White Noise

Plot Summary

• In 1984, Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) is a professor of "Hitler studies" (a field he founded) at the College-on-the-Hill in Ohio. Despite his specialism, he speaks no German and is secretly taking basic lessons to prepare for a speech he is due to give at a conference. Jack is married to Babette (Greta Gerwig), his fourth wife. Together, they raise a blended family with four children: Heinrich (Sam Nivola) and Steffie (May Nivola), from two of Jack's previous marriages; Denise (Raffey Cassidy), from Babette's previous marriage; and Wilder (Henry and Dean Moore), a child they conceived together. Theirs is a normal life, and Babette worries what life would be when the kids grow up and move away.Denise spies on Babette and finds her secret prescription stash of Dylar, a mysterious drug not in the usual records. Jack experiences a dream about a mysterious man trying to kill him, alluding to an earlier conversation with Babette focused on their mutual fear of death. Jack's colleague, Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle), a professor of American culture, wishes to develop a similarly niche field, "Elvis studies," and convinces Jack to help him to establish his course as the main authority on Elvis on campus. Jack goes to Murray's class and they both engage in a debate on how Elvis and Hitler had remarkably similar childhoods (They both were remarkably close to their mothers, and remained close to them during their old age. Both mesmerized crowds). They briefly become rivals as competition between their courses arises. Babette is starting to lose her memory. Denise told Steffie that Babette is taking some drugs, that might be contributing to her memory loss. Denise tells Jack that Babette is taking Dylar pills.However, their lives are disrupted when a cataclysmic train accident casts a cloud of chemical waste over the town. Jack is very sure that the cloud poses no threat to the city, and tries to calm his family down, initially. He says that society is set up in a way that the poor and the uneducated pay the highest price for man-made disasters. He reckons he and his family are not "exposed". This "Airborne Toxic Event" (the event was upgraded from "feathery plume" to "Dark billowing Cloud" to "Airborne toxic event" on the radio in short duration) forces a massive evacuation as a cloud of deadly chemicals (Nyodene D) moves towards the town, which leads to a major traffic jam on the highway. As they are on the highway, there are recommendations on the radio that people should remain indoors, and if have already evacuated, they should find shelter quickly. The progress on the highway is slow due to multiple accidents along the way. The car is soon running out of gas. Jack drives to a gas station to refill his car, where he is inadvertently exposed to the cloud. soon, the airborne toxic event, becomes a huge cloud of smoke, that brings its own weather and thunder and covers the entire town and surrounding highways. The family and numerous others are forced into quarantine at a summer camp. Jack's daughter Denise tells him that he got exposed to the cloud at the gas station for 2.5 mins. He goes to report himself to the medical desk, where he is told to continue his life. The exposure is real, but the side effects of the exposure will only be known in the next 15 yrs, as the chemical has a life of 30 yrs. Murray supplies Jack with a small palm-sized pistol to protect himself against the more dangerous survivalists in the camp. One day, chaos ensues when multiple families desperately try to escape the camp (after a panic is created that the toxic cloud is now headed their way). The Gladneys almost make it out but ultimately end up with their car floating in the river (they follow a Land Rover, who has 4 wheel drive and decides to escape through a forested route, that the Gladneys station wagon cannot handle). They later arrive in Iron City, where they encounter a man who rants about the lack of media attention on the evacuees and spots Jack, claiming he had seen him before looking at him. After nine days, the family manages to return home. However, since Jack was briefly exposed to the chemical waste, his fear of death becomes exacerbated.Later, everything has returned to normal except for Babette, who has become pale, lethargic and emotionally distant from Jack and the rest of the family (she wears her sweatsuit all the time, stares out of the window and cries all the time). Soon afterward, Jack begins having hallucinations of a mysterious, balding man following him around. Denise shares her concerns regarding Dylar (and how they are effecting Babette) and Jack confronts Babette (Jack talks to her doctor first, but he denies any knowledge of Dylar or having prescribed it to Babette.. Jack investigates further and asks her university Neuro-chemistry professor for an analysis of the drug.. She tells Jack that the drug is a psycho-pharmaceutical.. but the drug itself is not on the market and it is not known what it does). She admits to having joined (by responding to a newspaper ad) a shadowy clinical trial for a drug (super secret and super experimental drug) to treat death anxieties, and when she was cut from the trial, agreed to having sex with "Mr. Gray" in exchange for a continuing supply of the drug. This went on continuously for a few months. The sex was at a grubby motel where the TV was near the ceiling.Intrigued by the idea, Jack asks Denise for the Dylar bottle, but she reveals she threw it away earlier. While digging through the garbage, Jack finds a newspaper ad for Dylar, prompting him to retrieve his pistol and get revenge on Mr. Gray. Jack tracks him down at a motel, where he discovers that Mr. Gray was the man in his hallucinations. Jack shoots him and places the gun in his hand so as to make it look like suicide. Babette unexpectedly shows up and sees a still-alive Mr. Gray, who manages to shoot them both but only injures them slightly. After Jack and Babette convince the confused Mr. Gray that he is responsible for their injuries, they take him to a nearby hospital run by German atheist nuns. There, the couple also reconcile with each other.The next day, the Gladneys shop at an A&P supermarket, where the family participates in a dance number with all the other patrons and employees.

Storyline

• At once hilarious and horrifying, lyrical and absurd, ordinary and apocalyptic, "White Noise" dramatizes a contemporary American family's attempts to deal with the mundane conflicts of everyday life while grappling with the universal mysteries of love, death, and the possibility of happiness in an uncertain world. Ohio, 1984. Without a doubt, Jack Gladney, a liberal arts professor with a strange area of expertise, and his fourth wife, Babette, share a profound, unhealthy preoccupation with death. As a result, when the looming threat of an airborne toxic event forces everyone to evacuate their homes, the mystery of death evolves into sheer existential dread. Of course, this unforeseen complication uproots Jack and Babette's lives--there is no guarantee of ever returning, no knowledge of the extent of the crisis, and no means of protecting themselves from the dangers they may face. Now, nothing will ever be the same again, including the family's brief visits to the local supermarket. And as the sudden displacement and uncertainty create an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety, the community is closer to the Apocalypse than ever. Can Jack pluck up the courage to face the circus called life, uncomfortable truths, and the inescapable reality of death? — Nick Riganas