren in the string of cash-grabbing fan fiction films that ruined a perfectly fine series. His general look—as confoundingly attractive as it is to so many—is a form of permanent method acting that continues to disturb me. He is one of the greatest actors of his—of our, considering we are fellow old men—generation.
What he and his co-stars did best in the White Noise film is breathe life into DeLillo’s dialogue. I can’t remember a single line from the book, and I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I suspect that one of the other reasons I intuitively enjoyed White Noise as a teenager is DeLillo’s use of dialogue. Especially when multiple characters are chiming in. Without referencing the movie with specific bibliographical lines, as the lingering voice of Mr. S in my crowded head suggests I should be doing, I just want to make it known to whoever’s sneakily reading this personal therapeutic diary while I’m in the other room that the dialogue in White Noise the movie (and, I assume, the book) is great because it’s not quite natural speech. It’s too witty. Too filled with strange, intentional diction. The characters don’t talk how real humans would talk. Background characters, like the children, pipe up at precise moments. But these conversations, especially the chaotic ones among the family while they’re attempting to escape The Airborne Toxic Event, achieve a dramatic effect unparalleled in most other contemporary films. It’s hard to describe what I mean, but basically the dialogue in the movie sounded like it was ripped straight from the literature, which it probably was. This could have been a disaster, if the literature-like script wasn’t in the hands of a talented actor like Adam Driver. And his co-stars whose names I can’t remember, particularly the guy from Mean Girls who plays the Elvis professor. I don’t remember that Elvis/Hitler lecture part from the book and although it was hella weird in the movie, it was certainly memorable.
Speaking of disasters, what I do remember from White Noise the book is that The Airborne Toxic Event was relegated more to the background. I liked it because it wasn’t a straightforward disaster story, but a more personal story about one man and his family’s response to the uncertainty of a certain disaster. The well-written conversations and ruminations on death were more at the forefront, in the book, even though they did pop out in the movie as well. In White Noise the movie The Airborne Toxic Event is more of a visual spectacle, which makes sense because it’s a movie. But the book didn’t lose its pacing in the sections that followed The Airborne Toxic Event. The third act or chapter or whatever of the film felt slower and less exciting than the disaster film opening. I literally fell asleep during it.
I never re-read books. The list of literature that I aspire to consume before I expire is too long. Endless, considering the finite amount of time we have on earth, and the lack of Dylar necessary to forget that crushing truth. But White Noise the movie was good enough to make me think about picking the book back up. Or at least it made me want to crack open Underworld. I’m not going to read either, but at least the film gave me a false sense of hope and unfulfilled desire. Isn’t that what life’s all about?
*Having been in fifth grade when those towers fell, their appearance in pre-2001 pop culture always fascinated me. ‘Friends’ ended in 2004, I remember that for sure, but when you rewatch the earlier seasons the towers are in establishing shots. And then in the later seasons they are not. For a long while, and still now a little bit, it was weird to see them in old TV shows and movies. Weird to grow up with adults telling you how to feel about those towers and their relatively new absence. The absence of those towers had a self-inflicted effect on the psyche of the nation, a nation which used its ill psyche as justification to inflict disproportionate suffering upon the world, without ever really reflecting on what it did to the illusion we called ‘our psyche’ in any healing ways. “Hemingway wrote about the Spanish Civil War, and you’ll all be writing about 9/11,” Mr. S said, or something like that, not realizing it was already a cliché.