Download White Bret Easton Ellis 9780525656302 Books

Product details Hardcover 272 pages Publisher Knopf (April 16, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0525656308

White Bret Easton Ellis 9780525656302 Books Reviews

• Though linear, this is a collection of largely unconnected musings on culture and ideological conflict which never themselves directly address politics and policy, whatever legacy boutique media and the organic wine-and-cheese critical establishment say (or spastically shriek) about Ellis' latest work, though there is a common and unifying thread running through it opinions are not facts, facts may rely on unclear or nuanced variables for interpretation, and it's possible to manage social disagreement and dissent about opinions and factual ambiguity without becoming hysterically unhinged. Despite his rather tame and visibly true thesis, and his patently obvious anti-Trump disposition, Ellis has nevertheless spent the last week weathering exactly the sort of predictable, phony and overwrought establishment propaganda his text bemoaned.
  
  In doing so, I wish he'd delved into the substantive quibbles of our contemporary policy arguments, though it's beside the point of the work, as it would've fleshed out more fully how fake and ridiculous this culture and its corporate minders have become. The cheapest of the shots taken at Ellis in the wake of White was a phone interview with The New Yorker, which began with and was entirely predicated on the fiction that Trump had ever said, "Mexicans are rapists," (words he has in fact never uttered) and Ellis deflected (instead of confronting his interrogator with the truth of the matter), effectively replying that this text is not about sound bite/news cycle politics itself, but the broader cultural atmosphere in which those sound bites and distortions and outright lies exist, perhaps in his reply meta-framing this very issue, and he was dealt with as all critics of legacy media are dealt with, and—I'm sure—precisely as he expected by being falsely painted as a Trump apologist. It would then follow that Noam Chomsky is the greatest Trump apologist who ever lived.
  
  Interwoven among these riffs on aesthetic and ideological conflict (yet still necessarily relating to those themes) is a fair amount of interesting biographical data, a large part of which was not publicly known or confirmed until White was published the writer and what created him, the person inside that writer, the celebrity projected over that person and his paradoxical loathing of and obsession with the celebrity cult of youth and beauty, the events and artifacts that pushed him this way or that to write on this theme or that topic, inspiration and creativity, the pith and meaning and purpose of art and music and literature, real and true liberty as a precondition of any meaningful creative act (including the freedom to screw up, to fail utterly, to be wrong, to anger an already-angry feminist, to find pain and loss), and these strands of twinned personal narrative and shared social history all somehow ultimately lead into this horrible, boring, technocratic, dystopic and utterly fascist present that seems dead-set on annihilating those circumstances, the very things needed to create a culture worth having. White is essential reading for any fan of Ellis and his work, and instructive for anyone else trapped in this bland corporate media hellhole who somehow has no knowledge of him.
• This is a tour de force. Swimming against the riptide of Political Correctness, like a tadpole in a Tsunami, Ellis makes you, forces you, DEMANDS that you think for yourself.
• This book is going to make a lot of people mad, especially those inhabiting the rarefied liberal/progressive world of the "Coasts" and the entertainment industry. As an inhabitant of that social milieu since the publication of his first novel in his early 20s, he is the perfect Thackeray for today's Vanity Fair. He bravely calls out the absurdity of a group of people who profess to be liberal imposing pretty much a groupthink mentality where almost everyone is a victim, being offended is not to be tolerated, and God help you if you DON'T hate Trump - you'll be drummed out of the corps, whatever corps that is. He has a perfectly detached social observer's tone and a true open-minded person's horror of the loss of freedom of speech and freedom of expression that is now espoused by the very party that claim to champion it. Brilliant book, but it will have some reaching for their vodka, their Xanax and their safe spaces.
• The only book I have read about BEE is Less Than Zero -- though at the time I read it was probably too old for it to actually seem provocative (it was, perhaps, 2009?). Nevertheless, I liked that book and bought some others, Imperial Bedrooms and Rules of Attraction, if I remember correctly. I never could get into either of those books; maybe I'd just used up whatever was in the BEE well on that one book I'd read. That happens sometimes.
  
  Still, one can't deny the man's cultural influence, he is a celebrity writer of course, one of the few genuine celebrity writers in this year of our lord 2019, when few people can read, let alone pick a writer out of a line-up. On occasion, I might have listened to his podcast, and on occasion I may have also read his interviews. I think I've read more about BEE than I've actually read BEE, if that makes sense. And of course there "American Pyscho," which I have never read though I have seen the movie. The movie is a genuine masterpiece, despite the fact that it was, and still, contemporaneously 'problematic.' So, there is that.
  
  And yet I didn't know what to expect from this book. I read some of the pre-publication press and felt that it was a book that might be provocative simply for the sake of the provacateur; that is, it would take the piss out of the millennial generation, "generation wuss" as BEE calls it, but do little less but that. Did I really want to hear someone rant and rave about young people for 250 pages? I can't say it was on my list of things to do.
  
  I think it was after BEE got slammed by the New Yorker, caught in like a deer in headlights as he was berated by an interviewer for writing a book about Trump when he, in fact, did not know that much about Trump, or politics for that matter, that I thought perhaps there is something here that everyone is missing. It's like that with the media sometimes, so maybe the very thing BEE was railing against, this culture of conformity, of not being able to handle points of view that differ from one's own, was actually proving the book's point. Before it was published. That by the very instance of people trying to 'cancel' BEE -- this, years after his actual book "American Pyscho" was canceled (only to be picked up by another publisher) -- the press was doing the author's work for him (note post-Empire, getting canceled is the new American Dream).
  
  So I picked it up. And found myself pleasantly surprised. It wasn't, as the media suggested, a book about Trump, but a book only partially about Trump, in as much as it's a commentary on contemporary culture, a time and place in which Trump is president and so many folks are in disbelief. What little there is about Trump is mostly about people's reaction to Trump, how BEE's friends and associates, business partners and other randoms (i.e. people on Twitter) -- but most especially his ultra-liberal millennial boyfriend -- lost their collective shit over Trump's rise, and what that says about... us.
  
  When I say the book is only partially about Trump, you ask what else it's about well, it's about BEE's upbringing, so it is halfway a memoir, but then it is also about movies -- especially movies -- and so it also a book that reads as criticism, but then there is a lot about BEE's writing experience, what he was going through at different times that different books and films he was working on were created. I found this stuff especially compelling, as it was sandwiched between what, in the end, is in fact a rant of sorts about identity politics, identity culture, victim culture and a cult of permormative rage, if not performative excellence, that BEE sees an entire generation falling taking part in.
  
  Another big thing the book is about is aesthetics, and how people have lost -- if they ever possessed it in the first place -- the ability to discern whether something is good or bad based on whether it actually is good or bad. BEE's argument is that identity has replaced aesthetics, and that younger generations no longer know good from bad, they only know whether they agree or disagree. A movie need not be especially good or even interesting so long as one agrees with the point the filmmaker is trying to make.
  
  This was a point that I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly, though I don't know if the examples BEE used are the best ones; even still, I know he used them because they were such big tentpoles (the movie "Moonlight," for example), and one could only make a giant point by using a giant example, something everyone is familiar with. Is it a secret that movies such as those perform well with left-leaning critics because they play on the prejudices of limousine liberals in coastal cities for dramatic effect? No. BEE's argument is that movies like that, while seemingly progressive, are anything but -- to be progressive while making a movie with gay characters would be to make homosexuality beside the point (i.e. tell a good story, not necessarily a 'gay' story). That this is a blind spot here gets into BEE's privilege, which he acknowledges; even still, it's telling that so many of his examples fall on one side of the color line.
  
  In the end, the book's point seems to be that you cannot judge a person based on things they write or even what they say, but rather what they do -- BEE doesn't care who you voted for, he cares who you are. Which is probably why he can be on one side of the spectrum (or, in his defense, not on the spectrum at all) while his significant other can be on the other and they can both, at the end of the day, lay down next to one another in peace (or one would hope).
  
  Interlaced with that is, as I said, part memoir and part reflections on Hollywood, New York, September 11th, a wide assortment of things. BEE seems obsessed with truth, as opposed to representations of truth, which is why I think a good portion of the last quarter deals with Charlie Sheen's breakdown, a kind of post-mortem on the last time a celebrity actually said and did what they felt, and ultimately paid the price for it (he did, in fact, contract HIV).
  
  If I had one criticism, it'd be that while Ellis asserts, multiple times, that he isn't in a 'bubble,' he may actually be in one. Because for all his ranting about the millennial generation, it would seem, at least by reading this book, that only a certain portion of the millennial generation -- affluent, educated, elite -- are what he is being exposed to. Because for every young person who needs a trigger warning before viewing anything questionable, there is another one, lost in some wayward demographic that marketers, media people and most especially writers these days, don't care much about. And they don't give a second thought to any of that stuff. This demo, I'd argue, has always existed and always will exist, and I posit that it's this demo that took to books (and really movies) like "American Pyscho" in the first place.
  
  This demo was never left and it was never right, it was somewhere undefined, only interested in things that were interesting, and it's the reason why people like Kanye, and even myself, took any interest in Bret Easton Ellis at all.