Why bother calling it White Noise when it’s just another Noah Baumbach film? White Noise reviewed

These days, everyone who was knocking around a few decades ago predicted the internet. Marshall McLuhan famously predicted the internet in 1962. Orson Scott Card predicted the internet in 1986. Even David Bowie is supposed to have seen it coming. But I think Don DeLillo really did prophesise our 21st-century technological reality in his 1985 novel White Noise.

White Noise is about a lot of things (mostly, it’s one of the funniest novels ever written about death). But something weird keeps happening in the gaps. Characters are interrupted by the TV, by the radio, by a market researcher who keeps phoning them up to ask about the exact blend of fibres in their clothes. In every aspect of their lives, they’re constantly bombarded by invisible waves of data and messaging. There’s no such thing as a private life, inside, away from the chatter that descends from every corner of the world. One evening, our hero sees his own wife on the TV screen, teaching an exercise class. ‘What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels?’

DeLillo didn’t predict the internet because he was closely following developments in telecommunications; he just took the media landscape of his own era and dialled everything up to 11. He dug out the active principle behind TV and radio and advertising and let it grow into a monster.

Pretty much everyone talking about Noah Baumbach’s new film adaptation feels obliged to mention that White Noise is famously unfilmable. There’s the problem of DeLillo’s prose, and its habit of constantly heading off down weird tangents. There’s the way his characters talk, which is deeply odd.