About White Noise Movie

The White Noise movie was kind of a sleeper.

I'm not going to say that it was a hit, but it was a sleeper. I think that's one word that most movie critics can agree on as far as White Noise is concerned.

It's a sleeper because you really can't quite put your finger on it. On the one hand, you are looking at a movie that explores the scary interconnection between life and death. Usually, this interconnection is not handled well by Hollywood. Seriously. This is not my theory. This is an absolute fact.

Why? Well, on the one hand, you get this cartoonish depiction of death. I'm talking about zombies, ghosts, mummies, and anything and everything related to dead organisms. And when Hollywood presents death this way, it plays up the ugly. It plays up the unusual. It exaggerates the degradation, the decay and the plain old decomposition, and it is physically ugly.

But if you think about it, it has to look this way for life to be recycled on planet Earth. If you've ever had a puppy or any kind of pet die on you, you know this full well. When your pet was alive, it breathed air, it ate food, and where do you think food came from? It's carbon, it's nitrogen, it's oxygen. In other words, it's organic. Even though it may be made of synthetic stuff, but ultimately, it's organic.

And when it dies, your pet becomes part of the water cycle and the nitrogen cycle. In other words, it goes into the ground, gasses are released, worms get their food, and then where do you think all that degradation, all that freed energy goes to? That's right, it feeds plants. And the process repeats itself again and again and again.

And any healthy discussion of death would recognize this. That there is nothing fundamentally wrong with feces or decayed material or rot because that's part of the process. You're disgusted now because it attracts a lot of flies, it stinks, but you're only looking at it from one stage of the evolution of that energy.

Because when you see that energy transform into plant food, it becomes more and more pleasant. When all that tissue gets turned into energy which feeds plants and you're looking at the plant, with its broad leaves, nice healthy green color and amazing flowers, you think that it's a beautiful picture. And then when an animal eats that plant and you look at the animal and it's all cute and lively, you think it's positive as well.

I hope you see the point here because people think that the rotten part is automatically bad. And the whole point of great horror movies, talking about life and death, is that you are able to present decay in its proper context.

It is not the end. It is not the death that we fear. It is definitely not the final point of our consciousness. Instead, it's just a transitory point. And to layer on tension and narrative elements on top of this is really mind blowing.

And that's why White Noise has gained quite a bit of critical following. These are people who are involved with art schools. These are people involved with some sort of cinematographic background. They do movies for a living. Maybe they're academics.

But it definitely has this following because it takes a different approach to death while making it scary. It's able to preserve the suspense of that without cheapening it and resorting to flat, shallow and essentially pointless cartoon versions of that. Really deep stuff, but enjoyable as well if you are a big horror fan.

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