White

by Bret Easton Ellis

  * * *

  …

  Walk away, I began hearing that summer. Walk away, I’m just walking away. Just walk away. This was a hash-tag I’d first noticed in the last week of June, and it was connected to young people who’d made videos that were posted on Facebook about why they were leaving the Democratic party. The founder of the #WalkAway Campaign was a young gay actor and ex-Democrat who’d grown disillusioned by the party’s hectoring, inertia and bad faith, and after Hillary’s debacle he’d had enough, as he believed many others had. “Once upon a time I was liberal. Well, to be honest, less than a year ago I was still a liberal,” he announced in a video. “But I reject a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, dogmatic group to suppress free speech, create false narratives and apathetically steamroll over the truth. I reject hate. These are the reasons why I became a liberal. And these are the same reasons why I am now walking away.” This movement might have been small, but what made it seem larger was that it expressed something many people were talking about even before #WalkAway had become a campaign: the era of the traditional Democratic platform was dying, or actually had died in November 2016, or maybe even earlier, perhaps imploding somewhere along the road toward the shock of the election. It wasn’t that Trump had won the Electoral College by so little, a disillusioned friend and Clinton supporter told me, it was that she’d lost it by so much more than anyone could’ve imagined, which was exactly why everyone felt so angry and unmoored, as if they’d been promised something so immutable that it was carved in stone. (My millennial partner was convinced that the #WalkAway Campaign was created and disseminated by Russian bots; it wasn’t, but in the summer of 2018 who could really tell?) This campaign was a reaction against what many saw as an increasingly deranged and rabid resistance, which held that if you’re not “woke” to how hateful and dangerous Donald Trump is, then you and his supporters should be subjected to an ever-widening social and professional fatwa. If you’d been cast out by your relatives, dropped by friends or lost jobs because you even tolerated this man, here were further indications that the Left was nowhere near as inclusive and diverse as long proclaimed. In the summer of 2018 they had turned into haters, helped by an inordinate amount of encouragement from the mainstream media, and now came across as anti-common-sense, anti-rational and anti-American.

  * * *

  …

  Back in the spring of 2017 I’d lost a few friends (or false ones), not because I’d voted for Donald Trump (I hadn’t) but because on my podcast I finally went off on wealthy coastal elites that were still sobbing about an election, and argued that this inability to rationalize and deal with a simple fact had become unbearable not only for them, but also for anyone who had to endure their theatrical trauma. I poked fun at rich friends growling about the unfairness of the Electoral College over a dinner at Spago that cost thousands of dollars, and took Meryl Streep to task for her outraged anti-Trump speech at the Golden Globes the same week she’d put her Greenwich Village townhouse on the market for thirty million dollars. After that podcast aired I noticed a few acquaintances were no longer hanging out anymore, and that one or two people I actually considered friends had simply vanished—because, I supposed, I wasn’t adamantly against the president, because I didn’t agree with them that everything was so god awful, because I simply didn’t think that Trump was the worst thing to ever happen to democracy and because it seemed to them I thought it was okay “orange Hitler” was in the White House. I was normalizing him, and that, comrade, was not acceptable.

  I sometimes tweeted about how my virtue-signaling friends would lecture me, and on my podcast I talked about an LA-based producer’s knee-jerk reaction when I mentioned a mutual acquaintance had voted for Trump and it looked as if she’d been bitten by a zombie out of 28 Days Later and infected with the Rage virus. I made jokes like that not because I’d done anything to support whatever Trump had done, but only because I hadn’t clawed off my face in anguish at something he had done, so they suddenly considered me a collaborator, and showed all the signs of this ghastly infection. Some of my podcast followers suggested that by complaining about leftist hysteria I was practically Rush Limbaugh incarnate, that I was an alt-right pro-Trump weirdo, that it was all garbage, it was disgusting, it was unbearable. And so here we were: the opinion of someone was unbearable. This was the stance now. And also an extreme, ludicrous violation of free speech, much as policies deemed unlikeable were misconstrued as immoral. The relentless Hitler and Nazi comparisons were especially repugnant since my stepfather, a Polish Jew in his seventies, had as an infant, lost his family to the Holocaust, and I no longer could even pretend to sympathize with this hysteria; even as a metaphor, it was weak and basically moronic. However, my socialist boyfriend, whom I often accused of liberal fascism, now believed that my obsession with aesthetics had become, by the summer of 2018, essentially fascist as well.

  * * *

  …

  Earlier that year, various journalists wanted to talk to me about a couple of tweets I’d posted in favor of Kanye West. They couldn’t seem to believe that I supported his “crazy” feed, especially when he said he liked Trump, and couldn’t fathom why I tweeted “Hail Kanye!” in response to his weird blend of transparent prophet and calculated PR prankster. There was the suggestion made by the press that there was something wrong with me for posting this, and not them in asking me why. But I’d known Kanye since 2013, when out of the blue he texted me to ask if I’d like to work on a movie idea of his. We’d never met, but I was intrigued enough to go see him in a private wing of Cedars Sinai the day after his first child had been born. We spent four hours there talking about the movie project and a wide range of subjects—everything from Yeezus to porn to The Jetsons—until Kim Kardashian came out of her room cradling their newborn North. This seemed the time for me to excuse myself, though it also seemed that Kanye wanted me to stay indefinitely, even offering me a Grey Goose that he was pouring out of a magnum as I prepared to leave. Since then I’d worked with him on a few complicated and strange projects for film, TV and video that mostly never happened, yet because of all this I kept up with him on social media, and now found myself reacting to his amazing stream-of-conscious thoughts on his official Twitter page in the weeks before the release of his new record—just like hundreds of thousands of other followers.

  These tweets were a reminder of why I liked Kanye: they were sweet and mysterious, dumb and profound, funny and playful, self-help speak and old pics, part absurdist stunt as well as a genuine reflection of where Kanye West was in that moment. And at one point during the twitter-storms he mentioned that he loved Trump, and admired his “dragon energy,” which he suggested he and the president shared. But this admiration was nothing new, since he’d said as much when he imploded with a rant at a concert in San Jose the week after Trump won—and told the audience, “If I would’ve voted I would’ve voted for Trump.” (My boyfriend was at that concert and almost had a meltdown.) On top of all this he was one of the only celebrities to visit the president in Trump Tower after the election. (Leonardo DiCaprio was another one but with a different mission.) All of this was pure Kanye, obsessed with showbiz and spectacle and power—and to some of us his honesty had always been hypnotizing and inspiring. But the Left acted like horrified schoolteachers, lecturing us that what he’d tweeted was very, very bad; that nobody should listen to him; that he should apologize so we all could forgive him for a narrative in which he—a black man—supported a racist and was therefore racist himself. In a moral panic, John Legend virtue-signaled at Kanye, and begged him to recant, recant, recant, and Kanye refused. As he did when The New York Times, even in an otherwise glowing profile in the Arts & Leisure section, couldn’t process the Trump stuff either, and pushed Kanye to clarify and apologize, as if he needed to do so and, in his Kanye-like way, he refused.

  * * *

  …

  What made tweets like “Self-victimization is a disease” or those in p
raise of the president so much fun was that they caused Trump’s opponents to melt down even when they should’ve known better and taken these things in the spirit in which they were composed—as bi-polar, Dada performance art. But by taking Kanye so seriously, and literally, as if he were a Sunday morning pundit instead of a pop star, they twisted their meaning to fit a warped vision of the post-Trump world they’d imagined, a draconian, dystopian, 1984-meets-The Handmaid’s Tale future. It almost became a game to play: What could one say that would upset them the most? But was it really fun—or just simply exhausting—to watch them go insane and get indignant about, well, just about anything? They had developed very precise rules about how to live and what opinions were allowed, about what made a person “bad” or “good” and which paths one could rightly follow, and Kanye West wasn’t adhering to any of them. Instead of getting outraged all over again, they should have realized that a figure like Trump would seem appealing to him: brash, a gangster, his own man whether you liked him or loathed him, a loner, transparent, a truth teller not to be taken literally, flawed, contradictory, a rebel, awful for some or wonderful for others but certainly not vanilla or middle-of-the-road, incapable as a bureaucrat but skillful as a disruptor. This was also, of course, what a lot of other people I knew liked about Trump in the summer of 2018.

  The media became derisive and speculated that Kanye had to be on drugs to say anything of the sort. He’s destroying his career! How could a black man like Trump? And—shifting subjects, or targets—how could he promote Candace Owens? Owens, a young and pretty and compelling black woman, said she became a conservative when she finally understood that “liberals were actually the racists, liberals were actually the trolls.” Owens was raised in Stamford, Connecticut and had worked at Vogue, and she had now become an activist in her own right, notably critical of Black Lives Matter. Owens asserted that Democrats were the real plantation owners, and at her college appearances she told young blacks to get over their self-victimization and identity-politics nonsense and stop comparing themselves to actual slaves. Kanye tried to make the same point in a rambling, faux-inspirational TMZ interview—along the lines of “slavery’s all in your mind”—and the media began doubling down on their excoriation of all things and people somehow connected to him. Anyone but an idiot could tell what Kanye was trying to say, however garbled and clumsy it was, but given the bias infecting everything in 2018, the press worried that he was having “delusional episodes” and probably needed to be treated for drug abuse. Or maybe he’d just gone full-blown crazy, because no one who wasn’t insane could ever think like this. The consensus, in postmortem editorials everywhere, was that he would never have a career again after the slavery comment and the Trump tweets. It was all over for Kanye.

  * * *

  …

  I met up with Kanye during the week those controversies were exploding across social media, even though I hadn’t initially wanted to. Kanye reached out because he was interested in resurrecting a TV project we had discussed in 2015, which he was now considering as a film. I was always intrigued by the basic idea but wasn’t sure it would work as a movie, so I demurred, partly due to scheduling conflicts. He was soon heading to Wyoming to finish up production on his latest record, and in the interim it would be hard for me to find enough time for a meeting in his Calabasas offices. But then I realized that my hesitancy was colored somewhat by all that media coverage. I thought Kanye was probably okay, but maybe, like many were insisting, he was in some delusional or reckless phase, and if so, trying to get together in a week when I was already slammed with work and deadlines didn’t make any sense. But when I explained that my schedule was problematic, he seemed disappointed, and in turn this disappointed me. So I promptly rearranged my schedule and made the drive out to his compound, flittingly apprehensive that I might be meeting, as the media kept reiterating, a man who’d lost his mind.

  * * *

  …

  The year 2018 had been anxiety-inducing for a lot of people, many of them feeling like they were tumbling into free fall without a parachute. The Resistance seemed to be making a movie in which everyone was an actor and had a role and reading lines from a script, but it wasn’t easy to tell if this was a horror picture or just another reality-TV series: What was real, and what wasn’t? Everyone had a personal opinion, his or her own hot take on reality, and very few seemed to have the gift of neutrality, of being able to look at the world in a naturally calm, detached manner, from a distance, unencumbered by partisanship. Bias was everywhere. As an ironist I rarely got distracted—as happened above—by media spin, but if Sean Hannity on Fox presented a worldview that sometimes felt like a puffed-up fantasy aligning with the administration—and sometimes it didn’t—then Rachel Maddow on the opposite side of the aisle at MSNBC, with her own labyrinth of arcane theories every bit as aligned to her audience’s worldview, seemed pretty similar. Weren’t they both, on one level, just smug partisan hacks? This divide was highlighted everywhere, and in one week that August I had two separate conversations with older women I knew, both in their seventies, both in the same socio-economic class, both white and college-educated, one from the East Coast and the other from the West. One of them told me that Trump frightened her so much she could barely think straight most days, while the other one told me that Trump was probably the greatest president of her lifetime. And each thought it was time to bring out a straitjacket for the other.

  This anxiety wasn’t confined only to politics and media. Ever since the election, Hollywood had revealed itself in countless ways as one of the most hypocritical capitalist enclaves in the world, with a preening surface attitude advocating progressivism, equality, inclusivity and diversity—except not when it came down to inclusivity and diversity of political thought and opinion and language. The passive-aggressive corporate hostility in play there was akin to that of a wrathful and deranged teenager, its attitudes and poses so childlike that you had to wonder if the fantasies the town peddled had engulfed logic and common sense completely. They proudly promoted peace just as they were fine with Trump getting shot by Snoop Dogg in a video or decapitated by Kathy Griffin or beaten up by Robert De Niro, or more simply, as an apparently drunken Johnny Depp suggested, assassinated. And the ominousness one felt wasn’t restricted to the seemingly minor stuff, as when, in the summer of 2018, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar on The View lost their shit over Trump and then cut off an invited guest who disagreed with them, and who was gone after the commercial break. There were more dangerous signs in the air.

  * * *

  …

  Roseanne Barr’s late-night tweet comparing Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser of Obama, to a simian character in Planet of the Apes got her fired by the Walt Disney Company on the grounds of racism, even though Barr protested that she didn’t even know Jarrett was black. This episode presaged Disney’s other high-profile firing that summer of the writer-director James Gunn, who was responsible for the massively successful Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. Tweets from a decade ago had resurfaced, featuring tasteless bad-boy jokes, lame attempts at edgy low-brow shock humor that often touched on pedophilia, blowjobs, rape, AIDS. This was exactly what many of us thought Twitter had encouraged in its early years, back when “offensive” tweets didn’t yet somehow define the entire humanity of an individual and land him in jail with a lifetime sentence. Disney severed all business ties with Gunn, whose movies had brought over a billion dollars to the corporation, and fired him off the next Guardians movie, which he’d already written and was scheduled to go into production that fall. What made this corporate decision so chilling was that Gunn had not only made amends for and disavowed these tweets years ago but was also an active hater of Donald Trump, loudly criticizing him on, naturally, Twitter. The realization hit that not even vehement liberalism could save you anymore, not in a tyrannical and oppressive Hollywood culture that was now dictating how we expressed ourselves as comedians, filmmakers, artists. Freedom o
f expression had become, it seemed, an aesthetic death wish, effectively suicidal.

  With fewer and fewer corporations now running the show, (and soon it might just be one) fellow comrades might need to adhere to their new rulebook: about humor, about freedom of expression, about what’s funny or offensive. Artists—or, in the local parlance, creatives—should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families. This new policy required you to live in a world where one never got offended, where everyone was always nice and kind, where things were always spotless and sexless, preferably even genderless—and this is when I really started worrying, with enterprises professing control over not only what you say but your thoughts and impulses, even your dreams. Because of this enhanced corporate influence were audiences going to be able to consume material that was either unsanctioned or recklessly flirted with transgression, hostility, political incorrectness, marginality, the limits of forced diversity and inclusion, any kind of sexuality or anything at all that might be cursed with the now ubiquitous “trigger warning”? Were audiences willing to be brainwashed, or were they already there? How could artists flower in an environment while terrified about expressing themselves however they wanted to, or take big creative risks that often walked along the edges of good taste or even blasphemy, or simply those that allowed them to step into someone else’s shoes without being accused of cultural appropriation? Take, for example, an actress getting shot down for a role she desperately wanted to have played—take a deep breath, comrade—because she wasn’t exactly that character already. Weren’t artists supposed to reside anywhere except in a risk-allergic safe-house where zero tolerance was the first and utmost requirement? This, at the end of the summer of 2018, seemed not only like an ugly intimation of the future but the nightmarish new world order. And the hyperbole I was accusing others of, I realized, I was now voicing myself—but I couldn’t help it.