Though writer/director Noah Baumbach has matured a great deal in the twenty-seven years since his directorial debut, his approach to cinema can be traced back to that first film, slacker comedy Kicking and Screaming (1995). Following a group of college graduates who refuse to move on with their lives, Baumbach explored themes that would stay with him for the rest of his career: highly educated people who are as immature as they are intelligent; sharp dialogue, a blend of 1930s screwball and 2000s mumblecore; characters whose images of themselves cannot be reconciled with their present circumstances; and selfish, self-deceptive behavior put under a sardonic cinematic microscope. Like most of Baumbach's films, the story of post-graduate malaise was taken from his personal life.

This is not to say that Baumbach arrived as a fully formed filmmaker. Kicking and Screaming is delightful, funny, and smart, but Baumbach didn't fully come into himself until 2005's The Squid and the Whale. Informed by the childhood experience of his parent's divorce, the Squid and the Whale took its characters and their psychology seriously, where Kicking and Screaming had treated them as punchlines. At the same time, the humor of the latter film is pricklier, willing to go to very dark places. Baumbach continued this high wire act of dramatic empathy and unsparing cynicism in his next few films, delivering cringe dramedy masterpieces like Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg (2010). Though still finding comedy in human pain and frustration, Baumbach's recent films are less overtly confrontational. By the release of Marriage Story, Baumbach had mellowed out, embracing a tenderness in his storytelling that had previously been hidden beneath layers of irony.

Baumbach's next film will be something completely new for him -- it is his first adaptation. A filmic telling of Don DeLillo's seminal novel White Noise (1985). Set at a high-end college, the novel follows a death-obsessed professor and his equally fretful wife, whose relationship is tested by the soullessness of academia, the threat of environmental destruction, and late-twentieth-century malaise. Like many works in the blearily defined postmodern movement, White Noise focuses on the disconnect between the real world and our abstract means of understanding it, the modern world's inability to cope with death, and the thin line between simulation and reality.

Kicking and Screaming Directed by Noah Baumbach
Trimark Pictures Inc.

Baumbach is a perfect fit for the adaptation, having tackled like themes in his own films. His tonal approach is also a good match, balancing delirious comedy and despair in a mode similar to postmodernists such as Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon. Though heightened and loose, the story of White Noise is the kind Baumbach is prone to tell. The major difference is that it isn't an original story taken from Baumbach's personal experiences. It is taken from a densely woven novel and focuses on language as a slippery medium between thought and reality (another primary concern of the postmodernists).

This serves as a major challenge for adapting the story into an image-driven medium. It also begs the question: how different will White Noise be from the rest of Baumbach's filmography? Will it mark a detour from his hyper-personal sensibility, or will he rework the material to cater to his cinematic vision? Below, we'll break down the DNA of Baumbach's filmography and how it might mesh with DeLillo's novel.

Finding the Universal in the Autobiographicalthe-Squid-and-the-Whale-1

All of Baumbach's films as a writer/director have a viscerally personal perspective, sometimes feeling more like a confessional than fiction. Upon its 2019 release, audiences drew parallels between Marriage Story and Baumbach's real-life divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, which involved the custody of their young son. Baumbach has denied that the film is autobiographical, defining it as "personal" and drawn from the experiences of loved ones who had dealt with divorce as much as his own (both as a child of divorce and a divorcée). He did not deny the parallels -- only that the film is a clear-cut reflection of his own life rather than something more universal.

This is an approach Baumbach has brought to most of his films, with The Squid and the Whale being an exception. The movies rarely replicate literal memories or family dynamics, instead rewiring emotional experiences and personal insights into a fictionalized reality. Baumbach never plagiarized a major rock song in high school, but a friend did, and it felt like something he would have done, so he wove it into the Squid and the Whale. Ben Stiller's struggling documentary career in While We're Young (2015) is in far worse shape than Baumbach's filmmaking career. Still, the anxieties and insecurities about aging and irrelevancy seem to be a direct reflection of the newly middle-aged director's own. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) sees Baumbach tackle parent/child conflict similar to the Squid and the Whale. While the overbearing insecure artistic father is a sculptor rather than a writer, one can't help but view the film as a grown-up spiritual sequel to the earlier film.

As an adaptation of previously existing work, White Noise will be an outlier in this respect. It could simply be a reverse engineering of Baumbach's usual process. Rather than starting with something personal and making it universal, the filmmaker will take a universal work and make it personal. Beyond the obvious overlaps in tonal approach, Baumbach has plenty of experience that matches the novel's narrative, characters, and themes. His take on the world of higher education and the fragile people who occupy it goes back to Kicking and Screaming (though from the perspective of students rather than professors); The Squid and the Whale and the Meyerowitz Stories both feature disgruntled artist/academics as principal players. Dysfunctional marriages that reinforce anxieties adorn many of his films, most notably The Squid and the Whale and Marriage Story. Having been raised by divorced New York intellectuals, Baumbach has plenty of experiences to draw from for White Noise's central strained relationship to make it personal.

Neurotic Academics & Curmudgeon ArtistsThe Meyerowitz Stories (New and Revised)

If any filmmaker working today can truly understand the setting of DeLillo's White Noise, it's Noah Baumbach. The novel follows Jack and Babette Gladney, death-obsessed intellectuals with a knack for enabling each other's fears. Jack is a college professor in middle America, the major forerunner in the academic field of "Hitler Studies." The novel is written in the first person, from Jack's perspective, with the other characters existing exclusively through dialogue and Jack's internal impressions of them. This places us firmly in the biases, obsessions, and hang-ups of the protagonist, exploring the fickle relationship between inner reality, external reality, and the use of abstract systems of thought (language, philosophy, etc.) to bridge the two. His thoughts are philosophical and flowery, obscuring the baser impulses and desires that motivate them.

Baumbach's characters have similar issues with the internal/external divide. They are usually intellectuals (pseudo or bona fide) who desire to be seen as more intelligent and knowledgeable than they really are. They are masters of rationalization and self-deception, intelligent enough to redefine their most selfish impulses as reasonable so convincingly that they lose track of the difference between what they're after and what they tell themselves they're after. They present themselves as confident and well-rounded and wait anxiously for the day they are found out as frauds. When that day comes, they face it with resignation and wounded pride.

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The aging father in The Meyerowitz Stories is a sculptor with a high regard for his own art, though he feels the world has passed him by. At the film's climax, one of his sons notes that he grew up believing his father was a genius and that that belief was partially a defense mechanism. If he wasn't a genius, he was just a jerk. This speaks to a pathology of compensation that runs through Baumbach's films: artistic success and intellectual excellence are emphasized to justify otherwise empty lives. His characters are broken, immature, angry, and selfish -- but if they can do something great, they feel all that is excused. This is a prominent theme in White Noise and its satire of academia. Its characters' intellectual pursuits are used to compartmentalize, explain, and justify a culture that is increasingly hollow and consumer-oriented.

Dialogue, Word Play, & the InternalFrances Ha

White Noise is not a novel that lends itself easily to adaptation. It relies heavily on its linguistic form to create meaning, and its story is loose and idea-motivated. While the translation from book to film is always going to pose challenges because of the basic differences in the two mediums, these challenges are enhanced when adapting modernist or postmodernist novels, which concern themselves explicitly with the abstract and internal capabilities of language.

Though it has since received retrospective acclaim, Mary Harron's American Psycho (2000, based on the 1991 novel by Brett Easton Ellis, soon to be adapted again as a TV show) garnered mixed reception upon its release. The most frequent criticism was that flights of fantasy and delusion that made sense in the novel were confusing in the film. The motion picture medium renders everything as literal and external, whereas a novel can depict a mind wandering. Mike Nichols' Catch-22 (1970, based on the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller) attempted to mimic the novel's free-associative structure through jump cuts and non-linear editing, but the final film lacked the smart aleck humor of the novel's narrator that made those transitions so seamless. Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014, based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon) is extremely faithful to the novel, sometimes to its own detriment. The structure feels off-kilter in a way Anderson's films seldom do, and the voice-over feels clunky.

All the above-mentioned films are quite good in their own right (many argue that the American Psycho film is an improvement over the novel). However, they are hampered by the page-to-screen adaptation process, and something is lost in translation.

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Despite the challenges, Baumbach is well suited to the task. His dialogue can express tensions and complexes with unusual depth, and his characters talk past each other as often as to each other. This is an ideal sensibility for postmodernism's focus on communication breakdowns. He also understands that film is not bound to objective reality despite its function as exterior visualization. A film can portray limited perspectives. Baumbach displays this capability brilliantly in Marriage Story through narrative structure and visual composition.

The film drifts between the perspectives of the fracturing couple. We start from Nicole's perspective and come to see Charlie as suffocating, emotionally abusive, and manipulative. When we switch to Charlie's perspective later in the film, the role of antagonist/protagonist reverses, and we see Nicole as selfish, flighty, and uncompromising. It is only when the two narratives are pitted against one another in court that we see the messier truth: Charlie and Nicole are both decent people made monstrous in the eyes of the other by hurt and a grueling, unfeeling legal procedure. This notion of division in perspective plays out in visual compositions as well, from a subway pole splitting the frame between the two to a strange edit in a courtroom scene. We cut from an over-the-shoulder on Charlie with the judge in the background to an over-the-shoulder on Nicole with the judge in the background. The cut is jarring because such redundant repetition is usually avoided in editing, but in this case, the edit signifies their separation. Instead of showing the judge once, with an implied continuity between shots, we see one character's perspective on the judge, then the other's, emphasizing their isolation.

marriage-story
Netflix

Baumbach can choose to adapt the novel faithfully, utilizing heavy voice over to depict the distances between characters and their failures of perception (though Baumbach has seldom used narration in the past; if utilized in this film, it would be out of respect for the words of Don DeLillo); or to translate those ideas into their filmic equivalents, using structure, framing, sound, and other cinematic tools to convey solipsism and abstraction. If he chooses the former, he risks honoring the novel to the film's detriment, overwhelming a visual medium with stagnant voice-over. If he chooses the latter, he risks alienating fans of the novel.

Ideally, he will find a balance between respecting the novel and being true to his own sensibilities to create a film that is his own as much as it is DeLillo's.