On Noah Baumbach's 'White Noise'

The film’s first section is titled—as in the novel, whose three-part structure it retains—“Waves and Radiation.” Jack Gladney (played by Adam Driver) is a college professor who’s a bright star in the field of Hitler studies, even though, to his own embarrassment, he barely speaks a word of German. He thinks the Führer can best be understood through psychoanalysis or as a charismatic celebrity rather than through anything so boring as politics or economics. Fame—in the time of Reagan—über alles. His colleague Murray Siskind (Don Cheadle) is an expert on Elvis, and though the pair of tenured bloviators think they’re critiquing Big Men, they also seem to be under their spell.