| Michael
Keaton stars and stares at a bunch of TVs in this movie not
written by Don Delillo. In the book White Noise (1985)
the television transmogrifies from prop to character as it
drops astute non sequiturs into the conversation with an active
passivity that’s both uncanny and totally natural —
the implication being that it’s not a matter of turning
off the television anymore, but of existing in a state of
symbiotic complicity with it. In the movie White Noise,
made 20 years later (with no relation to the book other than
a coincidental appropriation of title), the televisual engagement
has regressed to that of a screenwriter who once maybe read
White Noise on the cover of some book. Here’s
the moral arc of the story: Watching too much television will
kill you and anyone who watches it with you. To make this
unsubtle point as bluntly as possible, the movie multiplies
the number of televisions Keaton watches in unison (much the
way Keaton himself was multiplied in the mid-90s genetic dramedy
Multiplicity) and empties them of content: he stares
for hours at a time at nothing but the titular fuzz, like
those spotted 2D pictures that turn 3D if you cross your eyes
and wait long enough. As if taking part in the cultural zeitgeist
by analytically viewing it will evoke some meaning or other
to manifest out of the static Void [i.e. But they’re
still 2D]. And what he sees are the deaths of people before
they happen, which he then participates in as he attempts
to stop them from happening — until he sees his own
death, which he then of course also enacts, still mistaking
(along with the zeitgeist) the passivity of televisual/self-reflection
for an actual active activity. But since he returns in the
coda as a voice over the radio to say hello to his boring
kid and the one friend (a crippled Deborah Unger) who escaped
death by throwing herself out a high-rise window, the movie
ends on a cultural prophesy of sorts (with an aging Michael
Keaton as the post-millennial proxy): the world will watch
itself to death, then come back, dematerialized, to haunt
whatever is left living. |