White

by Bret Easton Ellis

I was often at odds with the notion that anyone could really, deeply care about a Tweet in the first place. You tweeted, people screamed, people laughed, you shrugged, everyone moved on—that’s how I initially saw Twitter.

But after a while I realized that Twitter actually encouraged anger and despair—from the overly sincere, the virtue signaler, the dumb-ass, the literal-minded, the humorless.

But if you’ve had a long career and already taken a lot of hits, you also realize after a while that they bounce off. You find out the armor was built so long ago that you assume everybody else on social media can handle the same bullets that you’ve been shot with—until you find out this is decisively untrue.

Sinatra never apologized for anything because that kind of culture didn’t exist then—a world where anyone, even prominent people, could be policed into muteness—although he was occasionally attacked by the press about his appetite for women and the louche Rat Pack years in Las Vegas, which he single-handedly reinvented as a mecca for tourists.

Pop culture now would be hesitant to invite anyone like Sinatra (or Miles Davis or James Brown) back in, and while watching Gibney’s movie it chilled me to realize that maybe this democratization hadn’t been all that great for pop culture itself. How

Sinatra would have been disgusted by the Orwellian tenor of our current moment, but I can’t imagine he would have ever bowed to it.

The culture seemed like it no longer belonged to the titans but instead to whoever could seize its attention with whatever immediacy and force.

If Empire was the Eagles, Veuve Clicquot, Reagan, The Godfather and Robert Redford, then post-Empire was American Idol, coconut water, the Tea Party, The Human Centipede, and Shia LaBeouf.

It was a brief moment that never fully flowered; it existed fleetingly and then, like everything else, became watered down and clamped shut, as the post-Empire merged into corporate culture.

What Sheen exemplified and clarified was that not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is actually what matters the most, that the public will respond to you even more fervently, because you’re free and that’s exactly what they all desire—everyone, that is, except for the network or the show’s creator or the corporation that has made you so fabulously wealthy.

In HBO’s 2010 documentary—produced by Graydon Carter and directed by Martin Scorsese, pranksters who became heavyweight champions of Empire—Fran Lebowitz complained that what had really been lost in American culture was connoisseurship: the ability for someone to recognize the difference between what was genuinely good and what was merely mediocre.

In the decades after it was published, readers of American Psycho often asked me where Patrick Bateman would be now, as if he were an acquaintance of mine, someone real I used to know.

If you’d read the book carefully and had a sense of Manhattan geography, you knew that Bateman’s sleek and minimalist Upper West Side apartment had an imaginary address, and this always suggested to me that Bateman wasn’t necessarily a reliable narrator, and that he might in fact be a ghost, an idea, a summing up of that particular decade’s values as filtered through my own literary sensibility: moneyed, beautifully attired, impossibly groomed and handsome, morally bankrupt, totally isolated and filled with rage, a young and directionless mannequin hoping that someone, anyone, will save him from himself.

He could also just as easily have been a hedge funder in New York: Patrick Bateman begets Bill Ackman and Daniel Loeb.

I disagreed with the ideology that was being so widely embraced but I was still trying, as Bateman puts it, to fit in.

American Psycho was about what it meant to be a person in a society you disagreed with and what happened when you attempted to accept and live with its values even if you knew they were wrong.

New York in 2016 and beyond was American Psycho on steroids. And despite the connections provided by the internet and social media, many people felt even more isolated and increasingly aware that the idea of interconnectivity was itself an illusion.

Would better forensics—not to mention the Big Brother cameras on virtually every corner—prevent him from getting away with the murders he at least tells the reader he has committed, or would his expression of rage take any other form?

Something that upsets Bateman terribly is that due to corporate-culture conformity, no one can really tell anybody else apart (and the novel asks what difference does it make anyway?).

People are so lost in their narcissism that they’re unable to distinguish one individual from another, which is why Patrick gets away with his crimes (even if they’re in a fictional scenario).

Christian Bale changed the look of Bateman for me, giving him a face, a spectacular body and a deep yet hesitant voice, noting that he took his cues from watching Tom Cruise on The David Letterman Show: what Bale called a very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes.

Some people who wanted the book banned then regarded Bateman’s crimes (which might have been entirely imaginary thought crimes) as my crimes, a hideous mistake that contributed to the death

threats I subsequently received, and to the censorship with which I was threatened. In 1991, this seemed like an unusual and curious response but these days people routinely mistake thoughts and opinions for actual crimes. Feelings aren’t facts and opinions aren’t crimes and aesthetics still count—and the reason I’m a writer is to present an aesthetic, things that are true without always having to be factual or immutable. But opinions can also change, even if, according to social media, they’re supposed to be forever.

Bateman’s awareness that the society he’s a part of doesn’t care about his crimes and in turn forces him to imagine that maybe he didn’t actually commit them, was a tricky thing to dramatize onstage; it’s what

had also proved difficult for Mary Harron in her adaptation for the screen, a failure to which she freely admits.

This show was a reminder for me in the summer of 2018 that freedom was ultimately what everyone yearns for, no matter your age, your gender, your race, your identity.

And neither was my friend from Manhattan Beach, though he admitted that over the last year easily half of his left-leaning friends had dumped him simply because he’d talked positively about the president on social media. The question for him now had become: Well, were any of them really his friends in the first place? If they could ditch him so completely over Trump, maybe they never had been. He’d often wondered: Was this really all it took? Was defending the president you had supported and voted for that immoral and outrageous?

This was why it seemed to many of us in that summer that the Left was morphing into something it never had been in my lifetime: a morally superior, intolerant and authoritarian party that was out of touch and lacked any coherent ideology beyond its blanket refusal to credit an election in which someone they didn’t approve of had, at least legally, technically, won the White House. The Left had become a rage machine, burning itself up: a melting blue bubble dissolving in on itself.

The shunning of others who don’t think like you had moved past protest and resistance into childlike fascism, and it was becoming harder and harder to accept these exclusionary tactics. The differing political viewpoints were judged as immoral, racist and misogynist. This constant shrieking by the unconsoled was, for me, beyond tiresome, a high-pitched drone that never moved the needle.

This campaign was a reaction against what many saw as an increasingly deranged and rabid resistance, which held that if you’re not “woke” to how hateful and dangerous Donald Trump is, then you and his supporters should be subjected to an ever-widening social and professional fatwa.

infection. Some of my podcast followers suggested that by complaining about leftist hysteria I was practically Rush Limbaugh incarnate, that I was an alt-right pro-Trump weirdo, that it was all garbage, it was disgusting, it was unbearable. And so here we were: the opinion of someone was unbearable. This was the stance now.

And also an extreme, ludicrous violation of free speech, much as policies deemed unlikeable were misconstrued as immoral.

What made tweets like “Self-victimization is a disease” or those in praise of the president so much fun was that they caused Trump’s opponents to melt down even when they should’ve known better and taken these things in the spirit in which they were composed—as bi-polar, Dada performance art.

This episode presaged Disney’s other high-profile firing that summer of the writer-director James Gunn, who was responsible for the massively successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Tweets from a decade ago had resurfaced, featuring tasteless bad-boy jokes, lame attempts at edgy low-brow shock humor that often touched on pedophilia, blowjobs, rape, AIDS. This was exactly what many of us thought Twitter had encouraged in its early years, back when “offensive” tweets didn’t yet somehow define the entire humanity of an individual and land him in jail with a lifetime sentence. Disney severed all business ties with Gunn, whose movies had brought over a billion dollars to the corporation, and fired him off the next Guardians movie, which he’d already written and was scheduled to go into production that fall. What made this corporate decision so chilling was that Gunn had not only made amends for and disavowed these tweets years ago but was also an active hater of Donald Trump, loudly criticizing him on, naturally, Twitter. The realization hit that not even vehement liberalism could save you anymore, not in a tyrannical and oppressive Hollywood culture that was now dictating how we expressed ourselves as comedians, filmmakers, artists. Freedom of expression had become, it seemed, an aesthetic death wish, effectively suicidal.

Artists—or, in the local parlance, creatives—should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families.

How could artists flower in an environment while terrified about expressing themselves however they wanted to, or take big creative risks that often walked along the edges of good taste or even blasphemy, or simply those that allowed them to step into someone else’s shoes without being accused of cultural appropriation?

We also idly noted that the filmmaker David Lynch couldn’t say in an interview that he thought maybe Donald Trump would go down as one of the great presidents in history, not without groupthink forcing him into apologizing for this immediately on Facebook.

Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.