White

by Bret Easton Ellis

A cultural low point of 2015 was the effort by at least two hundred members of PEN America, a leading literary organization to which most writers belong, to not present the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris with a newly established Freedom of Expression Courage Award.

I never assumed that PEN was honoring any specific content, but rather that it was honoring a principle. The award was ultimately given to Charlie Hebdo, because many more PEN members believed the magazine deserved the award. But there were still the two hundred who were offended and felt Charlie Hebdo went “too far” in its satire, which suggested there was a limited number of targets that humorists and satirists were allowed to pursue. These protesters were mostly Americans. So, where were we coming from?

If you feel you’re experiencing “micro-aggressions” when someone asks you where you are from or “Can you help me with my math?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it’s triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help.

If you’re afflicted by these traumas that occurred years ago, and that is still a part of you years later, then you probably are still sick and in need of treatment.

Disgust with this victim culture, which exploded during the Obama era, also proved to be an ominous factor later that year with the election of Donald Trump.

Sometimes, when listening to friends of mine, I’d stare at them while a tiny voice in the back of my head started sighing, You are the biggest fucking baby I’ve ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life and please you’ve got to fucking calm the fuck down—I get it, I get it, you don’t like fucking Trump but for fuck’s sake enough already for fuck’s sake.

I’d never been a true believer that politics can solve the dark heart of humanity’s problems and the lawlessness of our sexuality, or that a bureaucratic band aid is going to heal the deep contradictory rifts and the cruelty, the passion and the fraudulence that factor into what it means to be human.

And this was because of how the media had chosen to cover Donald Trump, with an absolute cluelessness. A prankster had appeared—an actual disruptor—and the press was flummoxed.

Trump was the poster-boy antithesis of the proud moral superiority of the Left as defined forever by Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment, as well as by Michelle Obama’s breathlessly condescending “when they go low, we go high,” both of which were quoted approvingly in the legacy media.

I’d made Donald Trump the hero of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho and researched more than a few of his odious business practices, his casually brazen lying, how he’d let Roy Cohn serve as his mentor, the whiffs of racism that wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in a man of his age and demographic. I’d read The Art of the Deal and followed his trajectory and done enough homework to make Trump a character who could float through the novel and be the person Bateman’s always referencing and quoting and aspiring to be. The young men, Wall Street guys, I hung out with as part of my initial research were enthralled by him. Trump was an inspirational figure, which troubled me in 1987 and 1988 and 1989, and also why he’s mentioned more than forty times in the novel.

The Black Panthers’ aesthetic grasp turned them into rock stars for young people, black and white, in the 1960s, but Black Lives Matter was a millennial mess with no sense at all of forming a coherent visual idea or style in presenting itself—and this culture presentation ends up being, for better or worse, everything.

You would have to be a moral idiot not to recognize the movement’s importance, but it was frustrating to see their message get eclipsed by a lurching, unformed aesthetic, and we noted that it could belong to the list of things on #WhyTrumpWon.

What she actually was implying was the sentimental narrative that said white men shouldn’t be allowed to privately criticize anything about Black Lives Matter.

This friend of mine lived in a penthouse with stunning views of Central Park and probably had a net worth of more than ten million dollars, so I kept wondering why her vast misery was all Trump’s fault? How had she let this happen to herself?

And in Los Angeles they learned the hard way that if they admitted this, massive wide-eyed disbelief followed by arguments would ensue, started by people they saw as overly sensitive and out-of-touch elitists; since any conversation would tank, they kept quiet. It was an insurmountable headache.

I became

curious and started asking everyone why they’d moved from Obama to Trump. The reasons were mostly economic, having to do with trade and immigration, with political correctness and identity politics coming in a close third and fourth. In other words: these were white people.

The woman I’d known for a decade texted me later that Sunday and said she’d laughed when she saw the tweet, but she also warned me not to ever mention who was at that dinner. Her business was Hollywood-based, and who knew what could happen in this divisive climate; she’d noticed that people were far too hysterical, and to defend your beliefs just wasn’t worth the trouble.

I was now looking at a new kind of liberalism,

one that willingly censored people and punished voices, obstructed opinions and blocked viewpoints.

The irony was amplified when students—and, it seemed, the institution’s administration itself—rejected conservative speakers at Berkeley, once considered the bastion of free speech in America, and there was zero chance of spinning that story into an aspirational narrative for the Left or the Resistance or for anybody else anymore. All this was simply becoming embarrassing, and you could even sense the legacy media’s hesitancy to cover it.

In the winter of 2017, just a week after Trump’s inauguration, I was in London giving a talk at the Royal Institute of Great Britain when I was asked by the moderator what I thought of the “unending horror” that was now happening in the United States. I had to stop him and clarify that this apocalyptic narrative about the election and the new president was really only that, a narrative, and merely a reflection of a vast epidemic of alarmist and catastrophic drama that American media was encouraging.

Other things I said that were met with a deafening silence included that I didn’t think Trump was going to be impeached; that the protests of the Resistance weren’t going to change anything; that I defended the troublemaker Milo Yiannopoulos’s right of free speech in an oversensitive corporate culture that was trying to muzzle him, and I admitted that I missed Milo’s provocations on Twitter (he’d been kicked off) no matter how much I often disagreed with them, certainly more than I’d miss the tweets of a middle-aged comedienne who couldn’t handle a vicious yet typical Twitter trolling and had been instrumental in getting him banned.

The overreaction was alarmist, but that was the mood: in a post-Brexit UK there was a chill as well, especially given the realization that nationalism was beginning its sweep across Europe, blooming everywhere.

I had never gravitated toward any kind of music because of the politics it does or doesn’t espouse: it’s a question of whether I like the tunes or not, that’s it.

For many of us who grew up in California, the American writer Joan Didion was a heroine even though, or because, she was a Goldwater Republican, she was in love with John Wayne, she thought Jim Morrison was sexy because he was a bad boy, she hated hippie culture, she hated the Beats, she hated ’70s feminism, she idolized strong men in her fiction, she dismissed J. D. Salinger and Woody Allen when both were at the height of their popularity, she was the snob and the anti-snob. In short, she was fearlessly opinionated.

But her style, her aesthetic, sold everything she wrote, and this belief in style, and the precision of her writing, seemingly erased ideology: she was a realist, a pragmatist, attuned to logic and facts, but a stylist first—as with all great writers, the style was where you located the meaning in her work.

The key phrase here is “especially if we are writers” because it seems that everyone has fallen under the thrall of this idea that we’re all writers and dramatists now, that each of us has a special voice and something very important to say, usually about a feeling we have, and all this gets expressed in the black maw of social media billions of times a day.

Wallace had been a fan of Less Than Zero, and yet I’d been amused by David’s interpretation of American Psycho as “Neiman-Marcus nihilism” and never remotely felt we were having any kind of literary feud.

thought his Kenyon commencement speech from 2005 was a very special example of bullshit.

for those of us who were also touring and immersed in publishing in the 1990s, the movie provides a comically accurate account of a Gen-X era that is long gone: Walter Kirn’s book reviews in New York magazine ignite entire party conversations, Rolling Stone commissions a profile of an avant-garde academic novelist, people in cars sing along to Alanis Morissette anthems and smoking’s allowed everywhere. The digital age had not yet fully arrived.

But the movie completely omits any reference to the other Wallace: the contemptuous one, the contrarian, the jealous asshole with a violent side, the cruel critic—all the things some of us found interesting about him.

This movie prefers Saint David of the Kenyon commencement called “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life,” a speech some of his staunchest defenders and even former editors have a hard time stomaching, arguing that it’s the worst thing Wallace ever wrote, but which became a mini viral sensation.

I admire David Foster Wallace’s ambition and talent and wide-ranging literary experimentalism, even though for the most part I thought he was a fake-out artist whose disingenuous personality belied his genuine complexity. (See, for instance, his remark that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all”—a line I would’ve loved to have seen Jason Segel’s puppy dog David try to deliver sincerely.)

The very thing that Wallace always feared might happen to him is happily encouraged and actualized by The End of the Tour, and it’s kind of mind-blowing that the movie either didn’t figure this out or chose to simply ignore it. Minute by minute, scene by scene, the film rejects everything David Foster Wallace supposedly stood for and believed in. It’s a massive contradiction that leaves one somewhat dumbfounded by the adolescent hubris of both the portrayal and the conception, which seems determined to deliver something that its star keeps saying he doesn’t want—to become a character—and the movie willfully ignores this complaint.

Wallace begs Lipsky in their last scene in The End of the Tour, taking him to task, almost pleading, and though this might be an honorable way to live your life as a bro, it’s a terrible idea for a writer.

(except, of course, for Infinite Jest, which I hadn’t been able to find a way into despite its snazzy and prescient central idea of corporations taking over the American entertainment industry)

Fascinating. His critique of Wallace so far is fair and accurate but Infinite Jest isn’t about a corporate takeover of entertainment (heck, that has happened) so much as a corporate takeover of government. Is BEE slyly saying they’re the same!

The sincerity and the earnestness he began trafficking in seemed to some of us a ploy, a kind of contradiction—not totally fake, but not totally real either, a kind of performance art in which he’d sensed the societal shift toward earnestness and accommodated himself to it. But I still liked the idea of David and the fact that he existed, and I also think he was a genius.

While my feelings about him were—yes—contradictory, they were also honest.

Tavana’s ode to Sky Ferreira might not have been especially well written, though it was clearly an honest account by a man who was looking at a woman he might have desired and writing about that desire, even as it overshadowed what he thought about her music. So the question became: What if he’s honest about objectifying her?

Social-justice warriors from LAist, Flavorwire, Jezebel, Teen Vogue and Vulture couldn’t let this innocuous piece go unnoticed without throwing hissy fits, and so pissed-off and supposedly offended that they were obliged to denounce Art Tavana. When reading similar pieces by young journalists, some of whom should’ve known better, I wondered when liberal progressives had become such society matrons, clutching their pearls in horror every time anyone had an opinion that wasn’t the mirror image of their own.

Teen Vogue found the use of “boobs” and “knockers” misogynistic and lodged a rather insipid complaint about the male gaze. Whenever I hear an objection to the male gaze—hoping that it will…what? Go away, get rerouted, become contained—I automatically think, Are people really this deluded and deranged or haven’t they had a date in the last ten years?

I also kept wondering, throughout that week in the summer of 2016, what if all I wanted to do was bang Nick Jonas (a question still) and maybe wrote a fifteen-hundred-word ode, talking about his chest and his ass and his dumb-sexy face and the fact I didn’t really like his music—would that have been a dis on Nick?

Or what if a woman wanted to write about how she really hated Drake’s music but found him so physically hot and desirable that she was lusting for him anyway? Where would that put her? Where would that put me?

The reality is that men look at women, and men look at other men, and women look at men, and women especially size up other women and objectify them.

The sad ending of this story was that the LA Weekly, which had edited and posted the piece, felt they needed to apologize for it in the wake of all the online howling—for a piece where someone had clearly written honestly, sometimes embarrassingly so, about an entertainer and how he judged her. That was it. That should be allowed.

The overreaction epidemic that’s rampant in our society, as well as the specter of censorship, should not be allowed if we want to function as a free-speech society that believes—or even pretends to—in the First Amendment.

I admired how, in interviews, he was fearlessly opinionated about actors, directors, movies and TV series. I hate saying “fearlessly,” since that hardly describes dissing Oscar-bait movies or saying you don’t care for Cate Blanchett or that you found the first season of True Detective really boring after watching only one episode.

Tarantino was punished for “attacking” Bigelow and DuVernay—two women!—even though he had treated them neutrally, like adults, like the male filmmakers he also had issues with.

After thinking about it, I realized the answer was Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, and I remembered that I’d tweeted, surprised by how powerful Arnold’s film was, “Best movie I’ve seen in a year and I’ve gotta stop saying women can’t direct” and promptly told the reporter about all this.