What better way to end Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s rumination on life, death, and the fear of the in-between, than with a surprisingly upbeat, foot-tapping, and head-banging song about the afterlife?
As Brooklyn band LCD Soundsystem’s first single in five years, “new body rhumba” soundtracks the film’s transcendent epilogue, a finale dance number in the vein of Federico Fellini’s 8½ or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. “I essentially tasked [James Murphy] to ‘write an incredibly catchy song about death,’” Baumbach says. “The final scene is a dance of death and a dance of life. It’s a celebration of all that’s ending. Which is a celebration of all that is.”
