White Noise Trailer: Noah Baumbach's Airborne Toxic Event Finally Hits The Screen

Don DeLillo's 1985 postmodern opus, "White Noise," was considered for decades to be unfilmable and not without good reason. Much of the book's events, especially the ones surrounding what is called the "Airborne Toxic Event," are extremely abstract, making the task of adapting these scenes to the screen an uphill task. This is made especially more difficult when you take into account all of the philosophical themes interwoven throughout both the characters and the story. It's these issues that made initial adaptations of "White Noise" fall through.

That is, until Noah Baumbach decided to make his own adaptation, and he somehow managed to see it to completion. "White Noise" is about to make its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, and to celebrate this occasion, Netflix has released the first trailer for the previously-unfilmable movie. Needless to say, the story of Jack Gladley (Adam Driver), his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig), and his large family looks to be every bit as compelling on-screen as on the page.

There's a lot to take in with this trailer, especially due to its abstract subject matter. However, this footage falls in line with what we have already known about the film. Driver's Jack is a professor of Hitler Studies at The-College-on-the-Hill and is a man deeply afraid of death. This is a fear he shares with Gerwig's Babette, his fourth wife who often wonders which one of them will end up dying first. Their shared fear is heightened when the "Airborne Toxic Event" envelopes their small town after a train crash. Along with his wife and gaggle of children and stepchildren, Jack must confront his mortality and purpose in life as they flee this mysterious event. 

So yeah, that's some pretty deep stuff, but that's par for the course with Baumbach's work. Driver and Gerwig are joined by Don Cheadle, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith, Raffey Cassidy, Alessandro Nivola, and Lars Eidinger in this adaptation.

"White Noise" will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31 before serving as the opening night film of the New York Film Festival. It will then arrive on Netflix at some point.