Is White Noise the Don DeLillo Movie We've Been Waiting For?
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Each October, in the early hours of some mid-month morning, Don DeLillo’s landline should ring. On the other end, there should be someone from a certain Swedish prize-giving organization with some long overdue news. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen this fall. However, as 2022 draws to a close and phrases like “back to normal” get bandied about with increasing fervor, let’s look back at what was undeniably DeLillo season.
Over a career in excess of half a century, DeLillo has written 17 novels (possibly 18 without confirming one written under an alias), five plays, a screenplay and a short-story collection. Ranging in subjects from Hitler, 9/11, and rock music to assassination, mathematics, cryogenics, and more, the work has illuminated our age without explicitly setting out to do so. Unlike contemporaries of his, whether alive or dead, DeLillo is interested in larger concerns and not myopic explorations of self.
Take Underworld for example. This past October was the 25th anniversary of his magnum opus. It’s seemingly impossible to summarize what it’s about but if one had to try, here goes. There’s this waste management executive, the 1951 Shot Heard Round The World, the discovery of Russia’s nuclear capability—and Frank Sinatra’s there but so is a mean nun. Deftly taking the reader from the Cold War to the turn of the century (and back again), Underworld is about everything and the way it’s all connected and how we too are all connected. You have to read it and you have to read it before the forthcoming Netflix adaptation. Make sure you leave a window open because the fifty-ish page prologue will leave you gasping in awe. Just take my word for it.
In November, DeLillo became the fifth living author to be inducted into the august Library of America, with three novels of the 1980s: The Names, Libra, and White Noise, arriving with what is bar none, the coolest author photo ever. Interested in risk analysis, cults and ancient languages? Start with The Names. Obsessed with conspiracy, paranoia, and the Kennedy Assassination? Flip right to Libra. But, then there is White Noise, a modern classic if ever there was one and the book that DeLillo is arguably best known for. Thrillingly, it’s also the work that is ushering in a new era of appreciation and attention for DeLillo from some unexpected corners—namely, Netflix.
Previously, there have been two film adaptations of DeLillo’s work. When Robert Pattinson was tired of his skin sparkling, he took a strange trip in David Cronenberg’s 2012 adaptation of Cosmopolis. In 2016, we saw an adaptation of The Body Artist with À jamais. The former got closer to fully realizing DeLillo’s work in a different format but until Noah Baumbach came along, there hasn’t been a great DeLillo adaptation. Now, there is.
Before we tick into 2023 and whatever chaos that will reveal, White Noise drops on Netflix on December 30, and reader, it is spectacular. It’s a faithful adaptation of the novel but also very much its own animal. It’s a color-crazy thrill-ride which makes you think, feel, laugh aggressively, but also, fear death, the end of the world and how much you want to get done before one or the other occurs. To tell you anything more would be a grave disservice.
White Noise: (Penguin Orange Collection)
amazon.com
amazon.comOkay, well a little bit won’t hurt. Adam Driver stars as J.A.K. Gladney, a Hitler Studies professor at the College on the Hill while Greta Gerwig is Babette, his fitness-obsessed wife with a secret. Their lives are thrown into complete disarray when an “Airborne Toxic Event” occurs near their town and forces them to evacuate with their four kids (in a wood-paneled station wagon, naturally) not just their home, but their routines. What it is and how it’s dealt with is just one facet of the story. As in the novel, love and death, consumerism and chemicals, a sense of home and a sense of horror are woven throughout. Then as the movie ends, Baumbach offers up the most exuberant credit scene in recent memory (with the first new song from LCD Soundsystem in five years.) You can’t help smiling.
So, go read DeLillo and, as the year closes, watch DeLillo. Let’s hope that the adaptations of Libra, Underworld, and The Silence come to fruition. And, let’s hope that next October, early one morning, a landline rings with some good news.
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