Kill James Bond! - S4E24.5: White Noise

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

This is a preview of a bonus episode! Check it out on our reasonably-priced patreon! Earth's foremost Hitlerologist and his family have their lives briefly turned upside down by environmental disaster.  ----- Friend of the show Bella, a refugee evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021, is raising money for her gender confirmation surgery! Anything you can give would be hugely appreciated! https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/team-bella ----- Check out friend of the show Mattie's new book Simplicity here, or wherever fine graphic novels are sold! ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. In our home, we talk a lot about how insane everything feels, and agonise constantly over what can be done to best help the Palestinians trapped in Gaza facing the full brunt of genocidal violence. My partner Rebecca has put together a list of four fundraisers you can contribute to- all of them are at work on the ground doing what they can. -Palestinian Communist Youth Union, which is doing a food and water effort, and is part of the official communist party of Palestine https://www.gofundme.com/f/to-preserve-whats-left-of-humanity-global-solidarity -Water is Life, a water distribution project in North Gaza affiliated with an Indigenous American organization and the Freedom Flotilla https://www.waterislifegaza.org/ -Vegetable Distribution Fund, which secured and delivers fresh veg, affiliated with Freedom Flotilla also https://www.instagram.com/linking/fundraiser?fundraiser_id=1102739514947848 -Thamra, which distributes herb and veg seedlings, repairs and maintains water infrastructure, and distributes food made with replanted veg patches https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-thamra-cultivating-resilience-in-gaza ----- WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com , as well as on our Bluesky and X.com the every app account

They're not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore. What are they calling it? The airborne toxic event. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly. I am joined, as always, by my friends Abigail Thorne and Devon. Hello, gentle listener Bonjour listeners Oh, continental

Yes, well the thing is We all took independently Short City breaks In central Paris In gay Paris Yes, yes, we did Yeah, yeah, yeah Not brotherly

It was real like, you know It was a really quick sort of thing Like in and out one day Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Just four minutes We got to see the Louvre Which was really nice Yeah, it was nice actually

Had a great time there Did have to leave in a hurry but aside from that, you know, it's always nice to appreciate culture and you take up a few souvenirs as well so really feeling good about that. Absolutely. And also, if you're on the Patreon,

I just honestly don't worry about it anymore. Yeah, yeah, you can, that's fine. We actually take care of for a while now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's all good, don't worry. Yeah, in keeping with robbery season. But yeah, so meanwhile, on sort of bonus feed, we've still been... I do feel the need to clarify.

We didn't actually steal the jewels from the Louvre, and you do have to remain subscribed to the Patreon. Okay, that was a joke. You do. You don't cancel your subscription. Please. That was what the joke was, just in case anyone didn't get it yet.

Please do not cancel your Patreon and subscription. Yeah, don't do that. Not least because if you keep it, you get to retain access to us talking about, I guess, vaguely religion. And today's movie is kind of, I would describe it as like post-religion season. It doesn't necessarily mean the season is ending,

but it's like it's in dialogue with some of the other stuff. There's a couple of other stuff I want to do, Solaris as well. for religion season that incorporates like not just disbelief but like post belief if you like

and the film is white noise the 2022 Noah Baumbach movie with Adam Driver I love this movie it's in like my top at the very least 20 I've seen it a million times it's kind of a real comfort watch for me

and I'm really excited to sort of like share it with you because I think it's I have a fucking take about this movie. Okay. Yeah. It's a while ago,

a while ago you asked a great question on the podcast, which is what is a piece of conservative art that we think is really good? Interesting. I think this is a very well-made conservative film.

Interesting. I like this movie, but I disagree with its politics. I don't necessarily disagree. Okay. But we'll get into it. So this is an adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel,

which I also love. Yes. It's a pretty faithful adaptation as well. Oh, yeah. He did our art. It is. It is. It is.

I had a big, because okay listen this straight up front this is as I always do went into the movie thinking one thing and then was proven wrong there's a number of moments

throughout the movie around like oh I know the reason you're fucking doing that is because it's a fucking Netflix adaptation and you're trying to do like second screen

maximizing retention bullshit and I really marked it down for that and then after I watched the film went away and looked at like oh no the novel does just do that it's not therefore

novel restates things yeah it does this is a real kind of like Apple product despite being Netflix in the sense that it's not of the genre of Netflix stuff, even a couple of years

later where it's like you have to have the characters narrate what they're doing because people are going to be watching on their phones. This was one of the kind of like awards bait sort of things that they produced in the same way that Apple makes movies to get Apple executives to go to the Oscars. Yeah. This movie

is like you have the characters repeat what's going on because if that's the point of the movie they're trying to do something with that. noise. But so we begin with a lecture about car crashes and we're being we're being told as we're shown this sort of compilation reel of filmic car crashes that the car crash as a distinctly American film technique is something that is not dispiriting is not in itself sort of violent beyond a surface level but what it is is is a kind of secular optimism, right?

It's described as having a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun as we're sort of looking at the cars being thrown down cliffs and exploding and so on. Yeah, very specifically we're told to look past the violence to see the sense of innocence and fun. It's a high-spirited moment.

It's fun. Like, forget about the violence. Just enjoy things smashing into each other, you know? And this lecture is being delivered by Don Cheadle. It's fucking great in this movie He is Guy I love to see hugely College professor at the college on the hill

Which is sort of like any number of American Institutions This is what your conservative uncle thinks That liberal arts colleges are like Basically throughout this Kind of because this movie It does have a sort of a satire on academia One which I think is sort of largely earned

and it's not an unaffection of one because this is this is a film studies course but we we go from there to sort of the first day of classes right and and this sort of ritual the entrance of the station wagons right this is before before SUVs sort of conquered everything yeah it's 1974 yes back when your parents would drop you after college in the station wagon in the like estate car and all of these would sort of parade bumper to bumper around this sort of around this roundabout with parents dropping off their kids and

this is a kind of like it's a yearly ritual it marks the start of the academic year and there's something again it's like secular optimism again and we see Adam Driver Jack Gladney watching this from his

office and sort of like with some evident pleasure yeah he's a very big deal on campus he's Binoch big name on campus He's a lecturer in Hitler Studies. Yes. This is the first academia joke. He's Mr. Hitler Studies too.

Yes. He invented the field of Hitler studies. He did. He's the foremost Hitlerologist. Other than Hitler, he's contributed the most to the field. In the novel, he says that he invented Hitler studies in 1968. And that's sort of like very troubled American year. He pitched a Hitler Studies program to the dean who immediately sees the kind of the potential

returns in this and Hitler studies as we'll see it's not history exactly it's not psychology exactly either it's a kind of it's a celebrity branded course in which the celebrity is Hitler

and will this have sort of like useful impactful things to tell us well we'll see but it's in itself a sort of joke at the expense of the kind of commercializing instinct come and develop a parasocial relationship with DeFura

Well, quite. Yeah. Yeah. So he goes home to his wife. Look past the violence. Yeah. He goes home to his wife, Babette, who is disappointed to have missed this kind of station wagon ritual.

And they talk about how the parents looked this year. And the answer is kind of confident, secure in their wealth. And Babette says, I have trouble imagining death at that income level, to which Jack responds, maybe there is no death, maybe it's just documents changing hands, you know, you're sort of like window into the life of the upper class, sort of the upper bourgeois, which Jack isn't quite. And that also introduces us to another one of the film's themes, which is the difference between simulation and reality, like maybe there is no real death, maybe it is the only the symbol of death, which is documents changing hands. And this theme is also very effectively baked into the dialogue in particular between Jack and Babette, which is not written or delet. live it in a naturalistic way. It's spoken, it's very much like theater stage dialogue.

It's very like, it's very heightened. But this increases. Like even more so than academics would have. It's like an extra 25%, you know. And it's very effective. I like it. Yeah. This increases when we, we see their children.

They have four children. Oh, this is so chaotic, but it's so nice. They seem to have like seven or eight million children. I wasn't really able to distinguish many of them. Family life at the Gladneys is this sort of, constant mix of very pat, very portentous cross-talk and nonsense and half-remembered, half-informed sort of facts and horoscopes, right? If we think about what white noise is, it's a signal that has equal intensity at, like, at every frequency, right? And so everything is equally

important and it's sort of like it just buries itself into this completely flat, overwhelming noise, right? So that's why we call it noise. It's because it's as distinct from a signal, right? You can, you can kind of, it obscures a signal. There's no kind of meaningful information being exchanged, although there's a lot of talking. And so the children are talking about sort of like facts, trivia, Babette's reading horoscopes and it all just kind of bled. into this kind of into a pleasant hole oh absolutely absolutely it's very it's very comforting

to be part of this like yeah it's it's shots it's all sorts of different like it's cutting to all the different kids as they're talking but you can barely follow any like single individual strap conversation one thing that that did jump out to me is that the son heimlich heinrich heinrich he's invented a manoeuvre The son Heinrich is playing a mass murderer in prison at chess, like via the post. So again, there's like a look past the violence. Like, we're playing a fun game here.

Yeah, you killed like five, six, seven, eight people. Who knows? Like, it doesn't matter. Absolutely. Like three of them were cops. It doesn't matter. Like, whatever. Hey, it's sick Devon.

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