The Atlantic’s “White Noise” Lives Up To Its Name
White Noise, released by The Atlantic and directed by Daniel Lombroso, joins an increasingly crowded genre of films trying to make sense of the alt-right, the loose collective, centered on 4-chan and Reddit, of mostly young men connected by their support of Donald Trump, hatred of the Left, and little else.
Calling the alt-right an ideology is a little misleading – the term covers a motley of beliefs from White Supremacists to incels and opportunist trolls. White Noise differentiates itself by following the lives of three of the mostly anonymous movement’s public faces: pill salesman and Twitter personality Mike Cernovich, anti-immigration advocate Lauren Southern and White Supremacist Richard Spencer. We watch them go on dates (Southern’s boyfriend tells her that they have a duty to reproduce European children), throw awkward parties (the white ethnostate doesn’t look very fun) and decompress after being heckled at college campus speaking engagements, but learn very little of their actual beliefs.
The best moments of White Noise come when the ridiculousness of their philosophies are driven home to them. Southern and Cernovich marry and have children with non-white partners, and when asked about it the smoke pouring out of their ears is almost tangible. Southern in particular must deal with Titanic-sized levels of cognitive dissonance, as she denies being a feminist while dealing with rampant misogyny and come-ons from married “defenders of the family,” and advocates for the traditional role of women while herself trying to maintain a professional life and a family.
But even these moments, few as they are, are made bitter-sweet by the realization: Why are we following these people at all? This problem extends to all of the films tracking the alt-right. They focus almost exclusively on the movement’s members and beliefs, but never ask themselves whether we should be giving them that kind of attention at all. Treating their beliefs as intellectual puzzles obfuscates their maliciousness, and focusing only on them rather than the people they harm gives the alt-right exactly what it wants.
White Noise is guilty of this fault twice-over: by exclusively following the personal lives of the leaders it gives them exposure while failing to explain the harm they cause or how their views came about. The film gives us glimpses of the people we might have followed – the immigrants Southern interviews in France, living under a bridge, promised a life in Europe and given only a tent; Cernovich’s long-suffering Iranian-American wife, a living refutation of his beliefs, surrounded by Islamophobia and misogyny but still in love with the father of her child – but instead we are given a pity-laden portrayal of the people least deserving of our attention.
The fatal flaw of the film, however, lies elsewhere. In the final 15 minutes it stumbles into peddling the comforting myth that being a bad person makes the alt-righters sad, a view no more true than the thought that good people are always happy. (On the contrary, it is precisely their unhappiness that makes a sizable portion of the alt-right join, not the other way around.) This illusion breeds pity for them, and allows us to be complacent in the face of their bigotry.
Keeping tabs on the alt-right is important, but only because of the damage they do, not because of what they are in themselves. White Noise is a pertinent reminder of what happens when we forget that.
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