Celebrity, Nuns, Death, Guns, Academia.
My daughter was born in 1986, so, the year after White Noise was published. Within a couple of years I became quite familiar with Sesame Street, going strong after its emergence in the 1970s, and one memorable learning module was "one of these things is not like the others" and children would see the picture options on the TV screen and pick. It was usually 3 out of four alike and one different. So, three animals and one flower or tree, for example. Of the nouns listed above, I think in those days I would have picked nuns, but now I add academia as "not like the others." But DeLillo sees all five as compatible. Adding the fifth, after just re-reading the novel and watching the 2023 film adaptation, I feel the rhythm of those words I've chosen to sum up the plot of the novel, and I hear more an echo of the old 1960s TV show I watched in middle school: symbols on a blackboard of man, woman, birth, death, infinity. In 1966, daughter of a psychiatrist, I recognized this show as comparatively sophisticated, perhaps intellectual.
After a couple of career crises, fast forward to my mid-thirties. What did I know in 1985? Almost nothing, despite being sure of so many things. I got married for the second time, to the father of my two children, now grown. I heard about, and probably read about, Don DeLillo's White Noise but I am not sure when I read it. I was living in New York with my husband, from whom I am now separated. His brother's then brother-in-law had gone to Fordham with DeLillo and still exchanged letters with him, according to my ex. This must be the ultimate in name-dropping.
I read the novel but I did not know that it was prescient, despite its being very funny. Although the film adaptation had to drop some of the outdated brand names. I remember them well. But I really underestimated the destructive power of celebrity, whether in popular culture or serious history. The environmental emergency really is upon us even if in a somewhat different way. DeLillo back then was still with the earlier world of Rachel Carson; we are now in a suicidal world of climate change denial. Guns are everywhere and determine how I feel about public transportation, and mass killings are many times more common in the U.S. than anywhere else other than a war zone. Russia is still a threat after communism collapsed decades ago. Celebrities now include Princes and Presidents, to various effects.
So what did DeLillo see in the consumerism and in the academic world of his half-deluded, half-aware and hilarious Jack Gladney? The novelist's pastiche of the fear of death, a satire of the existentialists and some of the so-called postmodernists, has a core center of value, of course, without which satire is impossible- right now I cannot recall who made that observation but just being honest that it is not original. That value? Perhaps the absurdity of America itself. Irony-proof. After my recent graduate course in the novelists and critics of the modern world starting in the seventeenth century, I have some revised reflections on what America has become even as I ponder what I, too, have become in all those intervening years since 1985. I am nearer to the time of my death and moving away from the institutional spiritualities that had kept me questioning the meaning of life with some of the distracted pretentiousness of Gladney. I did not succeed in becoming the comfortable academic he became but instead mourned my foolish rejection of the original academic life I wanted. I settled for a distracted one; he achieved his rather disordered personal life alongside a kind of success.
Jack waits until later in his life to do a stupid thing that could well have ruined his success, a fear of success perhaps like my own or maybe it really was a fear of death that he and his wife shared. He sincerely wanted her love even though she was no threat to him or his domestic life. That was the odd truce with feminism that took place in the 1980s as part of Reagan's America. I tried to kill my ambition and he tried to kill his wife's seducer. We both failed but he is left with at least a realization of the magic of his youngest child and the rearrangement of the supermarket. His son Wilder survives a tricycle crossing of a busy highway and we know that after this miracle of survival this child will not, as Jack's wife Babette wishes, stay his same adorable self forever. He, too, will grow up in an America of the perpetually changing supermarket. I know, as I have done the same. I have lived and been one of the people who are buying incredibly useless stuff and making bad choices. This is the supermarket of toxic oil and plastic, conspiracy theories, lying would-be despots, that is, criminal celebrities who get elected President.
I am still shopping for my spirituality, and I've learned the same lesson Jack receives from the emergency clinic nun who saves his victim's life and treats his superficial gunshot wound. In fact, I am that nun. He asks if the church still teaches the conventional answer to fear of death: we will survive in some way, with a soul, and possibly go to a heaven. She tells him that is absurd. Shocked at her seeming unbelief, he is almost angry. ""You're a nun; act like it!" he scolds. She is having none of it. No pun intended. Instead she wisely, in my view, tells him that she sees her role is to own up to her unbelief so that people will not rely on nuns and other supposed believers to believe it all on their behalf. No need to think it through.
The film adaptation is very true to the novel and uses great visual quotations, such as from Godard's Le Weekend and other famous films, to convey the real toxicity of the postwar "better living through chemistry" as well as the absurd simulation of a disaster after the fact. This was before 9/11, the financial meltdown of 2008, and of course the pandemic of 2020-2022 (perhaps- I'm still intermittently wearing a mask). We were not ready for any of these events even though all were predicted by expert observers. Hmmm.
Babette's arriving at the clinic was not in the novel and it does skew the ending away from the watershed of Jack's need, presumably, to realize he cannot change her past behavior or their fears of who will die first. But the conversation with the nun is not omitted from the film, and the supermarket becomes the setting for a possible Dance of Death, and one such as Bergman would never have come up with. We no longer hold hands with Death- we have replaced our fear with distraction. We just stand in front of the automatic sliding doors.
I must get on to ordering a laptop table from Amazon. Where's my iPhone?
