The major theme of the film, annnnd book is the absence of meaning. All of the characters fill their daily routines with idle chatter. Words. Words fill the void.
Babette, who has resorted to taking an experimental pharmaceutical to stave off her fear, cannot even determine the difference between a word and what if represents. Everything has become babble to her. She’s become unhinged from “whats real.”
Yet none of the characters seem to notice—Nietzsche’s great fear.
God Is Dead
Actually it was Zarathustra, not Freddy Nietzsche, who spake those words to some villagers while a jester and a tightrope walker traversed a wire above him.
The jester in his colorful garb, the tightroper with his balancing pole, and the villagers wholly unimpressed by Zarathustra’s announcement.
So, the jester is doing flips over the tightrope walker, while traversing between two towers. The tightroper drops his pole—you can conjecture what this pole represents (God, religion, codes of life, whatever) Nietzsche wrote in short aphorisms; little cryptic word-images—so, dude drops his pole. Grabs at the wire. And falls to his death.
Zarathustra rushes to the dying man’s side. Explains about God’s death, and that there is no reason to fear death, no Hell, no God. Nothing.
Having sufficiently administered the dying man his last rights (at least in Zar’s eyes), Zarathustra exits, and the tightroper is left to contemplate Nothing in his remaining minutes.
https://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu%3A52571/datastream/OBJ/view
Then Zarathustra goes on to spread his message amongst the people—“God is Dead. Now here are the repercussions..”
Those repercussions entail a weakening of the herd, slave mentality, scapegoating of the “masters”, et al.
All of which were misappropriated by the Nazis.
The crux of the matter, when related to White Noise, is the Nothing, the Void, left by the death of God.
The kids threaten their parents with “superior” knowledge of trivia. The parents fight back ineffectively with their own “facts”, but lack the “sharpness” of their children because they’ve long left the information funnel to specialize in their crafts—equally trivial to the children’s general knowledge, but mors specialized.
https://food52.com/blog/20083-the-scientific-10-step-way-to-eat-a-sandwich
Nietzsche’s most contemptible man, the last man before the strike of a Lightning bolt, lives only for comfort. Convenience.
Babette teaches walking, sitting, and eating to old people. Jack teaches about Hitler—expounds on Hitler’s mother, the momentum of the crowds and torches. Murray (Jack’s scholar friend who was inspired by Jack) does the same with Elvis.
Everything is superficial. The proper way to fill a spoon. Hitler and Elvis were momma’s boys, so they became enamored with the crowd. Elvis self-destructed but fullfilled his contract. Hitler did the same.
This superficiality comes into play when the train derails in their small Ohio town, above which an ominous cloud of “Nyodene D”, a toxic chemical is unleashed—glowing, burning, billowing.
The children become occupied with the details of the cloud. The language used by the media. The parents attempt to assuage the children’s fears. Using their own long-held, trivial vagaries.
Procedure becomes the focus of all participants—directed by a faction of government focused on creating disaster simulations.
On a practical level, Nietzsche feared the legacy of Christianity on Western society. To him, Christ represented the exemplar of “slave mentality,” dying as the ultimate sacrifice in to his oppressors.
On a mystical level, Christ’s sacrifice freed believers from the void—the fear of death 💀, filling it with a story of perfection and love.
Nietzsche’s fear was that the second—the ideal of perfection and love would be destroyed with God’s death, but the slave mentality would persist—it would simply be transferred to the new God of the State.
Nietzsche’s solution took form in the Uebermensch—a sort of next level human, who was able to live in the void, and like the jester mentioned above, was able to cross the high wire between two towers.
Contrast this with Nietzsche’s “last man” who would seek to replace the void with comfort, per Nietzsche’s fear, largely provided by the State.
Ironically, the concept of the Uebermensch was misappropriated (with the aid of his sister, after Nietzsche’s death) to support the German National Socialist State—a complete reversal of his concept.
