White Noise

1980s Midwestern college town. Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies, pioneer in field. Blended family with wife Babette and four children from previous marriages. Comfortable academic life insulated from reality. Consumerist abundance.

Murray to Jack: "Isn't death the boundary we need? A source of terror and deep sorrow but also a precious asset." Theme of death anxiety in modern life, meaning in consumer culture, and confronting mortality.

Jack obsessed with death, hides fear behind academic prestige. Babette teaching posture, also death-anxious. Children precocious, media-saturated. Weekly supermarket trips. Campus lectures. Life of surfaces and shopping. Underneath: existential dread.

Airborne Toxic Event. Chemical tanker truck crashes, deadly cloud spreads. Family must evacuate. Simulated disaster becomes real. Death anxiety abstract made concrete. Forced to confront mortality physically.

Evacuate or stay? Trust authorities or panic? Jack exposed to cloud possibly fatally. Given ambiguous diagnosis. How much danger? Information contradictory. Modern life ambiguity cannot be intellectualized away. Must act on incomplete knowledge.

Family in evacuation camp. Everything familiar gone. Jack learns exposure may cause death in 30 years or never. "Nebulous mass" in body. Cannot know. Entering world where his death is real possibility not academic subject.

Jack and Babette relationship strain under death fear. He discovers she is secretly taking Dylar, experimental drug to eliminate fear of death. She is as terrified as him. Shared mortality brings them together and apart.

Return home. Life resumes but changed. Supermarket trips feel different. Jack investigates Dylar. Talks with colleague Murray about death and meaning. Children dealing with event in own ways. Promise: satirical look at death anxiety in consumer culture.

Jack discovers Babette got Dylar from "Mr. Gray" in exchange for sex. Betrayal and fear combined. Wife sold self for death drug that does not work. False defeat: solution to death anxiety is fraud and degradation.

Jack becomes obsessed with finding and killing Mr. Gray. Death anxiety transformed into murder plan. Gets gun from colleague. Babette helpless. Jack descending into violence as response to mortality terror. Unraveling.

Jack confronts Mr. Gray in motel. Shoots him. Gray shoots Jack. Both wounded. Babette arrives. Chaos and blood. Jack attempted murder to overcome death fear but just brought more death. Violence solved nothing. Lowest point.

Jack and Babette take wounded Gray to hospital. Nun there reveals nuns do not actually believe in God, just act out the belief for others. Last comfort of afterlife revealed as performance. No escape from death. Pure existential void.

Jack and Babette leave hospital. Both wounded but alive. Cannot defeat death but can live with its terror. Synthesis: accepting mortality without answers or solutions. Must live anyway. Absurdity embraced.

Family in supermarket. Shopping as ritual, consumer abundance as comfort even if hollow. Products dancing. Everyone dancing. Life continues despite death looming. Absurd celebration of meaninglessness and meaning both.

Dance number in supermarket. Products flying, colors bright, family together. Death still coming but right now they are alive and dancing. Embracing absurd joy. No answers but movement anyway. Living despite void.