This idea would have been unthinkable ten years earlier — that an opinion could become something wrong (…)
We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: the actor's dream.
There's a sadness to Gere, yet this doesn't erase the notion that Julian Kay is less a character than an idea, an abstraction, an actor, and he's certainly not likable.
And yet Gere's blankness and the movie's austerity collided, and audiences went with it in the spring of 1980 and made him a star (…) Women had always been photographed like this, but men hadn't—it was new, it was gay, it ended up influencing everything from the popularity of GQ magazine to how Calvin Klein began advertising men (…)
In 1980 I was beginning the Less Than Zero project which would culminate in 1985 with my first novel's publication…
(…) American Gigolo was another key template so much so that I named the male teenage prostitute Julian as well (…)
In 1979, the only movie he appeared in was Yanks, John Schlesinger's World War Il ensemble about Gis stationed in northern England in 1943. It was the first time Gere had starred in a movie made by a gay director, and the difference between this and his two previous movies (one directed by Terrence Malick, the other by Robert Mulligan) was noticeable to me even at fifteen. Everything changed because the camera now approached Gere as a star (…) I was fifteen, I hadn't before seen a more beautiful man in any movie, but he also seemed blank and lost, which probably added to his beauty (…)
Simon & Schuster announced a first printing of five thousand copies of Less Than Zero, expecting to sell maybe half that amount. In the spring of 1985, I honestly didn't care how many copies it sold — I was just amazed the book even got published that something I'd been working on for five years was going to be an actual hardcover sold in real bookstores (…) And it wasn't until October that the book appeared on The New York Times best-seller list. Though hardly a blockbuster, it sold well for a first novel and it was a genuine word-of-mouth success, since Simon & Schuster had initially budgeted no money to promote and advertise it.
(…) But when I finally finished it, at twenty, the book ultimately did feel like a reflection of where we were in the moment and not just an biographical story (…)
Part of the book's appeal to young readers could be that they'd never been presented quite like this in contemporary American fiction before: as sophisticated teenagers who aped the attitudes of their materialistic and narcissistic boomer parents. But Less Than Zero doesn't blame the parents. And in fact it's still rare for a young person's novel to feature kids who are just as bad as their parents, if not even worse (…)
The novel also reflects a numbness that was pervasive in the culture, particularly in Los Angeles, when I started writing it in 1980—a numbness that was thrilling and yet also contrary to reflexive understanding, to genuine feeling as well (…)
As the movie crept to an end, it dawned on me that there hadn't been a single scene or line of dialogue in the movie that was taken from the book.
(…) only in the last few years, starting with that international book tour I grudgingly went through in 2010, have I admitted that on so many levels Patrick Bateman was me, at least while I was working on the book (…)
This book would have completed a kind of trilogy detailing youthful '80s Reagan-era excess that had begun with Less Than Zero, been continued by The Rules of Attraction and would have ended with Bateman at the end of the decade…
Just as there had been two Brets, there were two Patrcik Batemans: there was the handsome and socially awkward boy next door whose name could remember because he seemed like everybody else — having conformed like everybody else —and there was the nocturnal Bateman who roamed the streets looking for prey, asserting his monstrousness, his individuality. At the end of the '80s I saw this as an appropriate response to a society obsessed with the surface of things and inclined to ignore anything that even hinted at the darkness lurking below.
This cooling of excitement on all levels of the culture has to do with the disappearing notion of investment.
When you went to a bookstore or record store or movie theater or newsstand, you took the time to invest a greater amount of effort and attention in these various expeditions than you would by clicking a few buttons — effort and attention that were tied to a deeper attempt to connect with the LP, the hardcover, the film, the porn (…)
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.
Everyone has to be the same, and have the same reactions to any given work of art, or movement or idea, and if you refuse to join the chorus of approval you will be tagged a racist or misogynist. This is what happens to a culture when it no longer cares about art.
(…) though the subsequent fawning over his simple statement that he was gay still seemed in that moment a new kind of victimization, with George Stephanopoulos viewing him on Good Morning America so tenderly it was he was talking to a six-year-old boy. And the reign of the gay as magical elf-who appears before us whenever he comes is some kind of saintly, adorable ET whose sole purpose is to remind us only about tolerance and our prejudices, to encourage feel good about ourselves and to serve as a symbol instead of being just another guy — still seems in media play five years later.
(…) as long as the gay in question (…) is certainly not conservative or Christian.
In April 2013 I was invited to the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) (…) many considered them almost fascistically PC in confused ways: they preached tolerance but would quickly bitch-slap anybody who didn't fall in stride with their agenda and ideology.
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.
And a few of its biggest supporters [of American Psycho] 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.
(…) 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 Canyons was an experimental, guerrilla, DIY affair that had cost $250,000 to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets, the rest of it crowd-funded) over twenty days in LA during the summer of 2012, and which starred controversial millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen.
As it happens, by then I'd been living with a millennial far almost five years (twenty-two years my junior), and I was alternately charmed and exasperated by how he and his friends - as well as other millennials I'd met and interacted with both in person and on social media - lived their lives. I had been occasionally tweeting about my amusement and frustration under the banner "Generation Wuss" in recent years. My huge generalities touched on millennials' oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity— incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move. These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they'd never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life's hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it's hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you're not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die (…)
This forced you to look again at the people who raised them, coddling them with praise and trying to shield them from the grim sides of life, which might well have created children who, as adults, appeared highly confident, competent and positive but at the hint of darkness or negativity often became paralyzed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears — You just victimized me! — and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles (…)
Anxiety and neediness became the defining aspects of Generation Wuss, and when the world didn't offer any financial cushion then you had to rely on your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked, an actor. And this created a further and ceaseless anxiety, which was why if people were snarky about this generation they were simply written off as a dick-case closed. No negativity allowed: we're only asking to be admired in the display culture we were raised in (…)
If there doesn't seem to be any economic path toward improving your circumstances, then the currency of popularity becomes the norm and also why you want to have thousands of people liking you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, wherever-and why, like an actor, you’ll try desperately to be liked (…) Any young artist who goes on Tumblr, he told me, doesn't actually want to create art — only to steal the art or be the art.
Parents kept begging me to understand how tormented they were by the oppressive insistence to reward their kids constantly, no matter what, and that in doing so they effectively debilitated them from coping with the failures we all confront as we get older, leaving their children unequipped to deal with inevitable pain.
I never forgot the hellish year when my college-educated boyfriend looked for a job and could find only nonpaying internships, while also having to contend with a demeaning sexual atmosphere that places such a relentlessly superficial emphasis on looks…
If you're a Caucasian adult who can't read Shakespeare or Melville or Toni Morrison because it might trigger something harmful and such texts could damage your hope to define yourself through your victimization, then you need to see a doctor, get into immersion therapy or take some meds. If you feel you're experiencing "micro-aggressions" when someone asks you where you are from or "Can you help me with my math?" or offers a "God bless you" after you sneeze (…) or someone correctly identifies you by your gender, and you consider this a massive societal dis, and it's triggering you and you need a safe space, then you need to seek professional help.
Liberalism used to concern itself with freedoms I'd aligned myself with, but during the 2016 campaigns, finally hardened into a warped authoritarian moral superiority movement that I didn't want to have anything to do with (…)
This wasn't the usual disappointment about election results —this was fear and horror and outrage that it seemed would never subside and not just for members of Generation Wuss, like my partner, but also for real grown-ups in their forties and fifties and sixties, so unhinged that their team hadn't won they began using words Tike "apocalypse" and « Hitlerian. » (…)
When my traumatized boyfriend criticized me for not being angrier about the election (five months after it happened) I shot back that I didn't want to talk about Trump anymore. I didn't care. He was elected president. Get over it. The Russians didn't destroy the Democratic Party or cause it to lose more than a thousand legislative seats in the four years leading up to the 2016 election-the Democrats did that to themselves. My boyfriend shot right back that I was being a Trump apologist, and that by simply accepting the election's results I was "colluding" with the new administration and, by extension, with Moscow.
But in the summer of 2015 something began to distract me, something odd was happening, something didn't seem rig the mainstream news that I had read and mostly trusted my entire adult life, legacy institutions like The New York Times and CNN wasn't tracking what seemed to me a shifting reality. The disparity between what I saw happening on the ground - through social media and other news sites and simply with my own eyes and ears — and what mainstream organizations were reporting became glaringly obvious in a way that it never had before.
The Trump insult machine was aimed at everybody he had issues with, and white men got it first and far worse than anybody else (…) Trump was the poster-boy antithesis of the proud moral superiority of the Left as defined forever by Clinton's "basket of deplorables" comment, as well as by Michelle Obama's breathlessly condescending "when they go low, we go high," both of which were quoted approvingly in the legacy media (…) the media became so completely freaked out that they abandoned the hallmarks of neutrality and perspective.
For me political conversations increasingly became less about policy or the candidates themselves than about how all of this was being covered, and to some people it seemed I was defending Trump instead of criticizing the media.
I'd made Donald Trump the hero of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (…) he's mentioned more than forty times in the novel. He's who Bateman is obsessed with, the daddy he never had, the man he wants to be. Maybe this was why I felt prepared when the country elected Trump as president; I once had known so many people who liked him, and I still did (…) Whenever I heard certain people losing their shit about Trump my first reaction was always, You need to be sedated, you need to see a shrink (…) The rich and entitled liberals I knew always had the hardest time and were always the most hysterical.
My female friend had been listening to us while drinking heavily and at this point she suddenly exploded into a spastic rage, telling us that she was disgusted to hear two white me faulting the aesthetics of Black Lives Matter (…) What she actually was implying was the sentimental narrative that said white men shouldn't be allowed privately criticize anything about Black Lives Matter. She kept ranting, often nonsensically, and though I'd known her for more than thirty years I'd never seen her so angry, so deranged (…) the knee-jerk overemotional lashing out that had become endemic in the culture when it came to Trump, and particularly viral among the morally superior wealthy people I knew: coastal Democrats whose bubble lives the election had burst apart. This friend of mine lived in a penthouse with stunning views of Central Park and probably had a net worth of more than ten million dollars, so I kept wondering why her vast misery was all Trump's fault?
(…) they both lost their shit and became infuriated, lashing out at me in ways I'd never seen from either of them. I had known one of them for more than thirty years —we'd met when I was twenty-one — and I had never seen him this apoplectic before, and in a swirl of morally superior self-regard and indignation he started lecturing me until I was ultimately hounded to say okay, forget it, you're right, you're both right, just forget all about it (…) 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."
This illiberalism was becoming the alarming norm, in the media, in Hollywood, and for a moment nowhere more glaringly than on college campuses in 2017, but this seemed to become the breaking point for everyone. The irony was amplified when students— and, it seemed, the institution's administration itself-rejected conservative speakers at Berkeley, once considered the bastion of free speech in America…
And then he told me, "How can you like country music when they're all against us —don't you understand that? They are against us, Bret. Our values." This was an educated white person, very successful in the high-end art world, and I stared at him without knowing how to respond.
The high moral tone seized by social-justice warriors, and increasingly an unhinged Left, is always out of scale with whatever they're actually indignant about, and I wasn't surprised that this hideous and probably nerve-wracking tendency had begun to create an authoritarian language police (…) Whenever I hear an objection to the male gaze-hoping that it will ... what? Go away, get rerouted, become contained - I automatically think, Are people really this deluded and deranged or haven't they had a date in the last ten years?
By now, just months before the election, it truly felt we were entering into an authoritarian cultural moment fostered by the Left — what had once been my side of the aisle, though I couldn't even recognize it anymore.
Tarantino was punished for "attacking" Bigelow and DuVernay — two women! — even though he had treated them neutrally, like adults, like the male filmmakers he aIso had issues with(…) Interestingly, The Hurt Locker also, I thought, felt like it had been — within the mainstream American movie system - directed generically by a man. Its testosterone level was palpable, whereas in the work of Sofia Coppola, Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion, Mia Hansen-Love, or Claire Denis you were aware of a much different presence behind the camera.
(…) I theorized that maybe it's a medium more suited to men —its nerd-geek technicality, the ruthless rapidity of images, the voyeuristic quality that's the essence of the best moviemaking and the aggressiveness of making any movie, at least within the confines of American moviemaking - and suggested that there was a credible difference in the way men and women create films (…)
The Bigelow tweets now crested with "I still believe that if « The Hurt Locker » had been directed by a man it would not have won the Oscar for best director. »
(…) in those early days that's how I used Twitter, enjoying the role of critic (…) or pointing out that Michael Haneke's unceasingly brutal old-age love story Amour was what "On Golden Pond might have been like if it had been directed by Hitler. »
(…) I hated thinking what might've happened to Sinatra in a day and age when, for example, he sang "the lady is a tramp" in song? Misogyny! A chief of the white male patriarchy! Toxic masculinity! Don't buy his records, comrade! Boycott the label! Sinatra would have been disgusted by the Orwellian tenor of our current moment, but I can't imagine he would have ever bowed to it.
(…) post-Empire (…) With expectations diminished everywhere there was a shrugging off of Establishment propriety, a refusal to bow to a system that wasn't working, and outsider attitudes were pushed into the mainstream —attitudes marked by a lack of polish, a do-it yourself mind-set, an impulse to carelessly wear your pajamas in public. It was a brief moment that never fully flowered; it existed fleetingly and then, like everything else, became watered down and clamped shut, as the post-Empire merged into corporate culture. Yet post-Empire hasn't entirely disappeared. Traces remain everywhere, and certainly Donald Trump is a post-Empire president, while the legacy media's reaction to him has never seemed more reactionary and belongs to full-blown Empire.
(…) and for my younger friends this kind of transparency was increasingly the norm: What did shame mean anymore?
(…) Fran Lebowitz complained that what had really been lost in American culture was connoisseurship: the ability for someone to recognize the difference between what was genuinely good and what was merely mediocre.
All of the novel's themes still hold sway three decades later when the one-percenters were suddenly richer than any humans had ever been before, an era when a jet was as commonplace as a new car and million-dollar rents were a reality. New York in 2016 and beyond was American Psycho on steroids. And despite the connections provided by the internet and social media, many people felt even more isolated and increasingly aware that the idea of interconnectivity was itself an illusion. This seems particularly painful when you're sitting alone in a room and staring at a glowing screen that promises you access to the intimacies of countless other lives, a condition that mirrors Bateman's loneliness and alienation: everything's available to him, yet that insatiable emptiness remains. These were my own feelings during those years in the apartment I was living in on East Thirteenth Street as the 1980s came to an end (…)
People are so lost in their narcissism that they're unable to distinguish one individual from another, which is why Patrick gets away with his crimes (…) Patrick’s obsession with his likes and dislikes and with detailing everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches has reached a new apotheosis.
New York (…) more crowded, if that was possible, and more rich people; everything seemed cleaned up and slightly anonymous, as if globalization had waved its wand over Manhattan. The city in which I came of age during the late 1980s was so much dirtier, scarier and more thrilling than the corporatized and homogenized place I experienced during those few days on the book tour (…) I spent an afternoon walking around kind of dazed at how different everything looked: calm and prosperous, safe for families, expensive and neutered, and so much less crazy than it had been in my twenties.
The shunning of others who don't think like you had moved past protest and resistance into childlike fascism, and it was becoming harder and harder to accept these exclusionary tactics. The differing political viewpoints were judged as immoral, racist and misogynist. This constant shrieking by the unconsoled was, for me, beyond tire-some, a high-pitched drone that never moved the needle.
(…) 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.
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.
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 (…) 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.
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, an apparently drunken Johnny Depp suggested, assassinated (…) Weren’t artists supposed to reside anywhere except in a risk-allergic safe house where zero tolerance was the first and utmost requirement?
We also idly noted that the filmmaker David Lynch couldn't say in an interview that he thought maybe Donald Trump would go down as one of the great presidents in history, not without groupthink forcing him into apologizing for this immediately on Facebook.
And where was a resistance that was so attractive and cunning that it managed to sway you, that maybe made you see things in a broader, less blinkered light? But the one we had in 2018 seemed bent on advocating mostly vandalism and violence. Trump's star on Hollywood Boulevard was destroyed with a pickax, an actor resembling a septuagenarian Lorax said "Fuck Trump" at the Tony Awards, a television hostess called the first daughter "a feckless cunt" on her TV program, another actor suggested the president's eleven-year-old son should be put in a cage with pedophiles. And all of this from Hollywood: the land of inclusion and diversity.
