DeLillo’s White Noise: Media as Culture in American Life
White noise, defined as a heterogeneous mixture of sound waves extending over a wide frequency range, can be compared to static, the buzzing of fluorescent lights, or the sound emitted from a television which has been muted but is still turned on. In the novel, the Gladney family seems to never be without some form of background noise – sometimes the radio, but most often the television, because “the need to use the senses that are available is as insistent as breathing – a fact that makes sense of the urge to keep radio or television going constantly” (McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, p. 68).
The television plays the role of another family member, always ready to pipe up with useless commentary and observations at both intense and mundane moments: after dinner, before sex, when ex-husbands come to visit their children, during parent to child conversations, during adult conversations, in the morning, at night, in the middle of the afternoon. The television never rests, and neither does the family’s incessant urge to be visually and audibly stimulated.
An unfortunate side effect of the television’s constant droning is the manner in which advertisements become lodged in the character’s brains. Because the “steady trend in advertising is to manifest the product as an integral part of large social purposes and processes” (p. 226), the characters can not escape product jingles even within their own brains: “Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it” (DeLillo, p. 51). A woman walks down the street muttering “a decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever” (p. 262). College students move into their dorm rooms carting “onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints” (p. 3).
Babette, the wife, mother, adulterer, and drug taker of the novel, has made it a tradition for the family to watch television together one night per week, feeling that this will in effect destroy the “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power” (DeLillo, p. 16) the television seems to have. Paradoxically, this gives the television more power by forcing people to watch it for an entire evening as a sort of “wholesome domestic sport.” It seems that none of the family takes much joy in the ritual and yet they participate anyway, demonstrating their inability to resist the magnetic pull of the television. In this way, the television is more than mere entertainment but also a medium through which the family interacts.
Virtually everything the media presents is some kind of a simulacrum, which Plato defines as a copy of a copy, twice removed from the original and therefore twice removed from the value of the original. By watching television, the Gladney family is being exposed to fairly worthless reproductions of experiences which they may or may not have already had themselves, or seen before on a different television show or in a movie, or read about in a book or magazine. Because “the content of a movie is a novel or a play or an opera” (McLuhan, p. 18), nobody ever sees anything truly original, anything which has not been seen or heard before.
Because of the similarity of situations, events, and people shown through the media, the television begins to serve as a sort of modern day collective unconscious. “Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness” (McLuhan, p. 108). Now that people everywhere in America have seen the same television shows and movies and read the same books and articles, they share a wealth of common memories – but unfortunately, these are not memories of actual life, but memories of media manufactured situations and characters. Our collective unconscious is tainted, cluttered with media images and advertisements, catch phrases and jingles.
This begins to show in how the characters, particularly Babette and her husband Jack, expect each other to act. Real life begins to imitate the lives depicted on television, because “[television] is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (McLuhan, p. 9). When Babette’s marital indiscretion is revealed, Jack’s questions about the identity of the man and the circumstances involved prompt her to assume that he is going to act out in a stereotypically testosterone driven male fashion, as though all men who have been cheated on are homicidal revenge seekers. She tells Jack that “we all know men and their insane rage. This is something men are good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage” (DeLillo, p. 225). It is as though she expects him to play the role of jealous husband in some action movie or to behave as a crazy killer on the evening news, because “a male follows the path of homicidal rage … the path of plain dumb blind male biology” (p. 269).
On the other hand, Jack seems to think of Babette as though she should be as reliable and unchanging as a character on a favorite sitcom or a familiar product he has been buying at the supermarket for years. When Babette admits that she has been taking the non-FDA-approved medicine Dylar in an attempt to combat her fear of death, Jack seems unable to accept this revelation in her personality, in effect ordering her to be who he thinks she is: “Babette is not a neurotic person. She is strong, healthy, outgoing, affirmative. She says yes to things. This is the point of Babette” (p. 220). Later, when Jack inquires as to how she feels and her answer is less than optimistic, he tells her that he “depends on [her] to be the healthy former outgoing Babette” (p. 263). He criticizes her for wanting to go running late at night, saying that “no one can convince me that the person I know as Babette actually wants to run up the stadium steps at ten o’clock at night” (p. 301) and even for the way she talks: “Babette doesn’t speak like this.” He wants her to be as “uniform, continuous, and indefinitely repeatable” (McLuhan, p. 116) as the advertisements he is constantly exposed to, day in and day out.
Even Murray Siskind, visiting lecturer at the college where Jack teaches Hitler studies, seems to expect specific behaviors out of people in certain situations. When Jack reveals that he was exposed to the toxic chemical Nyodene Derivative and is therefore scheduled to die, Murray advises him on the proper way to behave like a dying man. “What people look for in a dying friend,” he informs Jack, “is a stubborn kind of gravel-voiced nobility, a refusal to give in, with moments of indomitable humor” (DeLillo, p. 284). Where else could he have developed preconceived notions about how a dying man should behave except from watching characters die movies and television? The social consequences of media, the stereotyped roles people expect one another to fulfill, result from “the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology” (McLuhan, p. 7).
During the initial moments of the airborne toxic event, Heinrich, Jack’s only son, seems to react more reasonably to the situation than his father does, perhaps because “the power of the TV mosaic to transform American innocence into depth sophistication” (McLuhan, p. 323) is most visible in children. While he is watching the black cloud with interest from the roof, his father decides that it isn’t safe for him to be out on a ledge and Babette, sounding like she is repeating advice she has heard somewhere for dealing with a suicide jumper, tells him to “coax him back in. Be sensitive and caring. Get him to talk about himself. Don’t make sudden movements” (DeLillo, p. 110).
Heinrich expresses concern over whether or not the toxins will reach them and Jack, more occupied with media images than reality, tells him that “these things happen to poor people … did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods?” (p. 114). Objecting further once the radio officially calls the black mass an airborne toxic event, Jack insists, “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the county, where the fish hatcheries are” (p. 117). Evidently he feels that he is too educated and too rich for a natural disaster to affect him. If he hasn’t seen it on television, it must not be possible.
Initially, the radio serves as the most important form of media the Gladneys rely on for information describing the airborne toxic event and the symptoms it might cause. The symptoms keep being updated, however, and the two daughters develop whatever symptoms they hear about, even when the symptoms are no longer correct, demonstrating “the instant consequences of electronically moved information” (McLuhan, p. 203). At first, the girls have sweaty palms. Then when the symptoms of exposure are changed to nausea and vomiting, they develop those too. Denise, the older and more observant of the girls, keeps getting up during dinner and “walking in small, stiff rapid strides to the toilet off the hall, a hand clamped to her mouth” (p. 117). Heinrich observes that she is showing outdated symptoms, because the radio has moved on to “heart palpitations and deja vu” (p. 116). The power of suggestion that the media has here is undeniable. Clearly the girls had not been exposed to Nyodene Derivative within their home, but hearing about what it could do to them was all the convincing they needed to act accordingly.
The family does not clear out of the house until a booming voice outside advises them to evacuate, and even then they do not seem to be in any kind of a rush, because Babette is “sure there’s plenty of time or they would have told [them] to hurry” (p. 119). Apparently, even when they are told that there is a black billowing cloud of deadly chemicals, they need further instruction to clarify whether or not evacuation is only a suggestion or “a little more mandatory.” It takes them twenty minutes of gathering personal possessions and “tins and jars with familiar life-enhancing labels” before they get into the car and then they check the other motorist’s faces to try and figure out “how frightened [they] should be” (p. 120).
Heinrich takes over the role of the media during this event, acting as a sort of news caster for his family by describing the scene outside the car, “the number and placement of bodies, the skid marks, the vehicular damage” (p. 122), “enthusiastically, with a sense of appreciation for the vivid and unexpected” (p. 123). Once safely inside the abandoned Boy Scout camp where the evacuees were directed for shelter, Heinrich sinks deeper into his role. “At the outer edges of one of the largest clusters … [he] was at the center of things, speaking in his new-found voice, his tone of enthusiasm for runaway calamity” (p. 130).
The evacuees gather around Heinrich, listening and watching, as though he is a television. He relays what he knows about Nyodene Derivative with a mixture of seriousness, sincerity, and comedy, even throwing in some predictions for future damage caused by exposure to the toxin. “There’s a lesson in all of this,” he concludes. “Get to know your chemicals” (p. 131). He sounds almost like a commercial for poison control.
Babette busies herself through the event by reading tabloids to a group of people in the camp, thereby serving as a medium through which media could exist no matter what the circumstances. She changes her voice according to dialogue and speaker, reads stories and advertisements indiscriminately, alternately. She provides another form of entertainment to the crowd, one that is more light-hearted, bubbly, and insignificant.
The crowd enjoys listening to Heinrich and Babette not just because they are serving as makeshift forms of media, but because “the pleasure of being among the masses is the sense of joy in the multiplication of numbers” (McLuhan, p. 107). This is a similar joy to that which is derived from the repetition of commercials, of ideas, of anything. Jack tells his Hitler students that “crowds came to be hypnotized by the voice, the party anthems, the torch light parades” (DeLillo, p. 73). Hitler had double the power of a television; not only could he attract people to him due to the familiar and continuous repetition of his ideas and anthems, but also due to the sheer joy taken from being in a crowd, the concept of infinity finally realized in visual terms among the masses. “Hitler … we couldn’t have television without him” (p. 63).
Was Hitler not just an advertisement for hate and death, while the crowds he drew advertised life through conformity and infinity – both advertisements “intended as subliminal pills for the subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell” (McLuhan, p. 228)? As Jack says, “to break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual” (DeLillo, p. 73). To not buy what is being sold is to reject the crowd, to reject repetition, to reject eternity. To reject the illusion is to reject American culture.
Jack, never one to reject illusion, describes the toxic event as though it is in fact a movie, the cloud of poison moving “like some death ship in a Norse legend, escorted across the night by armoured creatures with spiral wings” (p. 127), the army helicopters “spotlighting the cloud … as though it were part of a sound-and-light show, a bit of mood-setting mist drifting across a high battlement where a king had been slain” (p. 128). Detached from the reality of the situation, Jack watches this thing happen as though he is not actually a part of it, indicating that he has begun to look at the world around him as though it were just an enormous television. He is more of a silent viewer than an active participant. As his son points out to him, “it is practically the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell [people from the Middle Ages] one little crucial thing that might save a million and a half lives?” (p. 148). The answer is probably not.
All the characters reactions seem partially staged or rehearsed. Rumors spread through out the camp, the people manufacturing and distributing information which might or might not be based on truth. There was “growing respect for the most vivid rumor, the most chilling tale” (p. 153) and the people “began to marvel at [their] own ability to manufacture awe.” The people do not seem to have emotions so much as they seem to look around and decide how they should be feeling, acting, and reacting; everyone is caught up in the idea of what image it would be appropriate to present.
Jack, for instance, reveals at the beginning of the novel that has has altered his image so that he would look like the sort of man one would expect to be teaching Hitler studies. The chancellor of the college had advised him not only to gain weight in order to give off “an air of unhealthy excess, of padding and exaggeration, hulking massiveness” (p. 17) but also to change his name if he wanted to be “taken seriously as a Hitler innovator” (p. 16). Having invented an extra initial, Jack is known as J. A. K. Gladney and has become “the false character that follows the name around” (p. 17), skulking about campus in dark glasses and an academic robe to keep up appearances.
But he is concerned not only with his own image, but also with Babette’s, even when she is just around the house, as though he expects her to keep up a constantly picturesque image. He complains that she wears sweatsuits too much, telling her that “I wish you wouldn’t wear it when you read bedtime stories to Wilder or braid Steffie’s hair. There’s something touching about such moments that is jeopardized by running clothes” (p. 301).
The other image that Jack becomes obsessed with is that of Mr. Gray, the man with whom Babette exchanged sex for Dylar. Jack imagines Mr. Gray as a blurry television figure, “gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished … a hazy gray seducer moving in ripples across a hotel room” (p. 241). Perhaps influenced by his wife’s repetitive comments about homicidal rage, because “a small pattern in a noisy redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself” (McLuhan, p. 227), Jack devises a plan to find and kill Willie Mink. Jack ends up acting just as his wife assumed he would, illustrating that life echoes what appears on television.
What Jack finds when following through with his plan is a man in a motel room incessantly shoving Dylar pills down his throat, spouting off nonsense like a walking television whose channels keep being flipped. “The pet under stress may need a prescription diet” (DeLillo, p. 307), he says, clearly repeating some random commercial. Willie’s face is even shaped like a television: “odd, concave, forehead and chin jutting” (p. 306), and he wears “Budweiser shorts” (p. 307) to complete the image, a commercial to correspond with his television face.
Faced with the man he has imagined all along as being an image from the television, Jack follows through with his plan and shoots Willie twice in the stomach “for maximum slowness, depth and intensity of pain” (p. 311). He describes the gunshot wounds as though removed from the situation, like he is in a movie: “I watched blood squirt … a delicate arc. I marveled at the rich color, sensed the color-causing action of nonnucleated cells … Mink’s pain was beautiful, intense” (p. 312). His plan falters when he places the gun in Willie’s hand in an attempt to imply suicide and Willie ends up shooting him in the wrist. Symbolically, Jack tries to kill the television and the television fights back, trying to save itself – indicating perhaps, finally, that Jack is ready to reject some of the artificiality of the media driven world.
In a world where television is everywhere, where television is a way of life and life is an echo of television, culture is inevitably influenced by the static sounding from the TV. But what purpose does the ever-present white noise of the media serve: does it intend to distort reality, or is it just an integral part of our modern reality? And for all Delillo’s good intentions for social commentary, are his words finally not just another layer of white noise in our already buzzing world?
