“White”

“Despite its provocative title and author, White is not an in-your-face screed. It’s not an angry book, and the title is a joke, it seems.

Ellis was a rebel in the early 90’s, American Psycho being turned down by its publisher as it was bound to be controversial. He was a young, bad boy writer who wrote transgressive novels, was hired to write interviews and profiles, and was then chastised for doing that in a transgressive fashion as well. You hired the American Psycho guy, and then you’re pissed because he and Judd Nelson played a prank by writing an article about hip spots in L.A. that turned out to be totally unhip? What did you expect?

Ellis enjoyed a period where his work was understood and appreciated for what it was, blatant satire, and people stopped accusing him of actually being an image-obsessed murderer. But he’s once again in bad boy jail, Twitter jail, and this time he’s locked up by a liberal group with which he once identified instead of the conservative group that American Psycho eviscerated. Again, he’s found himself in trouble for sharing his opinions on arts and culture, and again we’ve misunderstood. In the 90’s, it was like, “My god, what if people start emulating Patrick Bateman?” Which is a ridiculous idea as Bateman was himself a creation that reflected the darker sides of real people. In the 2010’s, it’s like, “Ellis’ rhetoric emboldens bad people,” which is the new “Somebody think of the children.” Which is so annoying. It implies that someone WANTED to do a bad thing, didn’t have the courage, then read essays by a writer of dark literary fiction and said, “NOW I have the guts!” As critiques of books go, that seems like a stretch and a half, inventing a hypothetical person who might, hypothetically, do something that they were considering, and an essay gave them that last shove. It’s an argument all adults have discounted in popular music, most adults have dismissed in the case of video games and film (as applied to adults), and yet somehow we think that it’s Bret Easton Ellis who we need to protect people from?

Ellis is a rebel, but I feel for him because after reading White, I don’t think he’s trying to be. He honestly seems to have been oblivious to the fact that American Psycho would get him in trouble, and he outright admits that he’s seemingly incapable of predicting what will set people off.

You’ll see that most of the reviews are middle-of-the-road, and I think it’s because most reviewers expected something polarizing, that it would be a long political takedown, but instead it’s a mixed bag of essays on everything from writing to horror movies to, yes, Trump’s election. The book presents some unpopular opinions, but they are opinions that are self-aware and very rarely and sparingly critical of any individuals. And while they’re unpopular and no reader is going to agree with all of them, none of them seem cruel or thoughtless, and I’m not using “unpopular” as a tarp to smuggle in racist, misogynist, horrific ideas. They really are well-formed, unpopular, but mostly harmless ideas. Which is why I think reviews are what they are. People expected something insane, something Milo Yiannopoulos, but what they get is a solid collection of essays with opinions that are against the grain, will age well, and probably seem quaint before long.

And this is where we need to talk about the recent interview/hit piece Ellis did with Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. Which, spoiler alert, I disliked when I first read it, and after reading White, I really hated.

The interview starts off with a preface that calls White “a sustained howl of displeasure.” Chotiner read the book as angry, whereas I didn’t. Disagreeing, sure, maybe a little curmudgeonly, but there’s a difference between a middle-aged man muttering to himself that the damn neighborhood kids are always out on their skateboards and the geezer flinging the door open, half-dressed, to scream slurs at them from his front porch. I definitely read it as the former, Chotiner DEFINITELY read it as the latter.

Chotiner’s preface tells us that Ellis wasn’t a fan of Moonlight. From Ellis’ entire essay about Moonlight, comparing the movie to The Weekend, King Cobra, and also discussing Fruitvale Station amongst others, Chotiner pulls this quote:

“When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s world view become the lens through which we began to look at everything?”

What Chotiner is doing is setting readers up to dislike Ellis, who dares to say negative things about Moonlight, the movie about a gay, black man that won an Academy Award. What Chotiner doesn’t mention is that Ellis’ review of Moonlight is long, complex, and brings up a lot of relevant points about the depiction of gay people and the fact that “gay people” are not a monolithic group that think, vote, and feel the same way. He talks about Eric Stonestreet playing a very specific type of gay stereotype and winning an Emmy for it. He talks about the depiction of Turing in The Imitation Game and how the Hollywood treatment of Turing makes him a much less complex, less problematic, less interesting individual than he was in real life.

To put it shortly, Ellis feels that gay characters are generally in one of a few categories, which are palatable to straight viewers, and that gay men in film are not allowed to be bad, flawed people on screen. They are, however, allowed to be victims. Ellis is very much over the victim status of gay men in films. Always being beaten up, ostracized, and, as Ellis puts it, winning awards after discovering they’re HIV positive and flinging themselves out a window in front of Meryl Streep.

Chotiner’s intro quotes Ellis’ line on Moonlight and Ellis’ critique of Michelle Obama’s Low/High statement, and then talks about Ellis’ defense of Roseanne and Kanye West. The intro is an obvious ploy to show readers, “See, this guy is an asshole, so he’s opened the door to the treatment I’m about to give him.” It’s putting Ellis on a side by picking out a few lines from the book, ignoring completely the overall themes, ideas, and left-of-center ideology you’ll find in the pages.

Isaac Chotiner clearly has an obsession with Donald Trump. Check his bylines, but you can also read the interview and see that EVERY question to Ellis regards Trump.

I’m tired of this. I read several interviews over the last year with musicians, writers, whatever, and for some reason, every interviewer wants to talk about making art or being a musician in the Trump era and what that means. And the artist in the hot seat throws out a couple lines about how separating families is probably a bad idea (thanks for the insight!) and generally distances themself from Trump. We are treated to this line of Q&A over and over, artist after artist, letting out a sigh of relief that we weren’t listening to an album by someone stupid enough to commit career suicide and admit they voted for the wrong person. It’s like the fake apologies people make to save their careers now and again. Can we stop doing this? Do I really care if someone made a tasteless Twitter joke 10 years ago? Do they owe ME an apology for making a joke that hurt someone else’s feelings?

With Ellis, there are going to be Trump questions. In portraying Trump as a hero to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, I’d argue that Ellis saw the man for being a dildo way before the rest of us. In the 90’s, many saw Trump as a punchline, and Ellis portrayed him as an idol to a morally bankrupt, unreliable narrator misanthrope. Which is why you kind of have to excuse Ellis’ “No shit” attitude about Trump. He saw this side of America 30 years ago. He wrestled it into a groundbreaking novel. And you’re just now getting around to asking him whether he thinks Trump might be a bad role model?

If Chotiner’s theme is “Trump is bad,” Ellis’ theme is that he isn’t particularly interested in talking about Donald Trump. Chotiner, like that one relative at Thanksgiving, continues to badger Uncle Brett even after Uncle Brett has repeatedly, politely, declined to discuss the topic he finds uninteresting.

We watch Chotiner quibble with Ellis over Trump’s approval rating, correcting that it’s not 50% but 42%. To do some correcting of my own, Chotiner is looking at overall approval, not the Latino approval they were discussing, and he links to overall approval ratings in the article, ignoring what Ellis said literally while also derailing what Ellis was saying rhetorically. As an interviewer, he’s looking up (the wrong) stats to prove his interview subject wrong rather than listening to him. Is it any wonder that Ellis starts to retreat from the interview at this point, when his interviewer obviously doesn’t care about what he’s saying?

Chotiner doesn’t interview Bret Easton Ellis. He interviews Donald Trump through the Bret Easton Ellis lens, and he runs into trouble as Trump is a topic Ellis is expressly disinterested in. Ellis speaks over and over about what he sees as an overreaction in the media to Trump, and Chotiner’s incredulous. Which is unbelievably ironic as Chotiner, three years into the Trump presidency, makes an interview with Bret Easton Ellis all about Trump. Chotiner is displaying exactly the sort of overreaction Ellis is talking about. He’s trying to prove that his own heightened reaction is a reasonable one, but instead comes off as an obsessed weirdo who simply can’t accept it when Ellis says, in essence, “This is not a topic I care all that much about.”

Claiming a disinterest in politics and the political scene is seen as a sin in today’s world. It wasn’t always this way. Being disinterested in politics was fairly normal. In fact, people would be interested in politics and it would be their “thing” the way church, a type of music, or modifying a Honda Civic would become someone’s “thing.” And an apathetic approach to politics was no more offensive than being indifferent to your neighbor’s Civic…except at 6 A.M. every day when it woke you up. Damn, you Jeremy. Damn you.

Today, disinterest is seen as batting for the other team, weirdly, by BOTH sides. If there’s one thing both sides can agree on, it’s the disdain for the disinterested.

Why? Here’s the limb I’m going on:

We don’t like to be confronted with the fact that our opinions and ideas probably don’t mean a whole lot, and our individual impact on the wider world of politics is immeasurably small. Fuck the 1%, do you know what percent of the American population holds a seat in congress? .000002%! When you look at it that way, it doesn’t seem super insane to look at politics and shrug.

For someone to be disinterested in something that they have such a small impact on is not ridiculous, in my eyes, and it’s not necessarily going against the cause. I don’t buy the idea that “the kids” are going to stop advocating politically because Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t think it matters. And as someone who occasionally runs into personal problems because I’m overly pragmatic, I can relate to someone getting a boatload of shit for saying something that is logically sound but causes someone else to go emotionally bonkers.

Ellis seems to feel that Trump ain’t good, and we should vote him out of office. Beyond that, he simply doesn’t share a current American obsession. And that’s…fine by me. But it’s not cool with Chotiner, and it’s not cool to the extent that Chotiner starts letting his contempt show.

Contempt is not just hatred or disdain. It’s dislike combined with a feeling of superiority. In a contemptuous relationship, not only is there disagreement, but the individual with contempt views the other as less than. Chotiner starts claiming a position of moral superiority over Ellis, confident that he’ll receive the backing of not only the 50% of the country that agrees with him on Trump (sorry, 58%), not to mention the vast majority of New Yorker readers and people who are likely to pay attention to an interview with a literary fiction author. From the very start, Chotiner is attempting to “win” the interview over Ellis.

The interview is so bad, so badgering, that Ellis eventually asks Chotiner, “I don’t know, what do you think?”

How badly is your interview going if you ask the interviewee a question and he stops and says, “I don’t know, what do you think?” How clear a signal is that?

And what’s disgusting is that Chotiner equates Ellis’ disinterest in the interview with disinterest about human rights issues like immigration and segregation. Dude, I’m sorry, but someone being disinterested in your shitty attitude and combative questions about immigration does not mean the person is disinterested in families that have been separated.

I’m going to suggest that, just maybe, treating your interview subject with contempt is what prompted the mechanism of disinterest, which is a mechanism many of us have found useful when talking to someone who is clearly upset and not willing to move on to other topics.

But, Dear Reader, I think you should know that Chotiner doesn’t just have contempt for Bret Easton Ellis.

The headline for the interview reads:

Bret Easton Ellis Thinks You’re Overreacting to Donald Trump

The truth is that Ellis does not attribute anything to you in the interview or in his book. He talks about an overreaction he attributes to self-identifying coastal elite types (one somewhat disturbing paraphrase I’ll make from the book: “Damn right I’m a coastal elite. New York and California should pick the President, not all these idiots who don’t know what’s good for them.”) Are you a film producer? Wealthy New York socialite with an apartment overlooking Central Park? Because if you’re not, then Ellis isn’t talking about you.

The person attributing an emotion to you is Chotiner. Chotiner, draws you in, sets you up to feel outraged that Bret Easton Ellis is attacking you, and then swoops in to save you by putting Ellis in his place. Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t think you’re overreacting to Trump. Isaac Chotiner is telling you that so he can swoop in, save you, and put Ellis in his place. Because that’s what you needed? A savior to rescue you from this rampaging author who’s never tweeted at you, never corresponded with you, and you’ve probably never read?

Chotiner the hero. It’s so self-aggrandizing and gross.

So what’s our part in all this?

The interview is much shared and lauded, precisely because it’s a hit piece. We do not care what Bret Easton Ellis has to say as much as we want to watch someone, who isn’t particularly upset about Donald Trump, get torn to shreds. Bret Easton Ellis was led into the public square and humiliated for our enjoyment. Many folks have retweeted portions, especially the seemingly cutting:

BEE: I think I am an absurdist. I think politics are ridiculous.

IC: Maybe don’t write a book about it. Would that be the solution?

The idea that politics are ridiculous…where would that come from? Maybe the fact that we have our second President in my lifetime who lost the popular vote? Maybe the fact that we were looking to a porn star to bring down the President? Maybe the fact that the President was a host of a fairly lousy reality TV show just a few years ago? Or maybe it’s politicians grilling tech executives about how their phones operate with the know-how of a grandpa asking their grandson how to snap a chat? Maybe it has something to do with climate change somehow exiting the realm of science and entering the realm of politics?

Is Chotiner’s position, that this is all very serious, morally superior to Ellis’, which is that this seems like a big farce and humans exist in a purposeless, chaotic world?

Chotiner’s suggestion that Ellis’ interpretation of politics has no place in public discourse is so asinine, especially for a journalist, and the sense of satisfaction people seem to be getting from this exchange makes me feel so deflated.

I’d just like to say to Chotiner, hey, if the left-of-center opinion of a Bret Easton Ellis is too much for you, maybe don’t do an interview with him. Would that be the solution?
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