“I never pretended to be an expert on millennials,” writes Bret Easton Ellis halfway through White, and the reader desperately wishes this were true. Ellis is best known for American Psycho, the controversial 1991 cult novel about an image-obsessed Wall Street serial killer; the film adaption would star Christian Bale as psychotic investment banker Patrick Bateman. Following several increasingly metafictional novels and a few bad screenplays, White is Ellis's first foray into nonfiction, and the result is less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size blog posts. Mostly, Ellis hates social media and wishes millennials would stop whining and “pull on their big boy pants”—an actual quote from this deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis's millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter.
White makes a few gestures at the memoir genre: passages about Ellis's childhood as a rich, unsupervised white kid growing up in 1970s Sherman Oaks, where he developed a taste for gruesome horror flicks; the surprise success of his debut novel, Less Than Zero, which Ellis started writing when he was a teenager and saw published while a junior at Bennington; the cocaine-hazed Manhattan where Ellis, a member of the literary Brat Pack, wrote American Psycho between benders in the late '80s. These sections—I cannot call them essays or chapters—are serviceable and of mild interest, I suppose, to fans who might wish to know what went wrong with the film adaptation of Less Than Zero, or how it feels to do a lot of drugs.
Bret Easton Ellis, 2009.
But Ellis's true purpose in the remaining two hundred pages of White, a rambling mess of cultural commentary and self-aggrandizement, is to offend young, progressive readers while giving everyone else the delight of watching. Bret Easton Ellis would like you to know that he thinks “boys will be boys.” He thinks #MeToo is pathetic. He thinks La La Land should have won Best Picture instead of Moonlight. He thinks HBO should make that Confederacy show. He thinks Tyler Clementi, the gay college student who jumped off a bridge after his roommate secretly taped him making out, got too worked up over a “harmless freshman dorm-room prank.” He misses Milo, and he calls Leslie Jones “a middle-aged comedienne who couldn't handle a vicious yet typical Twitter trolling.” Even the title White is a provocation, designed to simultaneously anticipate, incur, and mock accusations of white privilege.
Ellis feigns ignorance of all of this. “I was never good at realizing what might offend someone,” he shrugs, unconvincingly. “I've been rated and reviewed since I became a published author at the age of twenty-one, and I've grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised.” Like much of White, this is disingenuous. People who do not care what other people think do not waste their time telling other people this, and they certainly don't write books about it.
This presents a problem for the reviewer in my position: namely, whether to take the bait. I could write an incensed review that fiercely rebuts White's many inflammatory claims, thus giving the impression that they should be taken seriously; if my review were to go viral, it would likely trigger more bad coverage on pop-culture websites like Vulture and Vice; Bret Easton Ellis might trend for a bit on Twitter, where we would all take our best shots at dunking on this dude; and at the end of it all, the author would get to feel relevant again, and maybe finally write a movie that people actually liked. But why bother? For years now, Bret Easton Ellis has been accused of being a racist and a misogynist, and I think these things are true; but like most things that are true of Bret Easton Ellis, they are also very boring.
The thesis of White is that American culture has entered a period of steep, perhaps irreversible decline, and social media and millennials are to blame. This is ridiculous, not because social media hasn't changed things tremendously, but because such claims are invariably rooted in a childish nostalgia for an uncomplicated mode of human communication that has never, in fact, existed. One supposes that the last freethinking men of ancient Sumer, lamenting that cuneiform had ruined their political discourse, must have longed for the good old days of throwing rocks at each other's heads.
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