Why did the film version of Don DeLillo’s prize-winning novel White Noise fail? It didn’t simply fizzle at the box office, but after being given a prestige launch as the premiere attraction at last year’s New York Film Festival, the film was overlooked during award season and ignored by the public. This flop is ignominious because White Noise was intended to illuminate the zeitgeist. Instead, the zeitgeist, having its own instability issues, went “meh.”

Readers have been inquiring about White Noise ever since the ecological disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. They were curious why the film’s prospects remained inert, given that its central event — a fiery chemical spill from a train wreck that De Lillo then described as an “airborne toxic event” — momentarily occupied the national news cycle.

Perhaps some readers felt that White Noise should have triggered a popular response, just as The China Syndrome did back in 1979 following the Three Mile Island nuclear-plant meltdown. But public indifference to the White Noise film mirrored the distraction and antipathy that now regularly accompany social and political outrages. Attention moves on to the next scandal.

Apparently, the DeLillo movie wasn’t scandalous enough to break through our current condition of unrelenting cynicism. Three Mile Island produced no detectable health effects, while the health effects of the train wreck in East Palestine remain uninvestigated by Biden’s EPA. The latter is no surprise. What’s surprising is that culture mavens could not rescue the DeLillo adaptation from obscurity even though it presented another opportunity for the media’s commanding heights to prove its dominance.

Hollywood’s ratification of DeLillo’s novel reminds us how cultural ideas are promulgated by the literary industry. Its story about the hectic domestic life of a progressive academic seems to almost foretell the chaos now roiling Millennial America. DeLillo’s protagonist, Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), teaches Hitler studies at a small-town university, College on the Hill, and along with his latest wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig) raises a brood of teenagers just awakening to society’s hypocrisy. The New York Times claimed that DeLillo “precisely diagnosed the modern condition,” thus setting the stage for the film’s success. Yet Jack (“I teach Advanced Nazism”) comes out of the progressive bubble that, increasingly, Hollywood refuses to look beyond. Jack is a transparent literary conceit, conceived to represent the liberal intellectual class — now to flatter the elites of Millennial media culture making products to suit itself while indoctrinating the rest of us.

It would be encouraging to think of White Noise’s flop as a natural form of resistance — like herd immunity. DeLillo’s celebrated high irony, praised as “postmodernism,” combining social satire and existential dread, is the stuff of HBO snark, but it doesn’t work for the MCU film audience without adding extra layers of ironic F/X action, as in the two-part Avengers: Endgame. But White Noise sabotages itself with an opening gambit intended to mock the action-movie trend.

A multimedia discourse by Jack’s black colleague Murray (Don Cheadle) alleges America’s love of cinematic violence. If this seemed smart when DeLillo’s book appeared in 1985, it comes across as merely snide today. Murray’s montage of cinematic mayhem contains a quick shot of a car crashing into Trump Tower that is conceived to amuse only a select audience. What’s worse is Murray’s accompanying ultra-cynical lecture:

Don’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. No, these collisions are part of a long tradition of American optimism. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. A celebration. . . . We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. No, these are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration.

The film’s director appears to believe in nihilism and is disconnected from popular taste — which makes White Noise insensitive and irrelevant — especially after Michael Bay’s spectacular and humanist Ambulance.

This is a case of the literary and Hollywood snobs revealing their smug-ugliness. DeLillo’s idea of “white noise,” referring to media saturation and the constant streaming of misinformation and disinformation, now feels insufficient, a conceptual failure. DeLillo’s smart-alecky speculative, anti-Reagan cynicism has been made outdated by the many recent psyops. And the film’s director can’t keep pace. Citing “family as the cradle of the world’s misinformation” is both outmoded DeLillo and a repeat of The Squid and the Whale. The movie leaps from blended-family sitcom to that flaming, black-cloud environmental disaster — featuring a digression dramatizing community quarantine — and then returns to domestic dysfunction when Jack and Babette contend with drug dependency and infidelity, merging social and personal terrorism.

White Noise pretends to depict America in the middle of a waking nightmare, but it’s a privileged person’s nightmare. The Gladney clan’s boisterousness is paranoic with a resentful undercurrent connecting family life to heedless consumerism, like a Wes Anderson Tenenbaums family portrait minus the eccentric warmth. The period setting conveys nostalgia for that time when nihilism was the literary elite’s response to Reagan’s “morning in America” reelection campaign. (It’s the same outdated outrage as Jack’s “Advanced Nazism” boast, an academic sort-of joke that, if it was ever funny, fails in the cancel-culture era.)

So while White Noise at first seems perfectly fitting for “climate change” hysteria, its failure is a matter of bad timing. It opened just before the midterm elections, but its odd representation of apocalyptic America suggests a bizarre embrace of peak Covid. (It’s a movie only authoritarian governors of Democratic states could love.) Despite DeLillo’s literary foresight, even he couldn’t envision the social destruction of the psyops that attended the lockdowns, ultimately making all of White Noise’s high-flown paranoia seem trivial.