{"id":139899,"date":"2022-11-26T12:20:03","date_gmt":"2022-11-26T12:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/white-noise-the-airborne-toxic-event-explained\/"},"modified":"2022-11-26T12:20:03","modified_gmt":"2022-11-26T12:20:03","slug":"white-noise-the-airborne-toxic-event-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/white-noise-the-airborne-toxic-event-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"‘White Noise’: The airborne toxic event explained"},"content":{"rendered":"
If you were looking for a director to stage a spectacular cataclysm onscreen, Noah Baumbach would probably not be on your short list.<\/p>\n
Baumbach’s sharply observed, often personal movies, including 2005’s \u201cThe Squid and the Whale,\u201d 2014’s \u201cWhile We’re Young\u201d and 2019’s best picture-nominated \u201cMarriage Story,\u201d have featured of plenty of relationship disasters and emotional blow-ups. But there have been no actual explosions, no big car crashes, no visual effects. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had to deal with blood a little bit in ‘Marriage Story,’\u201d Baumbach says dryly, referring to a scene in which Adam Driver’s character accidentally cuts himself while attempting to perform a knife trick. \u201cBut that’s about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
So when Baumbach was preparing to adapt author Don DeLillo’s seminal 1985 post-modern novel \u201cWhite Noise,\u201d he knew one of the biggest challenges would be filming the book’s dramatic centerpiece: a mysterious \u201cairborne toxic event\u201d that descends upon a small college town , forcing its residents \u2014 including the brainy, neurotic Gladney family \u2014 to evacuate in terror.<\/p>\n
A dozen films into his directing career, Baumbach felt ready to tackle something on a bigger scale. \u201cThere was a different kind of planning, just finding the right people to help, but it was exciting,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
To be clear, \u201cWhite Noise\u201d is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a typical Hollywood disaster movie. Like the novel from which it is faithfully adapted, the movie, which hits select theaters Friday before arriving on Netflix on Dec. 30, is a satire of the many ways Americans try to distract themselves from their own fear of mortality, throwing themselves into consumerism, entertainment, conspiracy theories and pharmaceuticals. Mashing up quirky comedy with elements of sci-fi, horror and noir, all of it shot through with heady ideas, the film is all but impossible to categorize.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is sort of a meditation on death wrapped in a love letter to the ’80s and sometimes a screwball comedy,\u201d Don Cheadle, who co-stars alongside Driver and Greta Gerwig, offers by way of description. (You know, one of those<\/i>.)<\/p>\n