Bret Easton Ellis

White

Alfred A. Knopf, NY, NY 2019 - 261 pages

 

"White," Bret Easton Ellis's first essay (after six novels and a 34-year career) is divided into chapters laconically titled "acting," "liking," "tweeting," "secondself," "post-sex," “post-empire."

 

We all remember how BEE interpreted the American 80s and 90s: with novels accused of misogyny but proudly and hopelessly sporting an over-bearing, white-(gay)-privileged-North American slant. To me, "Less Than Zero" (1985) explained well the Reagan '80s and its drug-addicted twenty-year-old Californians without thoughts or feelings, driving convertibles and with MTV as only cohesive paste. 

 

"American Psycho" (that BEE begun writing in '86 but published in '91) doubled the stakes of "Less Than Zero": the rookies had grown up and they were now working on Wall Street (Clinton would later make them billionaires, with the abolition of the Glass-Steagal Act.)

 

The star was Patrick Bateman, a 27-year-old "heterosexual male dandy" consumed - like his circle of friends - by "crazily materialistic lifestyles" based on Armani jackets, "expensive restaurants", vacation homes in the Hamptons, muscle-bound abs and obsessive attention to hair and toiletry. Erm, and a penchant for serial killing. 

 

The 'historical' part of "White" tells us anecdotes on some of BEE's milestones. Like the origin of the idea - in "American Psycho" - of uniting fashion, Jack the Ripper and Wall Street: the epiphany happened at some dinners with young sherpa-financiers in NYC, people who could become violent if needed to get the right address for their engraved business cards. 

 

The genesis of the films of his two most famous novels are also part of his reminiscences. Including the gem of Christian Bale recreating Bateman and his "very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes” by studying... Tom Cruise on the David Letterman Show. 

 

It also tells us about "American Psycho: The Musical" with music by the much talented Duncan Sheik:  a '16, NYC production, billed for just 2 months, and closing 14 million dollars in the red.

 

I'd be a liar to say that BEE refrains from making reference to psycho-actives substances throughout the book. Glitterati artists ("sharing coke with JM Basquiat,”) and his Twitter-politics skirmishes fueled by "a mix of insomnia and tequila,” or his relationship with a partner who is "slightly addicted to opiates." His official psychotropic diet? Champagne and Klonopin, a benzodiazepine.

 

Then here he is, re-defending Kanye West and his (pro-Trump) Twitter-rants that BEE considers objects d'art animated by a Duchamp spirit (he calls them "bi-polar, Dada performance art.") 

 

Finally, he propagates the "Post-Empire" meme, an era which he imagines began shortly after 9/11 with "the then-radical attitude that wanted the lie of the Empire to no longer exist" and which today he finds in the excesses of the LGBT movement, Charlie Sheen and his debauchery, the Kardashians, Cee Lo Green's song Fuck You.

 

Empire's "celebrities" (Madonna, Joko, Muhammed Ali, Gore Vidal, John Lennon, Bob Dylan "and even Joni Mitchell") are "no longer" post-Empire, because "Post-Empire narcissism differs greatly from that of Empire." BEE would find proof by comparing Dylan's "Blood On The Tracks" ("one of Empire's proudest and most stylish achievements") with Eminem's "On The Marshall Mathers," in which - "fearlessly" - the white rapper "records the imaginary murder of his ex-wife with his angry hands, a defiant act that would never have been contemplated by Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan." 

 

In short... "White" is perhaps the internal monologue of a fight between Gen-X (BEE) and Millennials (his current partner.) But it is certainly the sacrosanct lashing out against the "reputation economy" (in which the supplier gives the ratings to the customer!) and "group-thinking" (sheep thinking: saying the same things), or giving a like to any post hoping that my posts will also be liked. It is a pastiche of captivating and apodictic critical ideas that arrive - not blamelessly, but without guilt - in bulk from someone who sometimes seems to share Bateman's genes ("in many ways Patrick Bateman was me": "we shared an illusory and distant relationship with a world that horrified us.") 

 

BEE limits himself to observing the war that (I quote Warren Buffett) in the 21st century the rich have declared on the poor and from which BEE opts out. It thus becomes a "privilege" to be able to choose to float in "drugs, fags and indifference.”

 

From his pulpit BEE calls Millennials as the 'Wuss Generation,’ finding them superficially cruel, but ready to throw in the towel at the first adversity. Or worse: to adopt the tactic of self-pity: “to define themselves - in practice - through a bad thing." 

 

BEE uses the "Resistance" pathetically set up by the Democrats post-Trump election as a contrast liquid to distinguish themselves from liberals, many of whom are Millennials. Curious move, considering that by criticizing the ultra-violent memes of the "Hollywood dem" [who propagandized their desire to beat the shit out of (De Niro), murder (Depp) and behead (Griffin) that "vulgar, deficient bully with crazy hair and orange skin"] BEE seems not to notice that they are the reflection of Trump's violent memes ("weak", Megyn Kelly "bleeding", mocking disabled...) 

 

Btw Trump was the hero of psycho Bateman. And that was way back, in '91.