TOXIC SHOCK

FROM HITLER ACADEMICS TO MEDICATED MUMS, WHITE NOISE IS AN EPIC SATIRE ON AMERICA. ADAPTING DON DELILLO'S UNFILMABLE' NOVEL, IT'S ALSO DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH'S MOST AMBITIOUS MOVIE YET. TOTAL FILM MEETS HIM AND HIS CAST TO DISCUSS DEATH, DRUGS, AND DANCING.

- JAMES MOTTRAM

In 2010, when Time listed the best 100 English-language novels since the magazine’s birth in 1923, Don DeLillo’s White Noise rightly featured. His eighth book, this 1985 award winner skewered middle-class life in America so acutely, “you don’t know whether to laugh or whimper” wrote author Lev Grossman. You’ll feel the same way about Noah Baumbach’s Netflix-backed movie adaptation, as fear and loathing in a mid-’80s college town take hold of academic Jack Gladney and his family. Get ready for addiction, anxiety, and eco-angst.

Central to the story is what’s dubbed ‘The Toxic Airborne Event’ – an environmental catastrophe that occurs just outside the Midwestern town where the Gladneys live, after a train crashes into an oil tanker, leading to a chemical spill. Soon a toxic cloud is heading towards homes, leading to panic, evacuation, and mass mask-wearing. Which may sound a mite familiar. “It was one of the uncanny things about DeLillo’s book,” says Baumbach. “It had all of these elements built into the story that resonate in the culture – and continue to resonate.”

Sitting in the faded grandeur of the Excelsior Hotel during the recent Venice Film Festival, which White Noise opened, the director admits that he didn’t want to make a movie about Coronavirus, but he couldn’t ignore its psychological effects either. DeLillo’s book, written in the shadow of Reaganomics and fears about nuclear war, provided the perfect way for Baumbach to process the past two years.

“It was a way to express the madness that I felt I was seeing every day, reading the headlines in the paper and not leaving my house.”