ripcurrent
Full plot from Wikipedia:
In 1984, Jack Gladney is a professor of “Hitler studies” (a field he founded) at the College-on-the-Hill in Ohio. Despite his specialism, he speaks no German and is secretly taking basic lessons to prepare for a speech he is due to give at a conference. Jack is married to Babette, his fourth wife. Together, they raise a blended family with four children: Heinrich and Steffie, from two of Jack’s previous marriages; Denise, from Babette’s previous marriage; and Wilder, a child they conceived together. Denise spies on Babette and finds her secret prescription stash of Dylar, a mysterious drug not in the usual records. Jack experiences a dream about a mysterious man trying to kill him, alluding to an earlier conversation with Babette focused on their mutual fear of death. Jack’s colleague, Murray Siskind, a professor of American culture, wishes to develop a similarly niche field, “Elvis studies,” and convinces Jack to help him. They briefly become rivals as competition between their courses arises.
However, their lives are disrupted when a cataclysmic train accident casts a cloud of chemical waste over the town. This “Airborne Toxic Event” forces a massive evacuation, which leads to a major traffic jam on the highway. Jack drives to a gas station to refill his car, where he is inadvertently exposed to the cloud. The family and numerous others are forced into quarantine at a summer camp. Murray supplies Jack with a small palm-sized pistol to protect himself against the more dangerous survivalists in the camp. One day, chaos ensues when multiple families desperately try to escape the camp. The Gladneys almost make it out but ultimately end up with their car floating in the river. They later arrive in Iron City, where they encounter a man who rants about the lack of media attention on the evacuees and spots Jack, claiming he had seen him before looking at him. After nine days, the family manages to return home. However, since Jack was briefly exposed to the chemical waste, his fear of death becomes exacerbated.
Later, everything has returned to normal except for Babette, who has become pale, lethargic and emotionally distant from Jack and the rest of the family. Soon afterward, Jack begins having hallucinations of a mysterious, balding man following him around. Denise shares her concerns regarding Dylar and Jack confronts Babette. She admits to having joined a shadowy clinical trial for a drug to treat death anxieties, and when she was cut from the trial, agreed to having sex with “Mr. Gray” in exchange for a continuing supply of the drug. Intrigued by the idea, Jack asks Denise for the Dylar bottle, but she reveals she threw it away earlier. While digging through the garbage, Jack finds a newspaper ad for Dylar, prompting him to retrieve his pistol and get revenge on Mr. Gray. Jack tracks him down at a motel, where he discovers that Mr. Gray was the man in his hallucinations. Jack shoots him and places the gun in his hand so as to make it look like suicide. Babette unexpectedly shows up and sees a still-alive Mr. Gray, who manages to shoot them both. After Jack and Babette convince the confused Mr. Gray that he is responsible for their injuries, they take him to a nearby hospital run by German atheist nuns. There, the couple also reconcile with each other.
The next day, the Gladneys shop at an A&P supermarket, where the family participates in a dance number with all the other patrons and employees.
Sounds insanely stupid. It’s getting boring to see all the “predictions” in these dumb movies.
White Noise was initially published back in the 80s. It got a resurgence in popularity because Delillo’s other work got made into a picture starring the heart throb from that vampire franchise where he goes around being rich in a limo.
I’ve been following the development of this film as it’s root content depicted both a bizarre parallel history and “what if” in the frame of a happening(another film) type scenario with the lavish consumerism of the 80s washing over its set.
Very odd coincidence that it’s happening in the real world now.
Strange plot.
Even worse:
“When Ben Ratner’s family signed up in 2021 to be extras in the movie “White Noise,” they thought it would be a fun distraction from their day-to-day life in blue-collar East Palestine, Ohio.
“The 2022 movie was shot around Ohio and is based on a novel by Don DeLillo. The book was published in 1985, shortly after a chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, that killed nearly 4,000 people. The book and film follow the fictional Gladney family – a couple and their four kids – as they flee an “airborne toxic event” and then return home and try to resume their normal lives.
Ratner tried to rewatch the movie a few days ago and found that he couldn’t finish it.
“All of a sudden, it hit too close to home,” he said.
Ratner and his family – his wife, Lindsay, and their kids, Lilly, Izzy, Simon and Brodie – are living the fiction they helped bring to the screen.”
cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-white-noise/index.html
Didn’t they deliberately ignite the stuff? If so, then what is this:
“Vinyl chloride is unstable and boils and evaporates at room temperature, giving it a very short lifespan in the environment, said Dana Barr, a professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.
“If you had a very small amount of vinyl chloride that was present in an area, it would evaporate within minutes to hours at the longest,” she said.
“But the problem they’re facing here is that it’s not just a small amount, and so if they can’t contain what gets into the water or what gets into the soil, they may have this continuous off-gassing of vinyl chloride that has gotten into these areas,” Barr said.
“I probably would be more concerned about the chemicals in the air over the course of the next month.”