White Noise: the review

WARNING: Small spoiler alert for this post, big spoiler alert for the comments. Read at your own peril.

Last night, Linus and I saw White Noise, which has nothing to do with the novel of the same name by the brilliant Don DeLillo. Which is a good novel, y'all should read it. The film? Not so much?

Granted, we both knew this film wasn't going to blow our minds. The reviews have ripped it to bits, and rightly so. I'm not terribly deterred by negative reviews of fright flicks, though, especially in the post-Scream era of gore, where a film needs to be scary and funny and smart and also a giant unpredictable mindfuck in order for anyone to give it the time of day. We saw it because that's what we do. We see horror movies.

There were some good things about White Noise. There was Michael Keaton, for one. Who doesn't love Michael Keaton? I've missed him, and it was nice to see him again. The concept? The dead communicating with the living electronically -- voices popping up in the static and snow of our radios and televisions and being amplified and deciphered so messages from the other side can be delivered to loved ones. Michael Keaton's obsession, first with communicating with his dead wife and then communicating with everyone else's dead wife, is complex and believable. You're not quite sure if he's actually hearing voices, if he's on the brink of madness and seeking comfort in something that isn't there, or if something truly sinister is going on.

Well, something truly sinister is going on, and it made for some jump-in-your-chair-cover-your-face scary moments. For the most part, the whole movie just made me nervous. I was a wreck the whole time. You have no idea what's going to happen, but you just know it's going to be bad.

Then we got to the last scene. The wrap-it-up scene. The scene where we found out if all of the theories we'd had since the movie began were right. They weren't. They weren't even remotely plausible, and bear in mind I accepted all the supernatural gobbledygook as plausible. In fact, those last 20 minutes pretty much negated everything positive that came before it. Kind of like when the aliens show up in Dude, Where's My Car? and you're like, "Huh? This wasn't in the preview. What's going on here?"

As I tried to make sense of the end of the film, I started formulating questions for Linus in my head. Homeboy went to Harvard -- he knows stuff. When we walked out, I started in.

"So wait," I began. "Those three monster things at the end, what were they and where did they come from?"

Linus did not know.

"So what was up with the whole chronological aspect?" I asked. "I didn't get that."

Neither did Linus.

"So that whole EVP thing. Is that for real? They had a statistic at the end."

Linus gave me an "Are you kidding me?" look.

"I'm not asking if you have a home theater set up to record the voices of the dead. I'm asking if there are people out there who actually study that."

Linus, in his infinite wisdom, reminded me that there are people out there who study everything. We spent the next hour discussing where we thought the film was going, and how if we had been right, it would have been a much better film. Next up: Boogeyman and The Ring II.

Related links:
Michael Keaton's Fame Audit
Salon didn't entirely hate White Noise
Some facts about EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena)