White

by Bret Easton Ellis

Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way.

This is not a job that’s forced on anyone; it’s simply chosen by people who want to express themselves (regardless of where their neuroses come from) and also hope to make a living from doing so. But most actors never succeed, and the struggle and rejection inherent in their trade makes just about any other profession seem sane and straightforward.

Actors depend on their likability, and their attractiveness, because they want people to watch them, to be drawn to them, to desire them. Because of this, actors are, by their very nature, liars.

Some actors have become more hidden, less likely to go public with their opinions, likes and dislikes—because who knows where that next job’s coming from? Others have become more vocal, stridently voicing their righteousness, but signaling one’s social-justice virtue isn’t necessarily the same as being honest—it can also be a pose.

We seem

to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing

their true selves. In other words: the ...

But I found out from my agent later that afternoon what I would get paid and it staggered me—“A fuck of a lot of money,” as she put it—and by comparison to the digital age when everyone basically writes for free, it seems even more staggering in retrospect.

And so begins a curious study in journalistic pathology: a youngish male reporter (Blum was probably thirty at the time) seems to seethe over the beauty and good fortune of these up-and-coming young actors, so he twists their youthful nights out—drinking Coronas at the Hard Rock, reveling in the attention from starstruck girls—into something almost sinister.

What the fuck was everybody protecting? Later, I would come to understand, it was the corporation.

My first day in the condo was April 1, the same day that the memorial service for Andy Warhol was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and that’s also when American Psycho opens.

This book would have completed a kind of trilogy detailing youthful ’80s Reagan-era excess that had begun with Less Than Zero, been continued by The Rules of Attraction and would have ended with Bateman at the end of the decade: passive, older, wiser, no longer with his fiancée, disillusioned as he left the company he’d worked at. To do what? He didn’t know. He was just relieved to be leaving an environment he’d never felt a part of or had outgrown, like Clay at the end of Less Than Zero and Sean at the end of The Rules of Attraction. But this original idea for the novel changed in a flash.

During my initial research I’d grown frustrated by their evasions about what exactly they did for the companies where they worked—information I felt was necessary, and finally understood really wasn’t.

The competition between these guys was overwhelming: the one-upmanship and bragging bordered at times on the threatening, and during this particular meal (the last one, it turned out) I suddenly decided—apropos of nothing in particular—that Patrick Bateman would be a serial killer. Or would imagine himself to be. (I never knew if it was one or the other, which in turn made the novel compelling to write. Is the answer more interesting than the mystery itself? I never thought so.)

My life was distinctly unlike the lives of my friends, who’d graduated with me in June 1986 and now had jobs that required them to go to an office (1987 was a time when you could graduate from college, find a job and pay a reasonable rent somewhere in Manhattan, something unimaginable given the moated gated community it is now, filled with what seems like only rich people and tourists).

while at that lunch—we were probably drinking champagne, and I was probably on Klonopin—I remember telling my friend about the last time I’d been at the Odeon, a few weeks earlier, when I found myself sharing cocaine with Jean-Michel Basquiat (we were both wearing suits) downstairs in the men’s restroom during a drunken dinner after a photo shoot for Interview magazine. Basquiat asked why there were so few black people in my first two novels and I said something about the casual racism of the white society I was depicting and we lit up cigarettes as we walked back, high, to the respective groups at our tables—just a typical encounter for me in the fall of 1987.

If anything the decadence ramped up, as if to defy what Wall Street had told us, and perhaps this defiance was not an atypical response to that era.

Some ’70s feminists complained about Playboy, and porn in general, and as males we were confused: What was wrong about looking at and objectifying beautiful women (or men)? What was wrong about this gender-based instinct to stare and covet? Why shouldn’t this be made more easily available to horny boys?

And what was wrong with the idea of the male gaze?

Why should we be turning away from our sexuality? My male friends often wondered, Who is empowered here? It’s certainly not me. I’m staring at this beautiful woman I desperately want and who I’ll probably never meet.

The feminist reaction to Playboy seemed unfair because our options pre-internet were so severely limited—maybe a couple issues of a magazine per month—that to apply moral criticism to our desires seemed cruel.

And yet this abundance changed my relationship to nudity and porn: it made it more commonplace, and somewhat less exciting, just as ordering a book from Amazon was less exciting than walking into a bookstore and browsing for an hour or so, or purchasing shoes online instead of heading to the mall and trying on a pair of Top-Siders while interacting with a salesperson, or buying a record at Tower, or actually standing in line for a movie you wanted to see. This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.

There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.

As A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, “Weekend is about the paradoxes and puzzlements of gay identity in a post-identity-politics era.” The shock of Weekend is that there is no political cause at the heart of it.

But these social media critics wanted to imply that my whiteness was an ideological error, that my comfortable unawareness was an indisputable problem, yet I’d argue that living without a direct experience of poverty or state-sponsored violence, growing up without ever being presumed a guaranteed threat in public places and never facing an existence where protection is hard to come by don’t equate to a lack of empathy, judgment, or understanding on my part and don’t rightly and automatically demand my silence.

But this is an age that judges everybody so harshly through the lens of identity politics that if you resist the threatening groupthink of “progressive ideology,” which proposes universal inclusivity except for those who dare to ask any questions, you’re somehow fucked. Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or a misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.

When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s worldview become the lens through which we began to look at everything?

The writer was stunned, but I don’t think the paying audience was wrong—this was their genuine reaction and if this seemed “sad” and “surreal” to the Vulture writer, obviously hoping the audience would conform to an ideology rather than respond to the film’s aesthetics, then Jung had an out-of-touch bias against that audience.

I prefer King Cobra because this is the rare post-gay film in which no one is tortured about being gay, no one gets bullied, no one is ashamed, no one has tearfully passionate coming-out scenes, and there’s no gay suffering at all—there’s a murder, but it’s over money. And isn’t this, in our new acceptance of gay lives and equality, whether black or white, the more progressive view?

(The angry and funny and outspoken pop star Morrissey is an anomaly, calling out contradictions and hypocrisies in society yet he always seems to be chastised by the press and on social media because he’s speaking honestly and doesn’t buy into the accepted narrative of the Applebee’s Gay.)

Certainly, in the spring of 2013 I hadn’t fucked up as many gay lives as Bill Clinton had.

The “instructions” also requested that I wouldn’t go public or tweet about their decision to disinvite me and suggested, as they often do with anyone who has somehow “transgressed” the GLAAD rules of humorless social etiquette, that I have a “sit down” with them. I could only think, Where in the hell were we—gay elementary school? I apologized to my agent for any embarrassment this might have caused her and then started tweeting.

The fact that GLAAD relentlessly bullied Alec Baldwin after he lashed out at paparazzi with gay slurs without ever acknowledging that he’d recently played an unstereotypical gay dude in Rock of Ages (a film directed by a gay man) and even had kissed Russell Brand on the mouth partly explains why he has never been a “traitor” to the community I belong to.

When a community prides itself on its differences and its uniqueness and then bans people because of how they express themselves—not for acts of hate speech but simply because it doesn’t like their opinions—a corporate fascism has been put into play that ought to be seriously reconsidered, not just by GLAAD but by everyone.

A gay TV writer said he also agreed with my tweets but couldn’t understand why I cared what middlebrow gays thought about anything.

The real shame isn’t the jokey observations but the lockstep reaction to them.

I didn’t even bother to block them. Because once you start choosing how people can and cannot express themselves then this opens the door to a very dark room in the corporation from which there’s really no escape. Can’t they in return police your thoughts, and then your feelings and then your impulses? And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dreams?

But being reviewed negatively never changed the way I wrote or the topics I wanted to explore, no matter how offended some readers were by my descriptions of violence and sex. As a Gen Xer, rejecting, or more likely ignoring the status quo came easily to me.

publishing house decided it didn’t like the contents of a particular novel I’d been given a contract to write for them and subsequently refused to publish it on the grounds of “taste”—they were offended by it. This is a story I’ll return to later, but it was a scary moment for the arts—if one that has come to seem normal: in effect, a corporation was deciding what should or shouldn’t be permitted, what should or shouldn’t be read, what you could say and what you weren’t allowed to say. The difference between then (1990) and now is that there were loud arguments and protests about this on both sides of the divide: people had differing opinions yet debated them rationally, driven by passion and logic.

That services today are rating us back raises the notion of how we present ourselves online and in social media, and how individuals can both brand themselves there and get branded. When everybody claims to be a specialist, with a voice that deserves to be heard, this actually makes each person’s voice less meaningful. All we’ve really done is to set ourselves up—to be sold to, branded, targeted, data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists everybody has to live under the same umbrella of rules and regulations: a mandate that dictates how all of us should express ourselves and behave.

The reputation economy is another instance of the blanding of our society, even though the enforcement of groupthink in social media has only increased anxiety and paranoia, because those who eagerly approve of the reputation economy are, of course, also the most scared.

Those of us who reveal flaws and inconsistencies or voice unpopular ideas suddenly become terrifying to the ones caught up in a world of corporate conformity and censorship that rejects the opinionated and the contrarian, corralling everyone into harmony with somebody else’s notion of an ideal. Very few people want solely to be negative or difficult, but what if those exact qualities were attached to the genuinely interesting, compelling and unusual—and couldn’t there then be a real conversation? The greatest crime being perpetrated in this new world is that of stamping out passion and silencing the individual.

the noise from the offended was too loud,

and I got kicked out of a corporation I hadn’t even known I’d belonged to. Ultimately, I was allowed to keep the advance, and another publisher (actually more prestigious) bought the rights and published the book quickly as a trade paperback in the spring of 1991, a week after the combat phase of the Gulf War supposedly came to an end.

I came

to understand I wasn’t any good at recognizing what would or wouldn’t tick people off, because art had never offended me.

Whether it was de Sade’s brutality or Céline’s anti-Semitism or Mailer’s misogyny or Polanski’s taste for minors, I was always able to separate the art from its creator and examine and value it (or not) on aesthetic grounds.

Here’s the dead end of social media: after you’ve created your own bubble that reflects only what you relate to or what you identify with, after you’ve blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you’ve created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture.

Ansari was exploring a particular narrative—the idea that it might be better to protect a marginalized group from being the brunt of jokes—and this seemed problematic, because was it really so progressive to marginalize gays even further by not making fun of them, by not even mentioning them in a roast which by definition makes fun of whoever’s being honored?

My huge generalities touched on millennials’ oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity—incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move.