🤐 SPOILER ALERT 🤐

Noah Baumbach’s new adaptation of the zeitgeist-y ’80s novel White Noise is equal parts literary and bombastic: Don DeLillo by way of Steven Spielberg. Throughout the film’s second half, these two storytelling modes converge — first in a train crash that intercuts with a heated academic lecture, then in an apocalyptic road trip. Finally, everything comes to a head during the film’s euphoric end credits. The Gladney clan (including stars Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig) enters the safe, sterile embrace of a supermarket, where they engage in a surreal dance number set to LCD Soundsystem’s original song “new body rhumba.” You can check the sequence out below. Trust us — you won’t want to skip these credits.

The supermarket is a crucial symbolic setting in DeLillo’s award-winning novel (Don Cheadle’s on-screen character, Murray Siskind, describes it as full of “psychic data”). It’s a fascination of Baumbach’s as well. His screenplay for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox ends with a similar musical sequence. “The supermarket is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time,” Baumbach tells Tudum. “It depends on how and when you look at it.”

It helps that this particular market’s soundtrack includes a banger of a new LCD Soundsystem song, also a recurring feature of the filmmaker’s work. “I’ve been friends with James [Murphy, the band’s front man] since he did songs for Greenberg,” Baumbach says. “After choreographer David Neumann and I worked on the dance for a bit, I asked James if he could write an upbeat song about death. I knew this would appeal to him. As would the ’80s time period.”

Appealing, yes. But the song-and-dance sequence also presented certain challenges. After all, “new body rhumba” was written after the scene was filmed. “The dance sequence was shot over two days on the supermarket set designed by Jess Gonchor in an abandoned Home Depot,” says Baumbach. “Weeks in advance, James, David and I came up with a tempo that worked for the movement. James later wrote the song to fit the tempo.” 

The finished sequence is odd and entrancing — not quite a dance number, not quite a standard shopping trip. Each actor has their own set of moves, some more musical than others. “What I love about David’s choreography is that it’s designed to fit the individual,” Baumbach says. “Some of the movement is more complex and involved and some is very simple. So, everyone could move and dance in a way that represented and celebrated themselves.”

White Noise is in many ways a story about death and our obsession with it. So it helps to leave things on an upbeat note by having the characters dance their way out. “The final scene is a dance of death and a dance of life,” Baumbach says. “It’s a celebration of all that’s ending. Which is a celebration of all that is.”

White Noise is streaming on Netflix now.