white noise (d. daniel lombroso)

White Noise follows three figures from the US alt-right, Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern, following them over the course of the years 2016 to 2018, more or less. The film is an investigation into the phenomenon of the far right, which at its most extreme takes the from of Nazi salutes, and saying the unspeakable, but can also have a more insidious influence in shifting the terrain of debate, pushing previously extreme views towards the mainstream. The British have suffered from this as much as any nation, although the guiding light of Daniel Lombroso’s film, unsurprisingly, is Trump, to whose bandwagon Spencer and Cernovich were inexorably tied. As Trump’s campaign starts to falter, their post-election euphoria starts to wane and the glow of success begins to wear off.

However, the film is most acute in those moments it reveals the way in which all three are, to a lesser or greater degree, grifters, flying their kites more from a sense of expediency and opportunism than conviction. Cernovich’s amiable wife is Iranian, and their baby is mixed race. He ends up selling pills for skin care like some modern day quack doctor. Cernovich comes across as a slightly bumbling fool who made his name by being controversial but has no real political beliefs beyond saying things that will help him sell his products. Southern, starts the film as an ingenue 22 year old, and is shown gradually beginning to become aware of the murky moral waters she’s getting herself into, even though she’s reluctant to face up to them. The clinching moment comes towards the end when, pregnant, she is asked about the colour of her partner and we learn that this white ethno-warrior is another who will have a mixed race child. Spencer is an eternal man child, who ends up living with his mother, and shrugs off any responsibility for anything he has ever said or done.

As such, the film is a useful and effective vehicle for debunking these would-be sacred cows of a movement which has caused untold damage. At times it feels as though the director might have gone a bit harder on his subjects, especially Southern, but part of the complexity of constructing the intimacy necessary to debunk these figures, to hoist them on their own petards, is that you have to be close enough to get past the carefully curated facade and discover the reality.