On Hitler studies and other ironies – Andrew Martin in NYRB:
‘What is White Noise about? Like “the most photographed barn in America,” the tourist attraction down the road from Blacksmith, the college-town setting of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, the book is famous for being famous. Sure, it’s about, among other things, consumerism, ambient dread, the family in the age of consumerism and ambient dread. But “once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn,” says Murray, the visiting professor and Elvis scholar at College-on-the-Hill charged by the author with providing oracular pronouncements—sometimes profound, sometimes very silly—about the nature of modern suburban life. Explaining the novel’s origins in a preface to the new Library of America edition, DeLillo sounds a lot like his fictional displaced New Yorker. “I spent time in a local supermarket, noting the names of products on the shelves,” he writes, examining the tabloids in the racks near the check-out counter, eventually scribbling long lists of possible titles even as I was still working on the narrative, and finally settling on Panasonic, only to learn ultimately that this was a trademarked name, permission refused by the Matsushita Corporation.’
(…)
‘When DeLillo’s narrator does engage in full-throated praise, as in his hymn to the coffee maker, we’re left to ponder its sincerity: I watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world—water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before.’
(…)
‘The narrator, Jack Gladney—who, in a joke that wouldn’t be out of place in an Evelyn Waugh novel, deliberately gains weight and goes by J.A.K. Gladney to pump up his stature as a pioneering scholar in “Hitler studies”—is both ridiculous and a shrewd observer of himself and others. Waugh’s version would not have the self-awareness to conclude that “I am the false character that follows the name around.” Gladney loves his third wife, Babette (an echo of Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis’s portrait of middle-class small-mindedness?), worries about his children and stepchildren (there are a lot of them), and, most of all, fears death. He’s a Hitler scholar who doesn’t know German, another good gag from an older, more bumptious literary tradition.’
(…)
‘It can be hard, now—and maybe it always was—to read the novel’s tone. In an interview around the time of its publication, DeLillo called the idea of a college with a department of Hitler studies “innately comic,” but in 2022 we’ve managed to metabolize without too much difficulty the fact that one of the most important literary works of the twenty-first century is called My Struggle and contains a long section in which the middle-class Norwegian narrator unironically compares his biography to Hitler’s. In that light, the scene in White Noise in which professors deliver dueling lectures about the parallels between Hitler and Elvis seems perfectly reasonable.’
(…)
‘Baumbach’s best films—The Squid and the Whale, Kicking and Screaming, Margot at the Wedding—are animated by a minute, naturalistic attention to the specific pains of romantic relationships, friendships, and family dynamics. While White Noise is perhaps the only DeLillo novel that could be accurately described as “domestic” in its concerns, its philosophical inquiries are a long way from these sharp, quotidian dramas. One can find parallels if one looks for them—Baumbach, like DeLillo, is a city cat set loose in the suburbs, and DeLillo’s novel is at least superficially about the fissures in a marriage, a subject Baumbach has repeatedly returned to with great success—but the director never gets a purchase on the material.’
(…)
‘Baumbach isn’t exactly wrong that a sociological viewpoint is fundamental to the novel’s vision. But the steadiness of DeLillo’s gaze is replaced in the film by a strenuous busyness that works against the emotional connection it’s trying to draw.’
(…)
‘The film is at its best in the scenes with the least dialogue, appropriating the visual language of horror movies to strong effect. There’s a terrifying nightmare sequence with an honorably shameless jump scare, and an eerie, quiet scene in which Jack fills up the car at a gas station during the airborne toxic event, its black “billowing plume” crossing the moon over his head. Babette’s confession of drug dependency and infidelity has a clammy, nauseated quality that elicits real discomfort, and Jack’s trip to the city to confront her pharmaceutical dealer has a garish immediacy.
But the uncertainty of purpose persists. Baumbach makes the bizarre choice to use Jack’s revenge trip as an act of marital reconciliation by having Babette arrive in time to be grazed by a bullet along with him, a plot point straight out of the schlockiest buddy cop movie. (And, not that it particularly matters, a rare deviation from the text.) The novel’s surreal visit to the hospital, where Jack encounters a group of German nuns (it’s the old Germantown section of town—DeLillo is funny!), becomes a chance for Jack and Babette to bond over their mutual injuries. The scene’s final lines of dialogue, in which the nuns astonishingly chide Jack (and now Babette) for imagining them to be so childish as to believe in God or heaven—“Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe”—lose their unsettling power, becoming just another comic bit. And the nuns say most of them in German, which Babette doesn’t know and, we’ve been shown repeatedly, Jack barely understands. Like so many of the film’s choices, it’s intellectually justifiable—another miscomprehension amid the static—without being satisfying.’
(…)
‘Later, in order to create a kind of weird doubling effect, Baumbach has the Dylar dealer played by an actor with a German accent (Lars Eidinger), making him, in some way, a manifestation of Jack’s inability to speak the language and a callback to his academic pursuit. In the novel, the dealer’s ethnic ambiguity is a source of curiosity and anxiety: “Was he Melanesian, Polynesian, Indonesian, Nepalese, Surinamese, Dutch-Chinese? Was he a composite?” In the film, he still calls Jack “white man,” and says, meaningfully, “You’re very white, you know that?” shortly before he’s shot. It’s a jarring moment—is White Noise about race?—that is left to trail off into the ether. It is, of course, right there in the title. But it was almost called Panasonic.’
Read the review here.
‘Panasonic,’ now that’s an invitation to time traveling.
If you are into subtle hatchet jobs this review is a delight.
I do agree with his assessment of the earlier Baumbach movies, although I would add ‘Marriage Story’ to the list of highly pleasant Baumbach movies.
Andrew Martin claims that the novel aged well and that it is just the movie that was already a corpse when it came out, but all he tells about the novel (I haven’t read it) points the other way.
The professor of Hitler Studies who doesn’t speak German. I have seen too many people in real life to find this particularly funny.
The quote about the coffee maker is quite deadly as well.
And if you want to say something about consumerism and suburban life in 2022– I don’t know why you would do that, but alas – you must come up with something that is a bit more shocking than what is here catalogued. I mean, why rely on a book from 1985? To show that not much has changed. Just Panasonic.
But to be fair, I will read the novel before 2024, Hitler studies or no Hitler studies.