Roll film! In Episode 23, DDSWTNP continue our White Noise residency by heading to the movies (or the TV screen) and examining Noah Baumbach’s 2022 film adaptation of the novel. We discuss the drive over the years to adapt the supposedly “unadaptable” DeLillo for the screen, the 2020s context of this film, and our varied reactions to successive viewings of it over the two-plus years since its release. Other topics include the central performances (especially Adam Driver as an unexpectedly good Jack Gladney and Don Cheadle as a refashioned Murray Siskind); Baumbach’s successes and failures at re-ordering DeLillo’s dialogue and visually distilling certain themes; and his shaping of the narrative as a “meta-cinematic” journey through his personal film history and a mixture of genres. Reviews by Tom LeClair, Marco Roth, and Jesse Kavadlo figure in our analysis, and we close by considering whether we do in fact “need a new body” in the film’s concluding supermarket song and dance number, which in our view captures some of the novel’s themes and distorts others. We’d love to hear on Instagram or email what you think of the film and our reactions, too!

We also take a little time to correct a historical error in our Episode 19 on Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake.

Texts and sources for this episode:

White Noise (dir. Noah Baumbach, 2022) (Netflix).

Film adaptation pages at “Don DeLillo’s America”:

http://www.perival.com/delillo/whitenoise_film_2022.html

http://perival.com/delillo/ddoddsends.html

Patrick Brzeski, Alex Ritman, “Noah Baumbach on Getting LCD Soundsystem to Create New Track for ‘White Noise,’” The Hollywood Reporter, August 31, 2022.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/venice-noah-baumbach-white-noise-lcd-soundsystem-1235209318/

Jesse Kavadlo, “Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’ Remains Unfilmable,” Pop Matters, January 11, 2023.

https://www.popmatters.com/white-noise-noah-baumbach-unfilmable

Tom LeClair, “The Maladaptation of White Noise,” Full Stop, December 29, 2022.

https://www.full-stop.net/2022/12/29/features/tomleclair/the-maladaptation-of-white-noise/

Jon Mooallem, “How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise’ a Disaster Movie for Our Moment,” New York Times Magazine, November 23, 2022.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/23/magazine/white-noise-noah-baumbach.html

Marco Roth, “Don DeLillo on Xanax,” Tablet, November 3, 2022.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/don-delillo-xanax-white-noise-noah-baumbach

We’ve arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise. In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo’s most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.

Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel’s narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter’s commentary on America and Americana, the meaning of Mylex suits, Jack’s relationships with Heinrich and Orest Mercator, and what it means to be a rat, a snake, a fascist, and a scholar of Hitler in this book’s universe.

Episode 22: White Noise (2) interprets passages mainly from the book’s second half, including scenes featuring the dark humor of Vernon Dickey and of SIMUVAC, the meaning of DeLillo’s desired title “Panasonic,” Jack’s shooting of Willie Mink (and what it owes to Nabokov), a riveting fire and a fascinating trash compactor cube, and the Dostoevskyan interrogation of belief by Sister Hermann Marie.

Every minute features original ideas on the enduring meanings of White Noise in so many political, social, technological, and moral dimensions – what it teaches us about the roots and implications of our many epistemological crises, how it does all this in writing that somehow manages to be self-conscious, philosophical, hilarious, and warm all at once.

Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes:

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

(DeLillo: “And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way.”)

Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998).

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922).

Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Mark Osteen, “‘The Natural Language of the Culture’: Exploring Commodities through White Noise.” Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise, eds. Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (MLA, 2006), pp. 192-203.

Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4

(“I’ve spoken of the ‘shining city’ all my political life . . .”)

Mark L. Sample, “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/be12b589-a9ca-4897-9475-f8c0b03ca648

(See this article for DeLillo’s list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic’s parent corporation).)

We’ve arrived at the big one, the breakthrough book of 1985 – White Noise. In Episodes 21 and 22, DDSWTNP extend our White Noise “residency” and turn in-depth attention to DeLillo’s most popular piece of fiction in another double episode.

Episode 21: White Noise (1) takes an expansive view of the novel’s narrative and goes into depth on (among many other subjects) the iconic opening chapter’s commentary on America and Americana, the meaning of Mylex suits, Jack’s relationships with Heinrich and Orest Mercator, and what it means to be a rat, a snake, a fascist, and a scholar of Hitler in this book’s universe.

Episode 22: White Noise (2) interprets passages mainly from the book’s second half, including scenes featuring the dark humor of Vernon Dickey and of SIMUVAC, the meaning of DeLillo’s desired title “Panasonic,” Jack’s shooting of Willie Mink (and what it owes to Nabokov), a riveting fire and a fascinating trash compactor cube, and the Dostoevskyan interrogation of belief by Sister Hermann Marie.

Every minute features original ideas on the enduring meanings of White Noise in so many political, social, technological, and moral dimensions – what it teaches us about the roots and implications of our many epistemological crises, how it does all this in writing that somehow manages to be self-conscious, philosophical, hilarious, and warm all at once.

Texts and artifacts discussed and mentioned in these episodes:

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (Free Press, 1973).

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

(DeLillo: “And White Noise develops a trite adultery plot that enmeshes the hero, justifying his fears about the death energies contained in plots. When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body or flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way.”)

Buddha, Ādittapariyāya Sutta (“Fire Sermon Discourse”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80dittapariy%C4%81ya_Sutta

Don DeLillo, White Noise: Text and Criticism, Mark Osteen, ed. (Penguin, 1998).

---. “The Sightings.” Weekend Magazine (August 4, 1979), 26-30.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (Routledge, 1966).

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” (1922).

Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympia_(Manet)

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955).

Mark Osteen, “‘The Natural Language of the Culture’: Exploring Commodities through White Noise.” Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s White Noise, eds. Tim Engles and John N. Duvall (MLA, 2006), pp. 192-203.

Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” January 11, 1989. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjECSv8KFN4

(“I’ve spoken of the ‘shining city’ all my political life . . .”)

Mark L. Sample, “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities.” https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-88c11800-9446-469b-a3be-3fdb36bfbd1e/section/be12b589-a9ca-4897-9475-f8c0b03ca648

(See this article for DeLillo’s list of alternate titles, including “Panasonic” and “Matshushita” (Panasonic’s parent corporation).)

Looking to start reading Don DeLillo, or already a fan and looking for ways to persuade your friends, relatives, or students to finally access the wonders of White Noise? In Episode Twenty, DDSWTNP offer an introduction to White Noise for the first-time reader of DeLillo, focusing on elements of plot, action, character, humor, and voice that often present stumbling blocks to initiates. We help listeners navigate DeLillo’s most popular novel, the “gateway drug” to the joys and challenges that a lifetime of reading his corpus holds in store. We also answer key questions like how to regard Hitler Studies and whether you need to know anything about “postmodernism,” philosophy, or how a media theorist might read the Most Photographed Barn in America before entering DeLillo’s world (spoiler: no!). Longtime listeners to the pod will find here, we hope, an episode to send along to anyone they’ve given a copy of White Noise for Christmas or ever told, “Hey, you should read Don DeLillo.” The first of several episodes to come from us on White Noise as the novel turns 40, this podcast will be followed in 2025 by our deep dives into the novel itself, its massive body of criticism, and the recent film adaptation – so stay tuned, and may you be immensely pleased.

First-time readers of White Noise looking for illuminating critical and contextual reading should try some of the essays and excerpts collected in Mark Osteen, ed., White Noise: Text and Criticism (New York: Penguin, 1998), as well as the many excellent resources at Curt Gardner’s website “Don DeLillo’s America” (http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html). But as we suggest in the episode, mainly we advise just going back and re-reading all your favorite scenes, or even the whole thing!

In Episode Nineteen, DDSWTNP turn outward to a discussion of Rachel Kushner, whose Booker Prize-nominated Creation Lake, a 2024 novel about the folly of espionage, revolutionary violence, life underground, and confronting modernity with ancient practices in rural France, solidifies its author’s reputation as a key inheritor of DeLillo’s influence and themes. Creation Lake is narrated by a nihilistic spy named Sadie Smith who infiltrates a farming commune called Le Moulin and grows enchanted with the claims of their cave-dwelling philosophical advisor, who argues that Neanderthal life thousands of years ago holds the key to reshaping humankind. In it Kushner explores the legacy of France’s 1968 while echoing The Names, Great Jones Street, Ratner’s Star, Mao II, and other DeLillo works, as we outline in our discussion. We find rich references as well in Creation Lake to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joan Didion, Michel Houellebecq, and Kushner’s own previous works, especially The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Listeners looking for new writing reminiscent of DeLillo and those already knowledgeable of Kushner’s works will find plenty here, and we hope this episode will be the first of several over time dedicated to DeLillo’s massive influence on exciting new world literature.

Texts and quotations mentioned and discussed in this episode, in addition to Creation Lake and those by DeLillo:

Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970) and Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Dana Goodyear, “Rachel Kushner’s Immersive Fiction,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2018 (includes discussion of Kushner’s friendship with DeLillo)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin (2019)

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (2013) and The Mars Room (2018)

---. “Rachel Kushner: ‘The last book that made me cry? The Brothers Karamazov,” The Guardian, October 5, 2018 (source of this answer: “The book that influenced my writing: Probably novels by Joan Didion, Denis Johnson and Don DeLillo. But a whole lot of other books, too”)

“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up” (1936)– a line mangled slightly in the episode)

In Episode Eighteen, DDSWTNP wish our author a happy 88th birthday and talk about the international life he led between the mid-1970s and early 1980s. We follow DeLillo abroad, covering his year in Canada (1975) and his much-discussed time living in Athens (1978-1982), tracing influences of these experiences on portrayals of national identity and language in The Names especially but other works too. Central to understanding this period is the powerful change in method that DeLillo made at his manual typewriter that inspired slower, more “serious” work. For those who already know the biography pretty well we also have in this episode some surprising details garnered from his letters in these years to editor and friend Gordon Lish, the remarkable story of DeLillo’s response to a Utah banning of Americana in 1979, and connections between the 1981 Athens earthquakes DeLillo lived through and the 1988 short story “The Ivory Acrobat.” We end by considering the “toxic spill” of the news that greeted DeLillo on his return to America in 1982 and energized the writing of White Noise, and we announce too some upcoming episodes that will close out 2024!

As is often true, we get significant help in this episode from interview excerpts and more collected at Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html

Texts referred to and quoted from in this episode:

Ann Arensberg, “Seven Seconds” (1988), in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University of Mississippi Press, 2005, 40-46.

Adam Begley, “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction CXXXV,” The Paris Review 128 (1993): 274-306.

Don DeLillo, The Engineer of Moonlight, Cornell Review 5 (Winter 1979), 21-47. [Incorrectly placed in Epoch in episode.]

---, “The Ivory Acrobat,” Granta (Issue 108, 1988) (and collected in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories).

Robert Harris, “A Talk with Don DeLillo” (1982), in DePietro, ed., 16-19.

Gordon Lish Manuscripts (1951-2017), Lilly Library, Indiana University (https://archives.iu.edu/catalog/InU-Li-VAC9786).

Mervyn Rothstein, “A Novelist Faces His Themes on New Ground” (1987), in DePietro, ed., 20-24.

Jim Woolf and Dan Bates, “Davis Official’s Action Dismays, Horrifies Author of ‘Americana.’” The Salt Lake Tribune, August 31, 1979.

In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo’s acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo’s portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work.

Texts mentioned or cited in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH

---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm

[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.]

---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997.

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s

William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.

In Episode Sixteen: “DeLillo’s Sentences,” DDSWTNP take a brief break from analyzing full novels to do some very close reading of single sentences from across DeLillo’s career. Style and craft, sound and rhythm, and what makes DeLillo (as one critic puts it) a poet writing prose—these are subjects we consider as we look closely at the lines noted below and try to figure out what DeLillo means when he says in 1997, “At some point you begin to write sentences and paragraphs that don’t sound like other writers’.” This episode is a deep dive into DeLillo’s language but also a pretty good introduction for those just starting to read him. #donutmaker #thehemingwayand

DeLillo lines analyzed in this episode:

“Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author’s permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see—a cryptic ticking mechanism in search of a revolution.” End Zone (113)

“New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague.” Great Jones Street (3)

“Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come.” Mao II (7)

“The last sentence was, ‘In future years, of course, men and women, in cubicles, wearing headphones, will be listening to secret tapes of the administration’s crimes while others study electronic records on computer screens and still others look at salvaged videotapes of caged men being subjected to severe physical pain and finally others, still others, behind closed doors, ask pointed questions of flesh-and-blood individuals.” Point Omega (33)

Other texts cited in this episode:

“Tom LeClair.” Interview by Andrew Mitchell Davenport. Full Stop, May 19, 2015. https://www.full-stop.net/2015/05/19/interviews/andrew-mitchell-davenport/tom-leclair/

“‘Writing as a Deeper Form of Concentration’: An Interview with Don DeLillo.” Interview by Maria Moss. Conversations with Don DeLillo. Ed. Thomas DePietro. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005. 155-68.

“Exile on Main Street: Don DeLillo’s Undisclosed Underworld.” Interview by David Remnick. Conversations with Don DeLillo. 131-44.