White Noise, pre-critical reading

I'm trying something a bit different here, and it might be interesting and it might not. I'm going to write two reviews of Don Delillo's White Noise, one before I read the background material and whatnot included in the Viking critical edition (gotta love those critical editions) and then another after. Essentially, I'm seeing how much, and what, changes in my views on a work of art when I know it in a (relative) vacuum, and when I know the thoughts of others on it.

The more I dwell on White Noise, the more I like it. The style of it strikes me as a cross between Pynchon and Vonnegut – darkly satiric and openly arty, but approachable.

Was anything written in the '80s not darkly satiric, by the way? It seems an apocalyptic decade. The next generation seemed odd and dangerous, but it wouldn't matter because they wouldn't be given a chance to grow up, at least not in anything but some post-apocalyptic hell. This seems to be the end-pointed gestured toward by so many works in the '80s.

Ultimately, the work is about how we deal with death, and the verdict seems to be that we deal with it by lying to everyone until we know until we reach ourselves. The book's tensions are all predicated on falsehoods, though it's only when the truth is revealed that the real trouble begins.

Ignorance is bliss could be the motto of the book. The protagonist, Jack Glad ney, is a formidable figure of great intelligence, at least when seen from the outside. Our perspective shows him as a man constantly fretting about the opinions of others, of becoming obsolete to his wife, to his family, to his work. His counterpart is Murray, who is painfully, prophetically honest. Murray seems incapable of deceit, gleefully showing the patchwork of lies that make up society. In a way, Murray seems a modern take on the Trickster character, setting up people for their great falls, but unlike the Tricksters of old it is not simply an element of truth, a grain of fact, in his words – they are pure fact. And they destroy.

Jack Gladney has convinced himself in four previous marriages that he wanted women so intelligent they were involved in Intelligence, but they all left him unsatiated. He has found love in a simple woman, Babette (whom he calls Baba in bed). And the core of her simplicity, as it is revealed, is her uncaring of death. They rarely discuss it, but when they do she says she hopes she dies first. It is a comforting thought to Jack, who doesn't want to die first simply because he doesn't want to die ever. The revelation that death haunts her, constantly, to the point of complete moral collapse, is the Fall of their relationship.

From here he has but one remaining comfort: the young boy, Wilder. I'm not sure Wilder's age is ever given, but he borders on ageless. He is within talking age, but he chooses not to. There is no gross hints of autism or any learning disabilities – he simply doesn't talk much. It is revealed near the end of the book, after roughly a year has passed, he is talking less. Far from concerning his parents, he becomes a simple comfort, a person of pure ego (as described by Murray), with no concern of the death of himself or those around him.

The last chapter of the book opens with an extended scene of Wilder, worth describing in some detail (after this scene there is a brief epilogue, which seems like it should be a separate entity and not the end of the same chapter). He rides his tricycle across a multilane highway as two old ladies watch, screaming but not interceding, as cars nearly hit him but don't, Wilder himself wildly unconcerned. After safely crossing, borderline miraculously, he rides down an embankment into some mud. Finding himself half-floating in the filth, he begins to cry, to weep, to wail, at which point a passing driver stops and goes down to help him, the ladies serving only as witnesses, not participants.

It's a rather odd scene, something that, in isolation, could be used as a standard mockery of art, a post-modern mess. But of course it isn't that, not when taken with what else is said about Wilder, and what the book is.

The key phrase to this is, once again, from a discussion between Murray and Jack. Wilder is either described as or described as having (the sentence is, purposefully probably, ambiguous) a “cloud of unknowing.” This is a reference to the 14^th century work of English Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing. In that work, God is described as either having or being a cloud of unknowing, only pierceable with the arrows of love. In other words, Wilder serves as a symbol for God.

In what way? It seems to me that Wilder serves as God for Jack and Babette, for all those around him who need the comfort of the deathless, of embracing the unknowing. If lies are unsustainable, and the truth destroys, the option is the embracing, the worship, of the unknown, of ignorance. In other words, the novel goes about describing a sort of atheistic mysticism, an embracing of the unknown because the Truth is too grand for comprehension, the difference between it and ancient mysticism being that the Truth has gone from God to Nothing.

But the last scene calls even this succor into question. Can this Edenic idiocy avoid a Fall perpetually, or is that what we're seeing in the final chapter? Just as the book shows an atheistic mysticism, maybe this an atheistic apocalypse, an event no longer of an end in redemption, but an end in collapse.

Cheery! Thanks, the '80s!

Moneyball: A Tale of Three Movies

I feel a bit torn on Moneyball. It's well-acted, essentially well-directed, and the script holds together well; the problem is, it feels a bit diffuse. You get the feeling that there are three different movies competing for screentime, which I think comes from the problem of adapting a book like Moneyball, which isn't really a narrative. Sorkin's proven his ability to adapt well from odd sources, but this doesn't flow nearly so well as The Social Network did. The three main movies are: a somewhat detached look at a two men removing the “sport” element from team management and the conflict that brings, the super-stereotypical sports movie where the underdogs no one expects anything from come from behind to win it all against insurmountable blah blah blah, and a human interest movie about a man combining the protective impulses of a father with his job and background to find a way to protect others from the mistakes he's made. Essentially, there's the Sorkin movie, the Miller (the director) movie, and the producers' movie (which is Blind Side II: Now With Baseball).

The Sorkin movie is really good – potentially great, even. The dehumanizing of sports, one of our culture's last rites, in an effort to raise competitiveness, an endeavor which is fruitless almost as soon as it's started working, is the stuff of a Great Movie. It's a friendlier Godfather, an ambiguous allegory on capitalism and its effects, but shot through with snappy patter and Jonah Hill being large and awkward.

But, this movie isn't all there. I don't care to know the details behind its failure, whether the script just never got polished enough or whether it got torn to shreds in an effort to make the movie more palatable to the desired audience. Sorkin's had enough mega-failures of his own making (see: Studio 60) that I wouldn't put it past him to fumble this one.

The remaining movies do make me doubt that, though. The director seems uninterested in the numbers-crunching that is the heart (or, rather, lack thereof) of the story. Instead you see a lot of the games, recreated and file footage both. Particularly egregious is the nearly-concluding montage of victory's for the A's, complete with slow-mo home runs and base running, fans rising up as a tidal wave of applause, bombastic music trying desperately to convey the grandeur of the moment. Maybe this is all intended satirically, so that the lack of a world series, and the lack of notability afterward, is all the more jarring. Maybe – but it sure doesn't feel like that. The viewer gets the idea that if it weren't for all those messy facts they could've given the movie a good ending, which is rather beside the point.

And now let's deal with the – ugh – producers' movie. For those of you who don't know, Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, is also the author of The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game in which there's sort of a human interest story but mostly it's about how much football has changed due to an iconoclastic individual doing things in a new way. The movie version enlarged the human interest story and turned it into The Blind Side, which made 1000% of its budget at the box office, a fact I'm sure has nothing to do with why the producers desperately wanted Moneyball to be like it. Anyway, in The Blind Side II: This Time It's Brad Pitt, we see a devoted divorcee dad learning to love people, projected through his saintly love and kindness towards his daughter. It is a plot (and a treatment of a plot) so banal I have nothing to say about it. The most you could say about it is that it skews any interpretation of the film towards the humanistic, showing that happiness comes through love and not success, a moral that feels about as tacked on as the last chapter of The Book of Job.

Moneyball ends up being accidentally reflective of the story it tells. It tries to do things a bit differently, with a focus on the numbers, and this works for most the film, but in the end it fizzles out. Now all that's left is for someone to come along and make a totally brilliant film about the Red Sox world series and make us forget all about Moneyball and the A's.