As “White Noise” tends to lag, it becomes haunted by the James Baldwin quote it presents at the beginning: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Though that stance is right on the money when it comes to hatred, Lombroso does not deal with such an emotional state until the last 15 minutes or so. Even then, as everyone seems to have run out of hate to sell, “White Noise” says little about its movement except showing that to stay grifting, you have to adapt.
The documentary does provide a strong sense of the domino effect in such ideology, in that it clearly connects mass shootings from around the world to the tweets fired out by those who are front and center here. But when it comes the filmmakers asking these people if they take any responsibility for their rhetoric, the figures back away. Of course they don’t, and such frustrating toothlessness becomes endemic of the project overall. Accountability is not in the script for the characters they’ve made, and in the few instances in “White Noise” looks to press back against the people who have given them so much access, it also gives them an easy way out.
Oh, and the movie is about misogynist pill salesman Mike Cernovich, xenophobic vlogger Lauren Southern, and white supremacist Richard Spencer. In the scope of America’s growth, may their legacies be a mere footnote.
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