Why I'm Dreading White Noise
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
In Emma Cline’s story “White Noise,” protagonist Harvey Weinstein awaits the jury’s verdict, making last-minute calls from the front porch of his friend’s house in Connecticut, when he sees a neighbor picking up the newspaper. Harvey recognizes something in the man’s “two sad clouds of eyebrows, wispy, fading,” and soon determines that the face belongs to the reclusive writer Don DeLillo. The two men get to talking:
“Field sparrow,” Don DeLillo said.
“Hmm?”
“There’s a field sparrow,” Don DeLillo said. He pointed—Harvey followed the line of his finger until he spotted it: a small brown bird, like a mouse, hopping in the icy gravel. It was dull, the color of dishwater.
“Very rare bird,” Don DeLillo mused. “This time of year. Never had one before.”
“Interesting,” Harvey said.
“I’ve heard of them showing up after storms, you know. Adverse conditions.”
“Right.”
They were communicating something, a hidden message coursing underneath this conversation—Do you know who I am? Don DeLillo was asking. Can I trust you? Are you on the level?
The terse, paranoid dialogue is a deft send-up of DeLillo. But Cline quickly twists the knife. Harvey, floundering for a distraction from public disgrace and significant jail time, plans his triumphant comeback: an adaptation of his new neighbor’s classic White Noise, “the unfilmable book.”
At this point, I must reveal myself as a Don DeLillo fanboy. I read White Noise in college and reoriented my taste around it. A few years removed, I admit that an editor should have cut most of the novel’s third and final section, and Mao II and Players are his best short novels. But White Noise, winner of the 1985 National Book Award, was my introduction to DeLillo, and it remains a strong example of his prose style, his postmodern, American themes, and his humor. When Cline’s story appeared in The New Yorker in June 2020, a friend and I had already made a half-serious plan to write our own White Noise adaptation.
I was therefore directly implicated in Cline’s joke about the type of guy who reveres DeLillo, not only a pseudointellectual blowhard, but quite possibly a monster hiding in plain sight. Except that for my generation, DeLillo is neither a god nor a cliche, just a nobody. “Who’s your favorite author?” well-meaning friends often ask, and DeLillo is rarely the recognizable answer they’re looking for. (With older crowds he gets more play; an avid reader in my parent’s generation once responded that she found him a tad “male”).
DeLillo’s popular disappearance is convenient, if unfair. Despite his considerable influence on the style and themes of Dav*d F*ster Wall*ce and Jonathan Franzen, for those born after 1985 and outside the literary world, DeLillo’s brand bears little trace of his progeny’s sneering connotation. Now in his mid-eighties, having avoided the character reckonings of many of his contemporaries, quietly living a half-hour North of his birthplace in the Bronx, Don was so close to remaining that rare specimen, a revered yet uncontroversial American writer.
No longer. In case you haven’t heard, Noah Baumbach (Frances Ha (2012), The Squid and the Whale (2005), and Marriage Story (2019)) is directing an adaptation of White Noise, starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle, officially set to premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 30th and streaming on Netflix later this year. Given my resume, you might expect me to be first in line (opening night passes, retailing at $400, are sold out). But with each tweet, teaser, and clickbait article about the impending release, I feel nothing but dread. Why?
Possessiveness, maybe. No matter what happens, I will have an all-knowing perspective that is impossible to explain. But there’s something else: on the book’s own terms, Baumbach’s adaptation is destined to disappoint. And once out in the world, it will supplant the text as a cultural reference point, as the public conception of White Noise.
No One Sees the Barn
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
- Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 1841
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
- Guy DeBord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
“The smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire.”
- Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985
The take freezes both the imagination and the intellect. The work is always at the mercy of the take—because the take is disseminated instantly and the work takes time … Our cultural discourse betrays a very elemental, primal anxiety: that representation and the represented cannot distinguish themselves from one another.
- Matthew Gasda, “Lost Illusions,” 2022
Early in White Noise, narrator and Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney takes a day trip with fellow professor Murray Jay Siskind. The ensuing scene is the novel’s most famous, despite serving no dramatic purpose. More than anything about “Baumbach’s New Netflix Movie,” this is the scene I’m dreading:
“We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."
Another silence ensued.
"They are taking pictures of taking pictures," he said.”
Murray, played by Don Cheadle, speaks in strange theoretical monologues throughout the novel. His cold, unsolicited criticism of modern life is frequently comic. “Technology is lust removed from nature,” he says. Of course, you have to admit he has a point. Nearly forty years after White Noise was published, the most photographed barn in America is nearly too on the nose as a metaphor for social media.
Once you’ve seen Driver and Cheadle perform the barn scene on the big screen, it becomes impossible to see the sentences DeLillo wrote, just as once you’ve seen the discourse about the film, it becomes impossible to see the film.
People are already being so annoying on Twitter, I can only imagine the debasement when the movie actually comes out. Thirty-something Lit Bros in Brooklyn will say it’s the greatest film of all time. Someone will accuse Jack Gladney of appropriating German culture, and his son Heinrich of being an incel. A robotic-voiced TikToker will explain how the most photographed barn in America is so meta. Mainstream critics will reduce the story to its political valence; its warnings about technology, pharmaceuticals, and environmental catastrophe will be called “prescient.” In short, it will turn into a Marriage Story type pop-cultural event, ruining a great, complex novel and hiding its essence in a sea of takes.
The Word and the Image
A good screenplay needs an opening image. Returning to Cline’s story, Weinstein the blockbuster producer knows this:
What was that first line? He tried to remember. A screaming comes across the sky! A screaming. Beautiful. Vicious. A great first line. Maybe float a presentation card with the text, not strain to be too literal, try to squeeze an arty image out of it. Just let it land in the original form. A screaming comes across the sky.
Only that’s Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, another postmodern American classic. In one of the story’s best jokes, Harvey questions how his Ivy-League lawyers are unfamiliar with DeLillo’s first line before one of them points out his mistake. To Harvey, DeLillo and Pynchon are the same; that is, they both represent the same sign, a general context surrounding their most popular novels’ characterization in the culture writ large. At the end of the story, what we’ve known all along is made clear: Weinstein’s neighbor is not Don DeLillo.
The original White Noise begins with a litany of images:
The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes …
and so on. The objects described by the words are vivid, though unremarkable. DeLillo has said in interviews that he approaches writing from the standpoint of the sentence. The film equivalent would be the shot. But how do you film the way “long shining line” sounds in a reader’s head? DeLillo’s sentences aren’t mere signifiers for the images they describe, but standalone alchemical units. From Garielle Lutz’s lecture “The Sentence is a Lonely Place”:
The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech.
Consider the rest of White Noise’s opening paragraph, yet another list:
As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hair dryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows, the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags-onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties. Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.
Baumbach can show the succession of colorful consumer items, but it will be difficult to mimic the rhythmic, exhausting effect of DeLillo’s lists, and impossible to affect the consonance. If the action-movie teaser trailer is any indication, Baumbach settled for voice-over (“May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift,” Driver intones deep from his nose. “Do not advance the action according to a plan.”)
It’s nothing new to complain that the movie will be worse than the book. DeLillo has written eighteen novels, but White Noise will be only the third feature adaptation. It’s tempting to connect this dearth to the particular challenge of DeLillo’s sentences; more likely, his publisher is holding onto the rights (Underworld, DeLillo’s 848-page epic set in the Bronx, is reportedly under production at Netflix). In Cosmopolis (2012), starring Robert Pattinson as a sociopathic billionaire in a limo, director David Cronenberg remained faithful to DeLillo’s zany dialogue and the result is plodding and nearly unintelligible. Never Ever (2016, dir. Benoit Jacquot) is more successful; its source material, The Body Artist, is an atypically straightforward and gothic novella in DeLillo’s oeuvre. Nevertheless, the first half of the film is dominated by long takes of Jacques (played by Mathieu Amalric) riding his motorbike. The roar of the engine, dramatic classical score, and flashes of streetlights are visually appealing, but hardly simulate the experience of reading DeLillo. The second half, carried by Julie Roy’s mesmerizing performance (she also wrote the screenplay), is nearly silent.
In the final chapter of White Noise, Jack Gladney’s youngest son Wilder rides his big-wheel tricycle accross the highway near his house. Throughout the novel, Jack and his wife Babette (Gerwig) project their own fear of death onto Wilder, who has suddenly stopped speaking. The image of Wilder viewed from overhead like a car chase, slowly pedaling across the freeway, weaving through speeding station wagons, has stuck with me. It’s a natural place to end the movie. But DeLillo’s final scene is less cinematic. It happens at the grocery store, a recurring setting in White Noise. To the “dismay” of the customers, “the supermarket shelves have been rearranged.” Amidst the chaos, Jack finds comfort in the tabloids, the subject of DeLillo’s closing sentences:
Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitamins, the cures for cancer, the remedies for obesity. The cults of the famous and the dead.
Yes, I’ll be watching as soon as I’m able.
- Micah
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I don't see his name enough around here. Mao II is my favorite of his short books. But I haven't given The Silence the second read it deserves