NOISE: What Films Can Tell Us About Civics

By: Travis Boundy

As any ISU student with an apartment overlooking a parking lot at will tell you, car alarms can be one of the worst offenders when it comes to noise—right up there with your neighbor’s Sunday-night-subwoofing. Just imagine what it must have been like for fictional movie protagonist David Owen, the main character of Henry Bean’s 2008 dark comedy Noise. David Owen is a New York City lawyer struggling to cope with a city full of alarms that plague him when he is at home and at work.

Owen discovers that he can accomplish nothing when car alarms are going off, and finds them impossible to ignore, despite the pleadings of his wife, who fails to understand his problem. Here is a display of one of the major themes of the film: impotence. Owen yells at the alarms, pleads for them to stop, but gets no response in turn. This theme is seemingly appropriate in our modern world, where many Americans feel that they are afloat in a sea of helplessness, where nothing is what it seems. We watch our institutions crumble around us and ask, “What can we do?”

Allegory or not, Noise has David Owen asking the same question, but his initial reaction was to commit a series of vigilante acts under the alias “the rectifier,” a masked hero on the side of the people, who broke into cars at night and silenced car alarms, often resulting in significant property damage, but always a good laugh for the viewer.

Unfortunately, the villains that most of us feel we have to contend with aren’t handled as easily as car alarms. Banks fail because of bad loans and investments, and we watch them receive cash handouts from our government, with a stunning lack of regulation that leaves us feeling sort of helpless. Then think about Rod Blagojevich, who was willing to sell a vacated senate seat. Think about Bernie Madoff. The list goes on and on, and ‘we the people’ start to feel like we don’t have a fighting chance.

Owen eventually gives up on “the rectifier,” after he gets arrested several times, and is forced to leave his wife and spend a month in prison. His marriage ruined, he realizes that there has to be a better way to solve his problems than simply destroying property. So Owen and his assistant decide to petition for an initiative on the New York City ballot, which would change the laws regarding car alarms and make it illegal to let alarms sound for extended time periods.