Book Review : Bret Easton Ellis - White (2019)
But most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense, we’ve all become actors.
Being a white man is nothing to be proud of. I suppose it is something you can be grateful for, because it makes life considerably easier than for other people, despite what Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the knights of conservative apocalypse are telling you. It does make life a little less meaningful, though. Because we have no life-or-death battles left to fight. At least not regarding our gender or racial identity. In fact, we never really had any battles to fight.
But it’s not something you can switch off. A white man is something that you are and not an option you can re-up, like in the old Louie C.K skit. It’s also something novelist Bret Easton Ellis wrote an essay about. It’s literally called White. Has the author of American Psycho and professional firestarter officially joined the bad guys and started defending male whiteness like it was it was the princess in the castle and not every other Super Mario character?
Not at all. White is not an examination of the power dynamics of identity politics, but rather of the methods used to create this inclusive online utopia: social justice, public call outs, cancel culture, etc.
It’s something I encourage any left-leaning people to read and consider seriously if they want to consider the potential pitfalls of what they’re doing.
There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.
White begins almost like a memoir, where Bret Easton Ellis recalls his blissful childhood where his parents allowed him to navigate popular culture without excessive supervision: “we were children wandering through a world made almost solely for adults,” he claims. He proceeds to explain how forming his own relationship to entertainment made him a well-balanced adult, a privilege that has been self-righteously taken from twenty-first century children.
If this feels like an old man claiming how much better his childhood was, it’s because there’s a little bit of that in Ellis’ argument. He sometimes has trouble seeing the forest for the trees. But his qualm is not with women, people of color or LGBTQ folks. He actually IS an LGBTQ folk. Ellis’ argument is that social justice has been co-opted by Hollywood liberal elite and corporate america and it is becoming a problem for free speech… and he’s kind of right.
Your white approval of Moonlight was supposed to make you feel virtuous. And while it’s nice to feel virtuous, it’s worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing.
What makes White so persuasive is that Bret Easton Ellis doesn’t use examples he’s not qualified to defend in order to make greater points. His takedown of the movie Moonlight is a great example of that. He criticized the Oscar winner for not being a convincing portrait of closeted homosexuality. He got into trouble on social media for criticizing the movie, but he’s a gay person and director Barry Jenkins is straight, so isn’t he allowed to criticize THIS particular point?
By recalling his online various battles like this one, Ellis raises a deeper and more pertinent point than we’re-not-allowed-to-say-anything-anymore. Such moral rectitude creates a new form of cultural conformity. If you don’t want to get burned online, lose your job and be deleted from culture, you have to publicly adhere to certain ideas. But every culture inevitably creates a counterculture and this is where White becomes fucking searing hot food for thoughts.
Such domineering conformity always produces countercultural figures who will inevitably gain a following for standing up to it. The Ben Shapiros and Jordan Petersons of this world were not born in a vacuum. Neither did Donald Trump, who’s Ellis’ example in White. Everyone wants to see themselves as the rebels. The ones standing up to “the man”, but Donald Trump’s election was born out of a countercultural movement, whether you like it or not.
One of them said the Electoral College was “bullshit” and that Los Angeles and New York should determine who “the fucking president” is. “I don’t want any goddamn know-nothing rural hicks deciding who the president should be,” he growled. “I am a proud liberal coastal elite and I think we should pick the president because we know better.”
Everyone knows Donald Trump can’t lead a country and people who elected him don’t fucking care. They are people who feel forgotten by the system and antagonized by everyone who believe the system works. Maybe their problems aren’t as pressing as the problems or colored folks who get shot in the street by the police for no reason, but it was important enough to them to elect Donald Trump. His presidency is symbolic. He’s a walking fuck-you sign.
In White, Bret Easton Ellis maps out some of the cultural mishaps that lead to a Donald Trump presidency and generational resurgences of right wing ideas. He’s not claiming that he shouldn’t be criticized for his opinions, but that when the corporate machine kicks in because it is pandering to online fury and deletes people from the cultural discourse, these people don’t magically disappear. We still have to deal with them without coercing them into ideological righteousness.
Bret Easton Ellis is not a right wing thinker. He’s very much a liberal who wants to remind us of an era where you can break the rules, disagree and create new ideas from the ashes of the old. He means well and I think what he says in White should definitely be considered.
I think he’s discounting the crippling effect social media had on critical thinking this decade, but no one should overlook a white man inherently saying: “I want to work with you. I want to find my place in all this. Here’s what I don’t like about what’s going on. Let’s find compromises.” White is a powerful book. It’s every shade of grey you can think about.
8.5/10
