It’s tough to be alive right now. Societal collapse is in the air — it smells like it. One of the ways to distract yourself from the fact of impending doom is shopping, according to Noah Baumbach. His new satire, White Noise, is astutely aware of the stank (and the plethora of things we do to avoid them) and runs with it. Based on Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name, the intellectual family drama transforms into a big-budget disaster flick in the face of an existential threat: a toxic airborne event that endangers an entire college town, forcing our characters to face the inevitability of death in grocery-store musical numbers and explosive traffic jams (a scene that recalls the late Jean-Luc Godard’s film Weekend). The film suggests that one of the many ways we numb ourselves to the fact of our own demise is by shopping — think back to the COVID-precipitated Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 or your credit card statements after SSENSE’s bi-annual sales … those purchases didn’t change the fact that the vibes were off, but it did ease the pain, if only for a moment. For Baumbach, car-crash movies and shopping are his psychological Band-Aids, he told Vulture at the film’s New York Film Festival premiere. In the film’s ironic promotional posters, stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig hawk existential dread for the low price of 99 cents.
“I was here [in New York] during 9/11, and we were told to go shop,†Baumbach said. “There was this whole thing where we were told that shopping was gonna get us out of it, and I think about that in the book, with the [characters’] return to the supermarket. There’s this sort of communal thing that we all are collectively responsible for creating for ourselves – this illusion that we’re gonna get something out of this.†Well, will consumerism get us out of anything? “I guess I’m counting on it,†he continued. Another solid distraction? A ticket to White Noise, out November 25.