Review: Bret Easton Ellis Uses White to Explode Our Pretenses of Dignity

Throughout, Ellis waves a broadsword at political correctness.

Bret Easton Ellis, White
Photo: Casey Nelson

With his first nonfiction work, White, Bret Easton Ellis waves a broadsword at political correctness, enjoying the friction that such a pursuit generates when indulged by someone in his particular social station. Whether you’re on the left or right of America’s endless struggle to pretend to be the democracy it claims to be, it’s not surprising when Rush Limbaugh or one of the “Stepford reporters” of Fox News demeans “identity politics.” But Ellis has written a couple of hip and controversial novels—including Less than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho—as well as a screenplay for a Paul Schrader film. Ellis is a member of the “Hollywood elite,” and he’s gay, living with a millennial boyfriend many years his junior. This isn’t the person, then, that one expects to entertain a flirtation with quasi-right-wing values, sort of making a case for Kanye West and Donald Trump. Ellis gets off on that very disjunction in White, which serves as both a summary and an extension of the provocations he offers on Twitter as well as on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast.

Ellis writes in generalities, roiling with the self-righteous anger that’s fashionable for everyone on all sides of the aisle to indulge nowadays. To him, helicopter parenting—scheduling every moment of children’s free time, sheltering them from the pressures and disappointments of competition—has led to a generation of wimps, an assertion which is as unoriginal as it is simplified. According to the author, millennials and members of Generation Z are “Generation Wuss,” and his primary research on the subject appears to be his own childhood, as well as watching his boyfriend, musician Todd Michael Schultz, fume over MSNBC’s reporting of Trump’s outrages du jour over the last several years. Ellis’s reduction of his lover here, as sheltered and unjustifiably hysterical, might embarrass un-woke straight writers. Time and again, Ellis takes shortcuts and acknowledges said shortcuts so as to indulge himself anyway.

White includes only a token acknowledgement of the effect of rising economic inequality on youthful rage. This book also refuses to engage with outrage culture as a creation of both the left and the right. Who’s a more expert orchestrator of this country’s bitterness than the current president of the United States? Lashing out at his peers, Ellis resorts to the most pitiful of the defenses that have been mounted of Trump: that what he says can’t be taken literally, as his obscenities are essentially performance art. MSNBC is vilified in the book while the outright lies of Fox News, and of Trump, are barely mentioned. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment is revisited in White as well, and so is Michelle Obama’s righteous “while they go high, we go low” routine at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, while Trump’s slander and encouragements of active assault are ignored.

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Yet in its slapdash and self-pitying way, White also cuts to the heart of modern liberal ineffectuality. To loosely paraphrase a character from Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump, it seems as if liberals would rather look good and lose than look bad and win. Ellis correctly sees factions of the far left as humorless prigs, demanding insincere apologies for superficial lapses in taste while literal-mindedly tabulating representation in various forms of art, which leads to all sorts of lapses in common sense. For instance, male critics are rarely allowed to comment on personal appearances in pop culture—objectification!—even though pop culture is almost entirely predicated on sex. What Ellis pinpoints, and what the far left willfully misses, is that this sort of self-censorship, encouraged of the broader populace as well, brokers another form of shame: of the very desire that most films, TV, and online imagery encourages anyway. Ellis uses the outcry over an L.A. Weekly article on Sky Ferreira as an example of this hypocritical neurosis, but he could have just as easily cited any number of other non-controversies, such as the absurd offenses that were taken over the assertion that Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman might partially be an essay on Gal Gadot’s beauty,

There are larger things at stake here than a man’s right to admit he finds a woman attractive. Ellis is rightfully scared of how acceptable censorship has become on the social media plane, which encourages us to offer a sanitized version of ourselves that’s engineered to earn “likes” and pass the inspections of prospective employers while conforming to a woke sensibility to atone for not effecting more significant social changes. Ellis misses a time—which, at 39, I remember too—in which one was able to make a joke in bad taste without having to then stage an apology tour. He’s rightfully scared of how corporations have combined social media with a generalized liberal agenda so as to trick us into serving as our own thought police.

This sense of not being able to say things, of not being able to be imperfect, encourages the creation of a hidden world, and not just the world of white supremacists. In private, many people make the sort of jokes that are brutally rebuffed on Twitter. And we still sexualize people, because most humans are driven by sexual desires and because we live in a simultaneously puritanical and über-sexed culture that’s confusing and exhausting. (Many of my friends are liberals who’re tired of the steroidal liberal nobility project, and these friends include millennials of various colors and sexualities, which, judging from White, might come as a shock to Ellis.) This public policing often suggests a compensation prize for liberals for possessing less influence than conservatives, insidiously allowing people to feel empowered even as corporations continue to seize control of the world.

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In White, Ellis is essentially arguing for our right to admit to our selfishness, our bitterness, and our questionable longings. He’s arguing for irony as an antidote to the outrage machine that keeps many of us in a perpetual anti-intellectual tizzy. As a way of achieving what he seems to oxymoronically idealize as a form of empathetic detachment, Ellis keeps returning to the notion of valuing aesthetic over theme in art. In particular, White’s liveliest passages often filter Ellis’s social grievances through film reviews, including a sharp and lucid reading of Schrader’s American Gigolo, which Ellis reads as an inadvertently prescient anticipation of how social media has transformed us all into commodified, ever-shifting actors. There’s also a visceral takedown of Barry Jenkins’s tormented gay pseudo-romance Moonlight, which Ellis sees as an embodiment of the left’s victim complex. (Although Ellis violates his own rules here, as he admits that Moonlight, with its evocative formal textures, is of aesthetic note. Which is to say that Ellis, as a gay man, is turning against a work of art for reasons of representation and theme, like many of the liberals he criticizes.)

Using aesthetic criterion, White leads to a white-washing of Trump that should nevertheless prove insightful to members of the “resistance.” Trump’s actions shouldn’t be taken as performance art, but that is how they’re taken: as a fuck-you to cultural platitudes that are growing increasingly distanced from how people actually process their lives. Trump is appealing to his supporters, including Kanye West, because he’s visceral, because his livewire nonsensicality and hatefulness seem to embody freedom, even if his behavior actively hurts the people who love him. When liberal outlets scold him, according every misbehavior equal prominence (and often glossing over policy, which is where he wreaks his greatest havoc), they grant Trump power, and somehow they continue to not learn this lesson—or they are, like Trump, just feeding the beast. Ellis understands this irony, and, seeking to distinguish between moral and aesthetic concerns, he decodes Trump’s allure.

Other reviews have ridiculed Ellis’s comparison of Trump’s political ascension to Charlie Sheen’s public 2011 meltdown, but this equivocation strikes me as brilliant and useful. In both cases, the offenders in question shattered the faux nobility of the press and the celebrity class, admitting in various fashions that our society is predicated on a ruthless game in which fame is used to make money, money to further fame, and so forth. Tired of spinning his real-life hedonism into sexist, toothless cartoon antics for Two and a Half Men, Sheen revealed the monstrous insanity that lurked under a typical fantasy of male power—a fantasy that women enjoy as well as men. Ellis finds Sheen’s breakdown weirdly admirable—of course the writer of American Psycho would—for exploding our pretenses of dignity.

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We turned on Sheen only when he forced us to confront the exploitation, the misery, behind his unlimited satiation of hunger, though we were also fixated for a while on him as the freak of the moment. Trump harvested our sleazy predictions with the help of Fox News and built a political empire on the acknowledgement of power for its own sake—on the appeal of watching platitudes be shattered. Nearly every sentiment out of Trump’s mouth is a ribald lie, but these collective lies fulfill a truth for Ellis: that politics, tabloids, and all of media has merged into a soup of sensationalist stimulation. Democrats, with their constant fact-checking and schoolhouse lecturing, are effectively bringing a knife to a gunfight.

White feels as if it was hammered out over a long weekend. Given the importance of some of Ellis’s subjects, one wishes that he was more disciplined, though perhaps that’s also missing his point of the inherent sloppiness of outrage culture. A sense of humor would’ve helped the book as well, as Ellis could stand to make a few jokes at his own rarefied expense. Being castigated on Twitter by C-listers or criticized for writing a novel that nevertheless made your name isn’t exactly synonymous with the frustrations of most American people. Ellis acknowledges this social discrepancy but doesn’t appear to truly know it. He’s evening scores in White, though he’s clearly a member of the gilded class that so galls him. A rich white man, Ellis can afford to write Trump off as a bad joke, which means that liberal media will have an excuse to ignore White. However, writing Trump off as a joke, effectively reducing his power by reducing our essentially reverential hatred, might also be the key to undoing him.

Bret Easton Ellis’s White is now available from Knopf.

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Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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