White

by Bret Easton Ellis

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  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. This environment feels natural to me, and I’ve never placed much importance on the opinions that shoot in, either pro or con. The critical reputation that emerged was based on how many reviewers liked or didn’t like my books, or what they thought I represented. This is how it works—and that’s cool, I guess. I was the rare author who was praised as often as he was disparaged. Unlike my peers, I wasn’t politely ignored if a critic didn’t like my books—he or she went after me full throttle. And I doubt any other writer of my generation received worse reviews than I did—and that’s not bragging or complaining, it’s just the truth. But being reviewed negatively never changed the way I wrote or the topics I wanted to explore, no matter how offended some readers were by my descriptions of violence and sex. As a Gen Xer, rejecting, or more likely ignoring the status quo came easily to me.

  One of my generation’s loudest anthems was Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation,” whose chorus rang out, “I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation / I’ve never been afraid of any deviation.” And my own reputation became a target of groupthink when my conglomerate-owned publishing house decided it didn’t like the contents of a particular novel I’d been given a contract to write for them and subsequently refused to publish it on the grounds of “taste”—they were offended by it. This is a story I’ll return to later, but it was a scary moment for the arts—if one that has come to seem normal: in effect, a corporation was deciding what should or shouldn’t be permitted, what should or shouldn’t be read, what you could say and what you weren’t allowed to say. The difference between then (1990) and now is that there were loud arguments and protests about this on both sides of the divide: people had differing opinions yet debated them rationally, driven by passion and logic. The embrace of corporate censorship wasn’t quite as acceptable in those days. You couldn’t argue that a certain HBO show shouldn’t be written, on the grounds of its presumed (though unproven) racism. There was no such thing, yet, as thought crime—now an everyday accusation. People also listened to one another, and I recall that as a time when you could be fiercely opinionated and openly questioning without being considered a troll and a hater who should get banned from the “civilized” world if your conclusions turned out to be different.

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  On a South Park episode in 2015, the character Cartman and other townspeople are enthralled by Yelp, an app that lets customers rate and review restaurants, and they remind maître d’s and waiters that they will be posting judgments about their meals. These Yelpers threaten to give eateries only one star out of five if they don’t grant their every wish and do exactly what they want. In turn, the restaurants feel they have no choice but to comply, and the Yelpers exploit their power by asking for free dishes and making suggestions on how to improve the lighting. The employees tolerate all this with increasing frustration and anger—at one point Yelp reviewers are even compared to ISIS—before both parties finally arrive at a truce. Unbeknownst to the Yelpers, the restaurant’s revenge is to contaminate their plates with every bodily fluid imaginable (and I mean every). The point of this episode is that patrons are now so deluded they all think they’re professional critics—as in “Everyone relies on my Yelp reviews!”—even if they have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. But in depicting the restaurant’s revenge it also provides a bleak commentary on what’s become known as the “reputation economy.” That services today are rating us back raises the notion of how we present ourselves online and in social media, and how individuals can both brand themselves there and get branded. When everybody claims to be a specialist, with a voice that deserves to be heard, this actually makes each person’s voice less meaningful. All we’ve really done is to set ourselves up—to be sold to, branded, targeted, data-mined. But this is the logical endgame of the democratization of culture and the dreaded cult of inclusivity, which insists everybody has to live under the same umbrella of rules and regulations: a mandate that dictates how all of us should express ourselves and behave.

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  Most people of a certain age probably noticed this when they joined their very first corporation. Facebook encouraged its users to “like” things, and because this platform is where they branded themselves on the social Web for the first time, their impulse was to follow the Facebook dictum and present an idealized portrait of themselves—or of a nicer, friendlier, duller self. And this was when the twin ideas of likability and “relatability” were born, which together began to reduce all of us, ultimately, to a neutered clockwork orange, enslaved to yet another corporate version of the status quo. To be accepted, we had to follow an upbeat morality code under which everything had to be liked and everybody’s voice had to be respected, and anyone who held negative or unpopular opinions that weren’t inclusive—in other words, a simple dislike—would be shut out of the conversation and ruthlessly shamed. Absurd doses of invective were often hurled at the supposed troll, to the point where the original “offense” or “transgression” or “insensitive dickish joke” or “idea” seemed negligible by comparison. In the new digital post-Empire age we’re accustomed to rating TV shows, restaurants, video games, books, even doctors, and we mostly give positive reviews because nobody wants to look like a hater. And even if you aren’t one, that’s what you’re labeled if you steer away from the herd.

  But meanwhile, and increasingly, the corporations are also rating us (as noted above). Sharing-economy companies like Uber and Airbnb rate their customers and shun those who don’t make the grade. With personal opinions and critical responses flowing in both directions, people began worrying about how they measured up. I was once briefly intrigued by the possibility that the reputation economy might stimulate the culture of shaming—of being more honest and critical than ever—but the bland corporate-culture idea of protecting yourself by “liking” everything, of being falsely positive in order to fit in with the gang, has only grown stronger and more pervasive. Everyone keeps posting positive reviews in hopes of getting the same in return. Rather than embracing the truly contradictory nature of human beings, with all of our biases and imperfections and flaws, we continue to transform ourselves into virtuous robots—or at least what our side thinks a virtuous robot should be. This in turn has led to the awful idea—and booming business—of reputation management, where firms are hired to help shape a more likable, relatable You. Devoted to gaming the system, this new practice is a form of deception, an attempt to erase (strangely) both subjectivity and objectivity, to evaluate through mass intuition, for a very high price.

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  Like virtually everything, the reputation company’s only goal is to make money. It urges us to adopt the dull conformity of corporate culture and forces us to react defensively by varnishing our imperfect selves so we can sell and be sold things—because who wants to take a ride or rent a house or treat a medical condition with anybody who doesn’t have a good online reputation? The new economy depends on everyone maintaining a reverentially conservative and eminently practical attitude: keep your mouth shut and your skirt long, be modest and don’t have any fucking opinions except those of the majority groupthink in that moment. The reputation economy is another instance of the blanding of our society, even though the enforcement of groupthink in social media has only increased anxiety and paranoia, because those who eagerly approve of the reputation economy are, of course, also the most scared. What happens if they lose what has become their most—if not only—valuable asset? This is another ominous reminder of how financially desperate people are, and that the only tool they have to raise themselves up the economic ladder is their sparklingly upbeat reputation with its fake flawless surface—which only adds to their ceaseless worry, their endless ne
ed to be liked, liked, liked. What people seem to forget in this miasma of false narcissism, and in our new display culture, is that empowerment doesn’t come from liking this or another, but from being true to our messy contradictory selves—which sometimes does, in fact, mean being a hater.

  There are limits to showcasing your most flattering assets because, despite how genuine and authentic we might think we are, we’re still just manufacturing a construct for social media, no matter how accurate it actually is or appears to be. What gets erased are the contradictions inherent in all of us. Those of us who reveal flaws and inconsistencies or voice unpopular ideas suddenly become terrifying to the ones caught up in a world of corporate conformity and censorship that rejects the opinionated and the contrarian, corralling everyone into harmony with somebody else’s notion of an ideal. Very few people want solely to be negative or difficult, but what if those exact qualities were attached to the genuinely interesting, compelling and unusual—and couldn’t there then be a real conversation? The greatest crime being perpetrated in this new world is that of stamping out passion and silencing the individual.

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  As I was completing American Psycho in the fall of 1989, I showed some pages of it to the person I’d found myself having a relationship with at the time, a lawyer on Wall Street who was a few years older than me, from Virginia, good-looking and closeted—meaning since I wasn’t officially out yet we presented ourselves as simply friends, though, of course, close acquaintances knew otherwise but not necessarily the people he worked with at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy. Since we’d been together for a year, Jim naturally was curious about what I’d been working on, and because I hadn’t shown anyone a word from the book once I began writing it two years earlier, I thought it would be okay if I let him take a look. In a few minor respects he had influenced the creation of Patrick Bateman, even if it primarily was a novel that expressed my personal pain when I was struggling and failing to accept adulthood in those lost yuppie years of the late 1980s. After reading two chapters that had caught his attention, Jim turned to me—I was editing the manuscript on the other side of the bed—and said, “You’re going to get into trouble.” I remember very clearly my flash of panic, and also the confusion swirling around me as I turned to him, looking up from the pages I was editing, and asked, “What do you mean?” He’d just finished the section that leads into the first rape, and subsequent murder, of a woman—the lunch with Bethany and what follows afterward—and simply said, “You’re going to get into trouble for that.” I instantly became annoyed and dismissive because this had never crossed my mind. I’d written most of that scene more than a year and a half earlier and only recently had added the more violent details; I’d begun thinking of American Psycho as so stylized that it bordered on being an experimental novel, one that hardly anyone would ever read. If the book was regarded on that level, how could I get into trouble?

  But I also realized that if Jim—a quiet, levelheaded Princeton grad who was always calm and low-key, never prone to drama—thought this might be true then it automatically carried a weight, particularly given how matter-of-factly he’d said it. I stared at him and asked, “Who am I going to get in trouble with?” And he said, “Everybody.” He read out loud a few lines about a rape that devolves quickly and viciously into murder—hard-core violence, definitely, but something I felt was justified within the context of who and what I was writing about. Hearing Jim pull out those isolated lines, I supposed, could offend someone, though not within the narrative itself. This was an aesthetic intention of the portrait I was trying to paint—with those colors, with that brush—and I felt the explosions of violence were necessary to my vision. This was my dramatic instinct. There were no rules. “What if,” I said, “it’s all in his head?” “Is it?” Jim asked. “I don’t know,” I remember saying. “Sometimes I think it’s all in his head, and then at other times I don’t.” Jim glanced at the pages he was holding and then looked back at me. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re going to get into trouble anyway.” While Jim’s initial response didn’t have any impact on the book—I changed nothing on account of it—as I finished my editing and rewriting, his reaction was always hovering somewhere in my mind, even after I turned in American Psycho to my publisher that December and it started moving through the usual production schedule. But as it was read and edited by my editor, then copyedited, then handed over to the book designer, the rumblings began. People at Simon & Schuster were offended. Women were especially offended, but the mixture of violence, sexuality, and the sick-joke sensibility made the book seem shockingly misogynistic to some men as well. The media started picking up on the discomfort within S&S, which was pressing on—the cover already designed and approved—toward a publication date in January, now only months away. And, just as Jim had predicted a year earlier, late one night in his loft on Bond Street, I was definitely in trouble.

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  The book was canceled in November 1990, two months before the release date Simon & Schuster had announced back in the spring. Bound galleys had been distributed, and some early readers defended (whether they read it or not) the book I believed I’d written—a black farce with an unreliable narrator—but this didn’t matter: the noise from the offended was too loud, and I got kicked out of a corporation I hadn’t even known I’d belonged to. Ultimately, I was allowed to keep the advance, and another publisher (actually more prestigious) bought the rights and published the book quickly as a trade paperback in the spring of 1991, a week after the combat phase of the Gulf War supposedly came to an end. As the years passed by and the controversy surrounding American Psycho faded, it finally was read in the spirit in which it had been created—as satire. And a few of its biggest supporters were women, feminists, including Fay Weldon and the filmmaker Mary Harron, who went on to adapt the novel into a stylish horror-comedy starring Christian Bale that was released nine years later—and unlike Less Than Zero, all of the dialogue and every scene came from the book. My one takeaway from this drama was that I came to understand I wasn’t any good at recognizing what would or wouldn’t tick people off, because art had never offended me.

  Maybe this was a case of an actual “offense” against a privileged white male, though these rightly are never tied to oppression, but it’s also true that I wasn’t ever offended because I’d understood all works of art were a product of human imagination, created like everything else by flawed and imperfect individuals. Whether it was de Sade’s brutality or Céline’s anti-Semitism or Mailer’s misogyny or Polanski’s taste for minors, I was always able to separate the art from its creator and examine and value it (or not) on aesthetic grounds. Before the horrible blooming of “relatability”—the inclusion of everybody into the same mind-set, the supposed safety of mass opinion, the ideology that proposes everybody should be on the same page, the better page—I remember emphatically not wanting what our culture now demanded. Rather than respect and niceness, inclusion and safety, likability and decency, my goal was to be confronted by things. (The fact that I came from a “conventional” background—although in many ways it certainly wasn’t—might, I suppose, have encouraged my desire to see the worst.) The litany of what I did want? To be challenged. To not live in the safety of my own little snow globe and be reassured by familiarity and surrounded by what made me comfortable and coddled me. To stand in other people’s shoes and see how they saw the world—especially if they were outsiders and monsters and freaks who would lead me as far away as possible from whatever my comfort zone supposedly was—because I sensed I was that outsider, that monster, that freak. I craved being shaken. I loved ambiguity. I wanted to change my mind, about one thing and another, virtually anything. I wanted to get upset and even be damaged by art. I wanted to get wiped out by the cruelty of someone’s vision of the world, whether it was Shakespeare or Scorsese, Joan Didion or Dennis Cooper. And all of this had a profound effect. It gave me em
pathy. It helped me realize that another world existed beyond my own, with other viewpoints and backgrounds and proclivities, and I have no doubt that this aided me in becoming an adult. It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world’s mysteries—the unexplained, the taboo, the other—and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.

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  Lee Siegel, a writer and cultural critic, astutely predicted where we’d all end up in an essay defending Stanley Kubrick’s enigmatic dream-film Eyes Wide Shut, whose mysteries were much derided by literal-minded audiences and critics upon its release: