Billboards line the highways, advertising restaurants and hotels and attorneys and doctors and other general localities; everywhere one looks, advertisements surround their daily lives, from the blatant “Please buy our product!!” to subtle product placement in the media they consume. Don DeLillo critiques this aspect of consumer culture in his novel, White Noise, through the eyes of Jack Gladney, a professor in the very fictional field of “Hitler studies.” Throughout the novel, DeLillo crafts a metanarrative concerning the impact that consumer culture has on the individual, often blurring the lines between a character’s earnestness and the generally absurd setup of particular situations to craft an elaborate and modern ironic set-up. In his satirical set-up of Jack’s situation and his stream-of-conscious narration, DeLillo informs readers that overindulgence in the consumerist world leads to a loss in one’s personal sense of identity and that this gaping hole is only filled in by the goods that they own. In particular, we will observe DeLillo’s portrayal of three characters in the novel: Babette Gladney, Murray Siskind, and Willie Mink. Babette Gladney plays the role of Jack’s fourth wife and fellow existential dreader. Alongside Jack, Babette greatly fears death, and she employs the use of a drug called Dylar to help stave it off. Murray Siskind is a fellow professor at the university Jack teaches at. Murray wishes to establish a field of study centered around Elvis Presley and often very cheerfully theorizes on media saturation and the meaning of supermarkets in society. Finally, Willie Mink serves as a vague antagonist in the last half of the novel. He is a debilitated researcher who developed Dylar that Jack ultimately confronts. Through the narrative and the portrayal of these characters, DeLillo shows how in a hyper-consumerist late-stage capitalist society, the nature of marketing degrades the human spirit, all individuality is lost, and only marketable names remain.
DeLillo establishes through his characters how one receives significant fulfillment from the goods they consume. One particular case of this sort of fulfillment is the yogurt that Babette keeps purchasing. Jack’s daughters, Denise and Steffie, note how “‘She keeps buying that stuff,’” but, despite that, “‘she never eats it’” (pg 2). They conclude that Babette’s purchases stem from a feedback loop wherein she feels guilty if she doesn’t buy it, but she also feels guilty if she buys it and doesn’t eat it. Babette’s only true comfort stems from the purchase itself. If she buys it, then surely she will eat it, but the reality is that Babette only desires the comfort that spending one’s money gets, and in this particular case, the affirmation that she is spending her money on something healthy. Babette is bound within the grasp of a capitalist culture that incentivises and pushes people to spend their money. Her own autonomy is denied and her choices are controlled by the capitalist structures that be. Later on in the novel, while out shopping for groceries, Jack runs into his coworker Murray. In Murray’s basket, lie “non-brand items in plain white packaging with simple labeling” (pg 6). Murray remarks how it is the “‘new austerity,’” and how it simply “appeals” to him (pg 6). He refers to how food packaging is the “last avant-garde” (pg 6). Murray proposes his newfound enjoyment of purchasing non-brand and labelless goods to be an affirmation of his position as an academic. His spending serves to fuel his own ego. DeLillo portrays the spending habits of these two to emphasize the comfort that consumerism and spending in capitalist America brings to the individual.
In making such a grand deal out of Babette’s yogurt-purchasing habits and Murray’s shopping choices, DeLillo goes on to pointedly joke about how much consumer society leads people to identify with the products that they purchase and the goods that they consume. These products become one with the identity of the individual. Murray tries to justify his individual purchasing habits by noting how it’s an “avant-garde” art of sorts, referring back to a conversation between him and Jack concerning the packaging of products (pg 6). The reader is then left with the idea that perhaps there is a postmodern sense of art when it comes to the packaging of consumer goods--that perhaps there is something more to it. With Babette, there’s a particular level of earnestness that the reader sympathizes with. Although she’s being particularly wasteful, there’s still some iota of effort in that she’s spending the money; all she has to do is eat the yogurt. An action so trivial that the whole thing seems almost absurd. DeLillo utilizes this blend of earnest and meta-narratively ironic intentions to argue that this “something more” is a cruel reality: that the marketing of particular goods is all a means to get consumers to buy their product and then try to justify it by any means possible-- to identify with it and allow the product to be a part of who they are. Through this, DeLillo criticizes the very idea of aligning one’s own identity with products that belong to corporations that ultimately only seek to utilize consumers as objects to fuel their enterprise.
DeLillo uses the emotional climax of his novel to showcase the logical extreme of consumerist culture. Towards the end of the novel, Jack confronts Willie Mink. Throughout the novel, Mink was built up to be the minister of a drug that supposedly gets rid of one’s fear of death and also the man whom Babette cheated on Jack with to get her hands on Dylar due to its experimental and unreleased status. Jack drives up to where he is told Mink resides and rehearses in his head a multitude of ways that the confrontation may go, but ultimately, the reader is presented with an “odd, concave, forehead and chin jutting” face, sat down in a “Hawaiian shirt and Budweiser shorts… watching TV without the sound” (pg 138). While conversing with Jack, Mink goes on to ramble, almost nonsensically. “To begin your project sweater…” he begins, and soon after he talks about how, “the pet under stress may need a prescription diet,” all completely unprovoked (pg 139). Mink is clearly reciting information that he heard from the television. The man himself is entirely hollowed out-- reality and fiction are one and the same, memories blur to where he can hardly remember when he even learned such things as the English language and “American sex” (pg 140). The only things that remain for this emptied-out Willie Mink are the sights and sounds that the television feeds him. This “weary pulse of a man” had become Babette’s last hope and the target that Jack set his sights on (pg 139). DeLillo characterizes Willie Mink as the ultimate logical extreme of a consumerist culture, a showcase of how the individual regurgitates the information that they’re fed from mass media and becomes another point on the grand communication line stemming from some marketing department at a corporation. Willie Mink and the according subversion of expectations is used in order to build up DeLillo’s point that consumer culture is destructive for the individual. Willie Mink, or maybe some abstraction of the idea of Willie Mink, is what awaits any participant of consumer culture. Consumers regurgitate the products that they use, whether intentional or not. They proudly display the brands they support on their clothing. Sayings and slogans that they hear from media entertainment are lodged in their brain as they are repeated ad infinitum. In the participation of consumer culture, individuals provide another avenue of marketing for large corporations.
Ultimately, it is evident that the active participation in capitalist structures leads to a downward spiral of the gradual loss of one’s sense of identity. DeLillo’s sharp irony and characterization amplify this idea throughout White Noise. The acceptance of marketing in the modern consumer culture leads to an attack on the individual. Unique ideas and thoughts are replaced with name brands and the justifications for liking a particular brand, whether that’s a particular advertisement or something like the packaging of the product itself. To be a participant in consumer culture is to accept that one’s own unique sense of self will be replaced by Levi jeans, Ralph Lauren shirts, Paul Mitchell hair, and a body made of Barilla pasta.