Bret Easton Ellis and the Future of Fiction

Bret Easton Ellis is dogged in defending his positions: he is for aesthetics over ideology; freedom of expression, and art that disrupts and disturbs. He asserts that a culture built on the need to be liked – driven in no small part by the approval mechanisms of social media – has created a cultural rot. When I first interviewed Ellis for VICE in 2014, he and I discussed his term “Generation Wuss” (which he coined on Twitter to refer to those largely falling into the millennial bracket). That conversation caught the public's attention as a clash of the generations. Now, and in light of the Trump election and the #MeToo movement, I wanted to know how his ideas had shifted.