White Noise ending explained: Did Jack get over his fear of death?  

Noah Baumbach's latest film White Noise was recently released on Netflix, leaving many viewers confused about its ending.

White Noise is adapted from the 1985 novel of the same name by Don DeLillo. It stars Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle in the lead roles, along with Raffey Cassidy, André Benjamin, Jodie Turner-Smith, Lars Eidinger, and others in supporting roles.

The plot revolves around Prof. Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his family and the bizarre man-made catastrophe their town suffers. Jack doesn't speak much about it, but he is dealing with a recurring problem. He thinks death is going to consume him without any warning. This decays his life and relationships.

Let's take a closer look at the ending of this movie and what it could have meant.

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers from White Noise.

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What was that music video-like dance sequence at the end of White Noise?

White Noise ends with a completely out-of-place dance sequence by the Gladneys in an A&P supermarket. For those interested, the song is called new body rhumba by LCD Soundsystem.

But right before that, we saw life in the town finally getting back to normal. Too bad the "airborne toxic event" just increased Jack's fear of death. He constantly begins to hallucinate about a mysterious man following him around. On top of that, Jack notices that his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), has become pale and distant from him.

At the film's beginning, we were made aware that Babette had been consuming a medication called Dylar. Even though Jack had ignored Denise's concerns before, he finally confronted his wife. Babette then revealed to her husband that she had joined a shady trial for a drug to treat death anxieties and that she was accepted in exchange for s*x with "Mr. Gray."

Jack asked Denise (Babette’s daughter from a previous marriage) for the Dylar bottle, but she revealed that she had disposed of them. The professor went through their garbage and discovered a newspaper with an advertisement for Dylar. Enraged, he retrieved the pistol given to him by Prof. Murray Siskind and set out to exact revenge on Mr. Gray.

Jack tracked down Mr. Gray in a motel and discovered that Mr. Gray was the man in his hallucinations. He shot him and put the gun in his hand to make it look like suicide. Babette unexpectedly showed up at the scene, and the couple got shot by the still-alive Mr. Gray. This, fortunately, was not lethal as Jack and Babette just got slightly injured.

Jack drove the trio to a hospital run by German Atheist Nuns, where the couple healed and reconciled. The final dance scene is an ode to celebration. Of course, for everyone born, death is inevitable. But we cannot ruin our lives by thinking about death. We are supposed to celebrate this one life we have with our loved ones and family. Make the best of it.

Jack and Babette understood that they will die one day. But to die, they need to learn to live first. While the entirety of White Noise is an absurd experience, one might say that the most normal part of the film is its ending dance scene.

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White Noise is streaming on Netflix worldwide.