When Horror Degenerates Into (In)action (Mis)adventure, or Why I Want to Start a List of Filmmakers Who Should Owe Me Money
by June Pulliam
06/24/2005
White Noise. Geoffrey Sax, director. 2004.
For a film that was supposed to be about the ghostliness of white noise—the static from televisions and radios and bad cell phone transmissions combined with the general sounds of everyday urban life that we’ve been trained to ignore—White Noise had no idea of how to deal with sound of any sort in any original or meaningful way. It opens with music that is a horror film cliché, a tune reminiscent of the opening score of Halloween. And it just got worse, as other annoying auditory moments included a scene where the film’s protagonist, Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton), is asked by his young son if he is going to be alright. Clearly, dad is not okay at this point, as he’s a grieving widower who’s gone completely around the twist. Director Geoffrey Sax actually cued maudlin music that is supposed to let viewers know that we should feel some sort of heartfelt emotion. I guess that’s a good idea in this case, as the script and characterization in this film are so weak that otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to feel.
The “plot,” and I use the term loosely, of White Noise is basically this: Architect Jonathan Rivers is blissfully in love with his young blonde wife, well-known novelist Anna Rivers. On the day the couple discovers that Anna is pregnant, she drives away into the sunset, never to be seen again. She has a flat late that night while driving close to the rocky shore of the film’s unnamed city, and somehow falls out of the car, hits her head and breaks her arm, only to be swept out by the tide to her death. Jonathan mourns his wife’s death (and we can tell he’s sad only because Michael Keaton mopes around looking all craggy and unshaven).
Soon after, Jonathan notices a strange, fat elderly man who looks like an aging ham radio operator has been tailing him, and of course a confrontation on the order of “who are you and why are you following me” ensues. The man introduces himself as Raymond Price, he who makes contact with the dead through mysterious electronic means, and he’s come to speak with Jonathan, for Anna has made contact with him. Jonathan displays some initial skepticism, but five minutes later into the film, goes to Raymond’s crumbling Victorian house, sees his collection of tape decks, computer monitors, and televisions programmed to receive static, and confronted with such overwhelming “evidence,” pretty much believes immediately that Raymond is the real deal. But here’s the kicker: A day before coming to see Raymond, Jonathan received a mysterious phone call from Anna’s cell phone, the same unit recovered from her body and now lying in Jonathan’s sock drawer. Raymond’s garbled message for Jonathan seems to be Anna saying his name, which is, coincidentally, the same staticy phone message that Jonathan received earlier. How Raymond knew this message is from Anna to Jonathan is anyone’s guess. After all, the film is set in a big city, not Mayberry.
On the strength of what sounds to be a mistuned radio station, Jonathan visits Raymond on a few more occasions to hear Anna’s further “communications.” During these times, we get to hear some of the other bits of white noise that Raymond claims are messages from the dead (and I swear I heard The Simpsons Hanz Moleman in the background of one of them). During Jonathan and Raymond’s final meeting, Jonathan sees something disturbing in his friend’s monitor—a visual image of three dark male figures that look something like Queer Eye’s Fab Five minus two, or possibly an old episode of The Sopranos, and hears something vaguely threatening uttered by this trio. Before Jonathan can discover anything else, Raymond clicks off the monitor and deletes the audio, dismissively stating that not all of the dead are like his Anna. Some of them are nasty.
Not to give away too much of the ending (does anyone actually care?), it turns out that Jonathan and Raymond haven’t really been talking with the dead. Instead, they’ve been punked. The fleeting images they’ve been seeing are more akin to the videos broadcast over the internet of those about to be executed by Al Qaida, the ones where the victim reads a canned statement such as “death to America” before being killed. The Three Menacing Figures from the Great Beyond (3MFGB) have orchestrated this entire show, where the dead seem to communicate with their living loved ones to comfort them about the nature of the Other Side. Why the 3MFGB want to perpetrate this fraud on the living is never made clear, but by the end of the film, all I really cared about was getting out of the theater undetected since I didn’t want anyone to know I was dumb enough to spend money to watch this movie.
Regular readers of this zine, and of my reviews specifically, might believe this piece is particularly rancorous, and wonder what in particular has so provoked my ire. Surely, I’ve seen a strikingly bad horror movie or two in my day. What so annoyed me about this film is that it had potentially excellent subject matter.
The fictitious Raymond Price’s electronic voice phenomenon has some basis in reality. Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian philosopher, psychologist, and university professor who had studied at Oxford University and with Carl Jung in Switzerland, (1 ) began his own series of experiments and brought this idea into popular consciousness with is 1971 book Break Through: Electronic Communication with the Dead May Be Possible. “Raudive’s widely read book would inspire psychic researchers around the world . . . to investigate what popularly became known as ‘electronic voice phenomena.” (2) White Noise might have been much more interesting had it been based, even loosely, on Dr. Raudive, or even dealt in more detail with EVP, which is itself a concept pregnant with signification as electronic media is already haunted to a degree in the way it transforms everyday voices and images into something uncanny through their reproduction. (3) Alas, all we got was a dull film with one-dimensional plot and characters. Ho hum.
Fittingly enough, before White Noise even started, I was treated to previews of two horror films that will be by their very nature derivative: The Ring Two and a remake of the Amityville Horror. Then and there, I should have known better and just left the theater. Maybe the characters from these films I haven’t yet seen were sending me some sort of coded message to leave before it was too late. But I stayed, only to discover that this is one of those films that is so disappointing, so incompetent, that it has caused me to howl for a refund of my admission price. In fact, it has inspired a new feature in Necropsy—filmmakers who owe us money for wasting our time.