‘They had to evacuate the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong.’ 1
At the end of a screening at the Soho Hotel—the beautiful scarlet seats in a room designed, perhaps carved, as a contemporary Greek theatre in a London basement—two art deco armchairs are brought on stage, the narrow space between the screen and the front row that is. Moments later, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach are sitting there, wearing right the stylish clothes one would expect, promptly delving into an amicable conversation and an insightful reflection on the act of making. What did you mean to say, is the daunting question any artist will eventually be asked. Very candidly, they seem to share the feeling to have never written a script knowing exactly what it was about. It’s normally something you discover after two or three Q&As, they convene. Mike Nichols—further elaborating, now seriously—always had that clarity in mind. But to them, shaping ideas through words on paper is a different kind of journey that, even when adapting from a book, is still driven by raw intuitions. While their tone is full of genuine admiration for the mastery of their late common friend, I cross my legs the other way and reflect on whether that lack of conscious intent is actually the only key to retelling DeLillo’s layered maximalist novel without being constrained by the search for its meaning or the lucidity to articulate it. In this respect, Baumbach succeeds in finding his way through an exhilarating maze of ideas that could have been translated in countless different films—or no one at all—and a place that is loose enough from its source material to make any attempt at comparing the two an utter nonsense.
The first part of White Noise—from the sheer writing bravura of its introductory dissertation on the value of car crashes in American films onwards—is perky and hypnotically strange. Its distinct Eighties–Spielberg flavour, along with the garish colour of the vegetables on the table at home, in the canteen of a college, on the shelves of a dehumanised—or dehumanising—supermarket, even allows a slightly perverse nostalgic feeling, If not for the time, for its cinema. From there, things dip into darker psychotic matters, only to let us realise how these have been looming all over since the very first frame. The finale gets suddenly a little wacky, in an unexpected vintage cult fashion. But maybe it’s good, I am still considering. Maybe my bewilderment should find peace in what Noah Baumbach said towards the end of the evening about the inexplicable joy of things that happen in a story ‘just like that,’ without trying to be univocally intelligible or display an obvious narrative logic.
One last note. I always thought that films that end in a big dance choreography should be made illegal. I haven’t changed my mind, and yet I’ll admit that focusing on one single character at a time during the tragic coda not only made me laugh, but also think—all those people, like tiny coloured plastic figures in some scale model—what a fitting image to represent our manic new world. And come full circle.
1. An excerpt from Don DeLillo’s White Noise that I find spookily meaningful—no one knew what was wrong.
