White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022) (Patreon)

Baumbach's adaptation of the "unadaptable" Don DeLillo novel has at least two direct quotations from Godard. The traffic jam in Weekend is here recreated to demonstrate the gridlock of panics suburbanites flee the "airborne toxic event," and several of the scenes in a glistening, utopian A&P store (including the LCD Soundsystem dance number over the credits) are pretty clearly cribbed from Tout va Bien. I say this as someone who generally liked White Noise the movie, and my point is not that Baumbach is unoriginal but that he is intelligent. If you are tackling a cinematic project that has been deemed impossible from the jump, who better top turn to than Godard, who continually bent the medium to his own strange philosophical needs? 

It's not just a Godard riff, though. The supermarket shots also mimic Andreas Gursky's dollar-store photos, and the glowing, otherworldly Shell station on the interstate borrows a bit from Kiss Me Deadly. What all these things have in common, of course, is a certain conjunction of high modernism and the end of the world, the notion that once a particular brand of consumer-fetish Americanism takes hold of the planet, destruction is is the only possible result. In selecting the three portions of the novel to adapt, Baumbach makes at least two astute choices. Jack (Adam Driver), Murray (Don Cheadle), and their colleagues exemplify a moribund academic / intellectual class whose death throes are temporarily forestalled by a romance with popular culture and demagoguery. (Take a look at all the books now available about Trump.) And the often-exquisite middle section depicts our long march to the grave, as the products we worship come around to kill us.

However I found the final "Dylar" section less convincing, partly because of plotting issues; Jack and Denise (Raffey Cassidy) take way to long putting two and two together. But also, attempting to wring pathos out of Babette (Greta Gerwig) after spending ninety minutes regarding her as part of the overall clatter of the Gladney family -- symptoms of the age more than people in their own right -- is too little too late. Besides, much of what had been implicit in the material up to that point it rendered as on-the-nose language-poetry by Mr. Gray (Lars Eidinger). Look at this showroom! That's the way it is. Well that's a fine how-do-you-do! Remember to have your pets spayed and neutered. Etc.

Oh, here's the Gursky photo by the way: