White

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White by Brett Easton Ellis

I purchased this book after seeing Brett Easton Ellis on Tucker Carlson. He seemed to have an intelligent, forthright exasperation with the stifling political correctness that permeates the culture. Despite all that, this is not a book on politics; it is about culture, specifically, the bicoastal, elite, celebrity, literary culture that Ellis has been a part of since he published his first best seller when he was 21 years old back in the mid-80s. Since Ellis is gay, a large part of the culture he discusses is about the gay culture that he saw develope over the last thirty years.

If that kind of thing disturbs you, then give the book a miss. On the other hand, you will be missing a very captivating discussion of movies, books, and life from an intelligent member of the arts community. Something like half the book involves Ellis's take on a variety of movies. A fair amount of his discussion of movies involves Ellis's fascination with horror movies, a genre which captivated him as a youth in Los Angeles. He has a nice discussion of why John Carpenter's The Thing is better than Alien. He discusses Tom Cruise and Risky Business, Judd Nelson, American Gigolo, movies based on his own books, the genesis and significance of American Psycho, and other movies. Listening to Ellis wander his way through these cultural moments of the past is like having a talk with an old cinephile friend.

One thing I liked was how Ellis treated the gay element. Basically, he treated it as just an element of his life, like being a Rotarian, that didn't necessarily define him. He has an interest in gay film – there was a long discussion of Moonlight, a movie I will never watch - and, frankly, I came away thinking that I might just want to watch King Cobra, which Ellis describes as a pretty decent murder mystery. Ellis actually nailed the inchoate reason that I don't want to watch Moonlight and am fairly revolted by how gays are treated by and in the media:

“In the spring of 2013, men of a certain demo experienced a flicker of annoyance at how the media treated basketball player Jason Collins as some kind of baby panda who needed to be honored and praised and consoled and infantilized for his coming out on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Within the tyrannical homophobia of the sports world, that any man—much less a black one—would come out was a triumph not only for the gay community but also for pranksters everywhere, who were thrilled by the idea that what should rightly be considered a boring fact that's nobody's business was instead a shock heard briefly around the planet. This was an undeniable moment (perhaps just a footnote now) and Jason Collins was the future, though the subsequent fawning over his simple statement that he was gay still seemed in that moment like a new kind of victimization, with George Stephanopoulos interviewing him on Good Morning America so tenderly it was as if he was talking to a six-year-old boy. And the reign of the gay man as magical elf—who appears before us whenever he comes out as some kind of saintly, adorable ET whose sole purpose is to remind us only about tolerance and our prejudices, to encourage us to feel good about ourselves and to serve as a symbol instead of being just another guy—still seems in media play five years later. While watching the coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang I was constantly reminded that freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy and figure skater Adam Rippon were openly gay—a media “progressivism” that one would have assumed was by now both tone-deaf and antiquated, and yet Kenworthy and Rippon openly participated in it, encouraging an identity-politics fervor that tilted toward that same casual and mindless degradation: the Gay Man as Magical Elf.”

The Gay Man as Magical Elf was such a widespread (if tricky) part of self-patronization that by now you would expect the chill members of the gay community to respond with cool indifference to the question of anybody else's gayness. Even now, however, the sweet and smiley and sexually unthreatening elf with liberal values and a positive attitude is supposed to transform everyone into noble gay-loving protectors—again, as long as the gay in question toes the party line, isn't messy or too sexual, negative or angry and offers no contradictions and is certainly not conservative or Christian. Sanctimonious voices in the media, straight and gay alike, tell us that all gay people should be canonized as long as they share the same uniform values—speak like this, express themselves within this range, only believe in this, only support this, vote for this. (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.)”

“The Gay Man as Magical Elf.”

Perfect.

Ellis also makes some cogent observations about the change in society since his youth. He has noticed that people – celebrities – tend to share a characteristic of fear these days. Actors, in particular, want to be liked and they have learned to enact a performance that will protect them from public criticism in their unscripted performances, even when they should be acting naturally. Ellis describes the change that came over James van der Beek on his podcast from uninhibited and angry to fearful and restrained:

“Should I have been surprised when an actor enacted a version of himself far more carefully than any civilian would? A version he'd want to play in front of an audience? No, that shouldn't have surprised me because most of us now are way more careful about how we present ourselves than ever before. What my podcast was fighting, I realized, was the limitations of the new world order. And even if this might be the new status quo, I still wanted to know: What the fuck was everybody protecting? Later, I would come to understand, it was the corporation.”

This observation segues into Ellis's observations about American political culture circa 2019. Ellis admits that he is not interested in politics. I think this is true, Ellis is too much of an aesthete to really care about politics, but as Keanu said about the Devil in Constantine, even if you aren't interested in him, he's interested in you, no one in this age escapes the interest of leftist politics. And in Ellis's case, it involved him stating his opinion on some topic only to be treated as a rapist FOR AN OPINION! Ellis seems honestly surprised that we have reached this point.

Add to that the epic emotional meltdown he witnessed in 2016 and the hysterical delusion of the Russian collusion and Ellis became, as the kids say, “red pilled.”

Here's an example:

“However, the friends I had dinner with that November, with whom I'd never talked politics during either the Bush or the Obama administrations, admitted how unmoored they were by this outcome. They seemed surprisingly calm, or maybe just dazed, as they confessed their shock and disappointment on election night, and then described the hangovers, literal and metaphorical, they'd endured on the morning after. During those dinners I had that week after the election, two men had expressed their surprise and dismay that they apparently had been living in a bubble. Living...in...a...bubble. I, for some reason, hadn't been living in a bubble and knew almost as many people who'd announced their intention to vote for Trump as those who said they were voting for Hillary. It was pretty evenly split in the world I moved through—maybe 55 percent for her, 45 for him—and this might have been why the outcome hadn't seemed as shocking to me as it was to those residing in that bubble. And yet one of these men, a writer I'd known for twenty years, became even more hysterical as the Trump administration revealed itself, and his initial resignation turned into something desperate and childish—complete with a certainty he carried with him at another dinner, late in the summer of 2017, that Donald Trump would be impeached by September. He was sputtering, furious; everything was just a total shitshow. I stared at him in the restaurant not saying anything as that voice began sighing in my head again.”

And this:

“But what was happening to the person I'd been living with for almost seven years reflected the epidemic of moral superiority that was also engulfing and destroying a faction on the Left. During the months after the election I could count the number of times my inconsolable boyfriend had left the condo—and didn't need more than two hands to tally them up. His hair became long and tousled, he hadn't shaved for months, and he also developed three nonopiate addictions: Russian conspiracies as discussed on Reddit, Rachel Maddow detailing Russian conspiracy theories on MSNBC, and playing Final Fantasy XV. If I made even an offhand quip disparaging legacy media or fake news or the striking shifts in tone and bias that had occurred in certain national news organizations, his hackles would rise and he'd glare at me, believing deeply that anything the Trump administration said about fake news and the awful media could not be trusted. He was part of the supposed resistance—though too tired and stoned to actually go out and resist. The election had turned him into a wreck. At times he resembled a bedraggled and enraged Russian peasant, ranting and stomping around the condo, MSNBC blaring, yelling “Piece of shit!” whenever Trump's visage appeared on the TV screen in the living room. If he read something in any of his feeds that implicated Trump in some Russian involvement he'd jump up and down and start clapping his hands in delight. “Impeachment! Impeachment's coming. I can't fucking wait.” In the early spring of 2017, this was sometimes amusing, and I would laugh, but as the year rushed forward I occasionally found myself wondering, What have I signed on for?”

I guess we now know who was subsidizing CNN for the last two years, and who stopped watching once the fantasy was exposed as idiocy.

Ellis was also offended by the totalitarianism masquerading as moral superiority:

“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. I reminded the moderator that despite what he or I thought about Trump, roughly half of the people who had actually voted were somewhat happy with the results of the 2016 election. After I said this you could've heard a pin drop in the sold-out hall. 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. Again, you could have heard the pins dropping. Nobody in the audience at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in the winter of 2017 wanted to hear any of this. At the signing afterward many people came up and were very polite, in that formal British style, and none of them said anything about my remarks except for a white man about my age who said he agreed with me about the protests. But my statements were considered so controversial that they made headlines in the Irish Examiner and The Daily Mail the following day. Somehow these opinions—they were merely that, not prophecies or facts—were provocative enough to warrant these headlines. 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.”

And after being asked what music he was listening to, Ellis had this exchange:

“One of my favorite songs of the past few years had been Luke Bryan's cotton-candy “Roller Coaster,” the sort of nearly perfect pop production that wasn't being made anymore by actual pop stars. Country was the only place where you could find the pop-rock sweet spot that I was currently searching for—old-school rock and pop sounds and structures. Jason Isbell transcends country with his great Southeastern and Something More Than Free albums, but this young man hadn't heard of Jason Isbell. In fact he wasn't listening to any of the artists I mentioned. I'd known him for a little more than a year, and he was also a “survivor” of the election who'd turn into a sputtering wreck if Trump came up briefly in passing or his image was glimpsed on a screen or monitor, and he was shocked, and asked, seriously, how could I possibly like that music? I had no idea what the young man meant and I said so. And then he told me, “How can you like country music when they're all against us—don't you understand that? They are against us, Bret. Our values.”

This book is like a tourist guide to a part of American culture that I knew existed, but I will never experience.