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| Noah Baumbach with The New York Times culture reporter Reggie Ugwu at LIVE from NYPL on the final scene in White Noise: “I reached out to James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem), a close friend of mine. We worked together on Greenberg …” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
Noah Baumbach’s firm grip on White Noise, Don DeLillo’s masterpiece, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig with Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola and May Nivola (Emily Mortimer and Alessandro Nivola’s children), Don Cheadle, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lars Eidinger, and Barbara Sukowa, with costumes by Oscar-winner (for Anthony Minghella's The English Patient) Ann Roth (Baumbach ’s While We're Young), is vibrantly disturbing and joyously faithful to the source. The uproarious finale, an all-encompassing supermarket dance number, visually part Stepford Wives and Jacques Demy musical, is set to new body rhumba, a new song by LCD Soundsystem, all ready to show the Grim Reaper what we humans are up to.
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| Noah Baumbach on filming dialogue: “It reminds me of screwball comedies of the Thirties and Forties. Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder …” Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
The Gladney household consists of Jack (Adam Driver) and Babette (Greta Gerwig), his two children from previous marriages, Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and Steffie (May Nivola), Babette’s daughter Denise (Raffey Cassidy) and the wise, wordless Wilder (played by twins Henry Moore and Dean Moore), who, as opposed to the novel, is the son they have together (Wilder here also does get to say one single show-stopping word - “again”).
During a stroll in the supermarket, Jack, founder and chair of the department of Hitler Studies at a small Middle-American college, introduces Babette to his colleague Murray Jay Siskind (Don Cheadle), whose specialties include movie car crashes and Elvis and many other fascinating subjects. In Don DeLillo’s novel, Murray utters the following pivotal sentences which inform the orbit of the film: “Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.” He also comments on Babette’s “important hair,” which Gerwig sports with arrant aplomb.
When an accident produces a black billowy cloud, soon to be upgraded to “Airborne Toxic Event” by the media, the family priorities become scrambled anew. Baumbach intercuts, for what is called chapter two in both novel and film, the truck with flammable load en route to disaster with Jack and his illustrious colleagues first in the faculty cafeteria and later at the great dueling lecture he conceptualized with Murray on biographical tidbits around Hitler and Elvis.
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| White Noise posters at the Walter Reade Theater on opening day of the New York Film Festival Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
The kids begin to have symptoms they heard on the radio. Or did they have them already before? One of the symptoms is a sense of déjà-vu. Audience members who read the novel can relate. The dialogue is often taken verbatim from DeLillo, reshuffled and spoken in a tone of slight detachment, as though the actors were realizing while speaking that they had said the same thing before. Baumbach bets on the uncanny effect this has. Murray interprets it as a sort of amnesia. It all did happen before, we only forgot. “Like you I forgot” says Emmanuelle Riva’s character in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Husband and wife keep competing over who is more obsessed with death. Before all comes to a close, more Teutonic winds blow the plot around. At the long awaited Hitler conference, the music choice is of subtle brilliance. The instrumental tune is called “Muss I Denn,” an old German folksong, famously sung by Elvis Presley in German, wearing military uniform.
The world is dependent on the belief that someone does believe, even if it is all just pretense.
On the evening of Wednesday, December 7, the Noah Baumbach with Reggie Ugwu: White Noise LIVE from NYPL event took place inside the Celeste Bartos Forum of the Stephen A Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library.
The New York Times culture reporter Reggie Ugwu: There’s a great dance number during the credits of the film. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that and also the music because you have an original song by LCD Soundsystem. Which came first? And tell me about working with James Murphy!
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| Noah Baumbach with Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Danny Elfman and James Murphy at the New York Film Festival White Noise press conference Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
Noah Baumbach: That’s also the thing about adaptation too, or screenwriting, or any kind of writing, I suppose. The novel ends in the supermarket which had been described as a kind of waiting place between life and death. It’s an actual supermarket but this idea of going back to shop after all of this drama has occurred reminded me of feelings after 9/11 - well, let’s all just go and shop [New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s recommendation at the time] of course the supermarket took on another meaning with the pandemic.
And the trips to the supermarket during these timess that we go through and it’s scary. And so all of this was in my mind but not being addressed in any kind of literal way. The dance at the end of the movie goes to when movies suddenly give you permission to break form or change something. Something becomes possible that wasn’t possible even a few minutes before.
In working with David Neumann in choreographing I felt like as if people could almost break into dance or song at any moment, but don’t. And then at the end suddenly it creates that kind of possibility. The scene at the supermarket in the end is many things - on the one hand it could be seen as more satirically or cynically in that here we are just shopping till we die. I didn’t want to look at it quite that way, I felt it could be a kind of joyous sort of celebration of life, which is also a celebration of death.
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| Volker Schlöndorff’s Return To Montauk set with Margarethe von Trotta, Stellan Skarsgård, Robert Seeliger, Isi Laborde-Edozien and Colm Tóibín on the steps of the Stephen A Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library. Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
I mean the movie essentially is about this notion that maybe to fully live life is also to invite in death. David and I looked at different cultures and different dances of death and mourning and many of them were quite joyous. I reached out to James Murphy, a close friend of mine. We worked together on Greenberg, a movie I‘ve made, and remained friends. And I said “I think you’d be great for this.” Essentially like “You could really write a great dance song that’s about death. I feel that’d be up your alley.” He was brought in while we were shooting. We had to figure out a tempo that we could choreograph to and later he wrote the full song.
RU: It’s a fantastic song, so thank you for that. The rhythm and the music of the language, that’s something that both you and DeLillo are highly attuned to, is the beauty of the language and the uses of language. Part of what’s so funny about the movie and about the book is that he’s also showing you the limits of language, the futility of it.
NB: Right.
RU: These are some of the most articulate characters that you’re ever going to see but it doesn’t do them much good in the end.
NB: Right.
RU: I’m curious what was interesting to you about the way these characters talk.
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| LCD Soundsystem kingpin James Murphy at the New York Film Festival Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze |
NB: I think you said it. It’s something in all or many of my movies. People are talking in some ways to figure it out often. And people who think language is going to save them, facts or their knowledge or being right or wrong. Also how language is connection between people and also how you can be talking in a room and be totally far apart.
As you say, DeLillo does that on a kind of grander scale in the novel. So you have, for instance in this kitchen scene, the kids talking, Jack talking, the TV is on, Heinrich is listening to the radio at this time, Babette comes in, she’s got someone on the phone. And they’re all kind of having the same conversation; they’re all having their own experience and I like doing that visually.
It reminds me of screwball comedies of the Thirties and Forties. Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder - that sort of fast-talking, fast-moving, people talking over each other and the dialogue’s great and it’s just a pleasure. I like kind of trying to find ways to bring that into maybe a more realistic environment. I mean, this being kind of real and unreal, but Marriage Story has some sequences of that too. All my moves do. Because I find it inherently funny also. And I think it’s true and often articulate people, how they use language is a way to defend.
I’m also interested in identity and collective identities and families and family stories, and family mythologies. The things that we are told by our parents, the things we think are true. The Squid And The Whale is all about that from a kid’s perspective and Meyerowitz Stories is that from an adult perspective, of like trying to find your own voice in a world with many voices. It was in DeLillo’s novel too and it’s in this. Murray has that line: family as the cradle of the world’s misinformation. Which is a great line of DeLillo’s, how family is a kind of microcosm of the culture.
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| Noah Baumbach LIVE from NYPL |
Something we’ve seen obviously over the last few years is how language starts to lose meaning and how we’re trying to talk our way out of things and using the same words to mean totally different things. Same expressions, internet speak, you know, all of those things. And to me that was another layer of the book that was compelling to me in terms of the movie.
White Noise was the Opening Night selection of the 60th New York Film Festival, had its world première at the Venice Film Festival and will be available on Netflix in the US and the UK on December 30. The film is currently in cinemas in the US and the UK.
The upcoming Robert Caro, Robert Gottlieb, and Lizzie Gottlieb: Turn Every Page LIVE from NYPL event tonight, December 12 is SOLD OUT. There is a livestream available on the NYPL event page.
