American Psycho Author Bret Easton Ellis On Why He Hates Millennials
The Interview: American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis on why he hates millennials
“What is millennial culture? There’s no writing. None of them read books.” Interview by Decca Aitkenhead
A lot of things have been said about Bret Easton Ellis over the course of his 34-year career, but no one could ever accuse him of being inoffensive. His first novel, Less Than Zero, portrayed the nihilism of privileged Los Angeles party kids lost in a blur of apathy, sexual deviance and drugs. Just 21 when the book became a hit, Ellis joined Manhattan’s literary Brat Pack, notorious for its chilling irony and prodigious cocaine consumption. But it was his third novel, American Psycho, that provoked the global uproar that would attach the prefix “controversial” to Ellis’s name for ever more. The 1991 tale of a sadistic Wall Street banker who becomes a serial killer featured so much rape, mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism that its original publishers refused to release it. Feminists were appalled by the misogynistic violence, Ellis received death threats, and in several countries the book was deemed “harmful to minors” and could only be sold shrink-wrapped.
Since then his novels have grown progressively odder and increasingly meta; the protagonist of his fifth, for example, is a writer called Bret Easton Ellis who takes a lot of drugs while promoting a book called Glamorama, the name of the author’s fourth novel in real life. It was described by one reviewer as “a tour de force of narcissism”. At 55, the enfant terrible of American literature is now publishing his very first work of non-fiction. He always said he would never write an autobiography, and White isn’t a memoir so much as a freeform exploration of themes in contemporary culture that concern him.
“I never wanted,” he writes in it, “to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring.” Whether he intended the line to be funny isn’t clear, but it certainly is, because White could just as easily have been titled Why I Hate Absolutely Everything About Millennials.
When we meet, it takes me a moment to recognise him, so altered is he from our previous encounter nine years ago. Now grey, bespectacled and heavy, it’s obvious the cocaine and glamour years are behind him. “I’m done with the scene,” he agrees. “It’s boring. I’d rather stay home at night, binge-watch a TV show, open a bottle of wine, get into my snuggies. Do you know, I actually choose the restaurants we go to by their noise level?”
It also takes me a minute or two to recognise the personality I remember having liked tremendously when we last met. The version of himself Ellis presents in White is so coldly unpleasant that, while reading it, I found myself wondering how on earth we could possibly have got along. But very soon I’m utterly charmed once again, and so confused by the contrast between his print voice and the one now making me laugh that I ask if he deliberately set out to make himself unlikeable in the book. “Well, it’s a ‘voice’,” he concedes. “And it’s not necessarily my voice.”
His real voice is warm and witty, and we spend an engaging couple of hours holed up in his study in West Hollywood, gazing out over a panoramic view of LA while his boyfriend potters about the apartment. I suspect Ellis went out of his way to sound unlikeable in White in order to defy what he calls the “cult of likeability”, one of the book’s chief complaints about modern culture. He thinks social media has turned us all into shiny actors, promoting our personal brands with an online performance of relentless positivity, and he is certain a book as dark as American Psycho would not get published today. “Never. Publishing houses now have triggering divisions, where the manuscript has to go through a psychiatrist or psychologist and diversity people.” A woman he knows wrote a novel recently about a Muslim girl, “and they said, ‘This is cultural appropriation, you’re not a Muslim girl.’ ”
He is sick and tired, too, of the American left’s nervous breakdown over Donald Trump, and the media’s “hysterical” obsession with the president. He is also dismayed by the millennial “cult of victimisation”, in which everyone must identify themselves through their misfortune or vulnerability.
“I did not know a single person growing up who was afflicted with 20 different allergies and needed to carry a badger onto a plane as a security animal. I see these kids in oversized sunglasses, clutching a poodle with a little yellow security tag. I even know people who have them!” He can’t stand woke young social-justice warriors taking offence at everything on Twitter, nor their puritanically judgmental “cancel culture”. “Someone said it about me today, ‘Let’s cancel Bret Easton Ellis.’ The word gets used all the time, ‘We’re going to cancel this person, she shouldn’t have tweeted that, she’s cancelled.’ Louis CK is cancelled, Michael Jackson is cancelled — it’s become part of the lexicon.”
All this he offers with a wry air of bemused exasperation. “I feel adrift and disillusioned by what’s going on. I’m looking at it, I think fairly clearly, and thinking it’s just ridiculous.”
Ellis’s fiction has a reputation for teasing its readers with gratuitous ambiguity and unreliable narrators, and in real life he can be equally disingenuous. When I last interviewed him, he told me, “I don’t lie in interviews. I never have,” before promptly confessing to a whopper, and Jay McInerney, his erstwhile friend and fellow Brat Pack author, once called him a “chronic liar”. (Ellis memorably retaliated: “I don’t have a competitive vibe with Jay. I have a bigger dick.”) But when I ask if he likes anything at all about millennial culture, he replies slowly and deliberately, “Nothing. Nothing interests me about millennial culture” — and on this occasion I’m confident he isn’t lying.
Except, of course, his boyfriend, Todd Michael Schultz, is a super-woke 32-year-old progressive-socialist pop singer, consumed by fury about Trump and soldered to social media, who tweets things such as “Republicans are the greatest threat to humanity. Seriously”. The couple have been together for 10 years, and soon I begin to wonder if the book really is about the way we live now, or more about the man Ellis lives with.
Critics have always accused Ellis of inconsistency, and it’s easy to see why. The author claimed American Psycho was a satirical critique of capitalist consumerism, for example, but was addicted to designer brands while he wrote it. If the cult of likeability is as “totalitarian” as he claims, I ask, how come it doesn’t appear to have constrained him in the slightest?
“I don’t know if I necessarily felt that I was at the centre of what I was talking about. What I was covering was something societal, cultural — much, much bigger than me.” I wonder how he squares his theory that social media makes everyone pretend to be delightful with the online epidemic of toxic trolling.
“Instagram is far more popular than Twitter, and I think Instagram is that fake place. I know a lot of people who fake Instagram. You know, his friends,” he says, gesturing through the wall towards his boyfriend, “are a perfect example. Todd said, ‘I cannot believe so-and-so posted this today. I talked to her on the phone this morning and she’s miserable. But she’s posted a picture going like this …’ ” and Ellis mimics an Insta-perfect smile of artificial joy.
Yet Ellis is on both Instagram and Twitter, and in White he details with indignation the various Twitter storms he has detonated. Isn’t he guilty of being a bit snowflakey himself, complaining about getting grief online for posting wilfully provocative tweets? “I think that shouting about tweets, and taking people down for tweets, is the problem. No one should ever take a tweet seriously. In the early days of Twitter, that was how it was used — jokes, outrageous comments, fun shit. We turned to a moment where people became victimised by the tweets, that’s my problem.”
What he hates about online social justice warriors, he goes on, is their mob mentality group-think. “The thing I noticed that is chilling is Todd’s total lack of interest in the individual, and that the group is more important; that someone who stakes a claim on their own about something is usually looked at as a contrarian or a troll. It’s a feeling that I’ve got over the past five years, in little comments, in things that he notices. I’m from a different generation and I do believe in the attraction of the individual and not the group.”
Once again, though, he seems equally guilty of making wild generalisations about an entire generation. “I mean, what is millennial culture?” he muses. “It kind of disturbs me. There’s no writing. They don’t care about literature. None of them read books. Where is the great millennial novel? There isn’t one.” Has he read Sally Rooney? “Er, remind me who Sally Rooney is?” The 28-year-old winner of this year’s Costa prize, for her second novel, Normal People, which was widely praised as a great millennial novel. “Oh yes, of course. But no, I haven’t read her book.” He hasn’t even heard of — let alone read — The Coddling of the American Mind, either. To have written a book about the mindset of millennials without bothering to consult this seminal analysis of contemporary US campus culture seems a remarkable omission.
No amount of reading, however, could remedy the most obvious weakness in his critique of millennial values. As a white, affluent American man, it must be easy to dismiss the grievances of the disenfranchised as trivial self-pity — but having never experienced their reality, what authority does he have to judge?
“Completely agree. Standing in someone else’s shoes is the most important thing, and only leads to empathy. But I don’t see that happening. Todd doesn’t do that. Todd can’t put himself in the shoes of, say, a conservative. I do think this is very much a millennial thing. Young people just can’t do it.”
Yes, but can Ellis? He has no more clue what it’s like to be marginalised, I suggest, than I have to be an octopus. “Do you really believe that most of the people complaining about it have gone through that shit? College kids today complain constantly about being slaves, and about being so put upon, and we’re living in The Handmaid’s Tale, and this is the worst society in the world. I’m not going to let that garbage pour in without criticising. That’s what I rally against. It’s not the legitimate shit of people who really have it bad, who really have it awful. We’re talking about middle-class kids saying that America is evil, and an actress suing CBS for $9m because two of the actors made what she thought were rape jokes when they were rehearsing. It’s absurd, this histrionic drama that they’ve created, and all out of their own victimisation.”
As I largely agree with Ellis, it’s maddening how he keeps shooting his own arguments in the foot. Asked if African-Americans have a legitimate grievance, he says, “Of course, yes, but what do you do with that? I mean, shit happens to everybody.”
Ellis himself was born into comfortable affluence, the son of a Californian property developer, and expensively educated at private schools and colleges. As he says himself: “I’d grown up in Hollywood and all my friends’ fathers worked in Hollywood, and we all wanted to make movies and assumed that was what we were going to do.” He was able to indulge in extravagant recreational drug use, but was never arrested, despite it being well documented by the media. Yet when I ask if he recognises his own white privilege, he begins to look faintly bored. “Your own personal history and how you were raised, of course you’d have to be a royal idiot not to understand that is part of who you are. But I don’t know what to do about it. Yes, there’s white privilege, to a degree. But privilege suggests to me something that I was just given, and I didn’t have to work and I didn’t have to prove myself, and I was just this rich kid — none of which was true. I always felt I was a self-made man.”
If he anticipates the online outcry that last sentence alone will provoke, it doesn’t show. Then again, he tells me he wanted to call the book White Privileged Male, so is clearly more knowing than he likes to let on.
As a young writer Ellis perfected the affectless ironic detachment of his generation X, the legacy of which some millennials blame for the political mess we’re now in. “That’s what he says,” Ellis agrees conspiratorially, nodding through the wall towards Todd again. “All the time.” Might there be some truth in it? “Maybe. But I don’t think it’s the gen X-ers who screwed anything up, it’s probably the baby-boomers. If I have to answer that question, I’d say that. But I don’t really care.”
Ellis constructed an entire literary identity out of not caring. Back in the 1990s, this postmodernist indolence was very much of its time, and he makes a stab at sustaining it even now. “I’ve never voted. I think politics are a fucking joke. Why would I take it seriously? I’m an absurdist.” Will he vote next year? “Probably not.” But the posture no longer feels convincing, and I suggest he’s now as worked up as everyone else. “It’s true,” he admits. “What my problem was this time round was, OK, [Trump] is what the United States wants. And then a large faction are saying, ‘They’re wrong. This can’t happen!’ That started the fuse for me. It was legal, and yet they’re losing their minds. I couldn’t believe they’re actively getting trumped by this man. I can’t understand how someone could do this. Especially my boyfriend.”
Ellis writes about falling out with friends incensed by his refusal to participate in their anti-Trump outrage, but the critical fault line seems to lie between him and Todd. “The most frightening thing about the past two or three years is that there is no discourse.” When Robert Mueller announced he would seek no further indictments in the Russia probe, Ellis says Todd wouldn’t speak to him for 36 hours. “And I can’t tell you what the Kavanaugh hearing did to this household. I wasn’t going to watch it; I had work to do. He got up extra early and padded into the living room and I heard it blasting out on MSNBC. So he walked into my office and goes, ‘Aren’t you watching it?’ ‘No, I’m not watching it.’ Because I know in this household it can go from zero to 100, there’s no slow build-up. Then it’s, ‘Why aren’t you watching?’ ‘I’m like, ‘Uh, it’s a Muppet Show. They’re both full of shit.’ ‘He’s lying.’ ‘This whole thing is a fucking witch hunt, I can’t stand it any more.’ ‘You’re fucking crazy!’ And that’s how it is. We can laugh about it sometimes, but a lot of the time it’s …” Relationship threatening? Ellis nods. “He’s said so a couple of times.”
I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk so cuttingly about their partner to a virtual stranger, let alone on the record. Ellis seems to think it perfectly normal, which only makes it all the more disorientating. Has he considered the possibility that their relationship has given him a distorted impression of the millennial generation? “No, I think it’s given me a completely clarified one.”
Had I not, by luck, had a brief chat with Todd on arrival, while Ellis was on a call, by now I’d have assumed the pair were on the brink of breaking up. But Todd had been sanguine about White, finding it “interesting”, if in parts “a bit over the top”, and from what I see between them the chemistry looks solidly contented. How this can be is a mystery to me, for if Ellis’s anti-millennial polemic is harsh, White’s very first review — posted just before we meet, by a young transgender lesbian firmly situated in Todd’s progressive camp — is just as savagely damning. Each side may be broadly right about the other’s flaws, but the ugliness of the intergenerational culture war is so alienating that it’s hard to see how any relationship could survive it.
The simplicity of Ellis’s answer disarms me. He has found love three times in his life, he says. “Two of them were bad. One of them was the unavailable type, one of them was a bad type — and one type was the good type.” And Todd is? “Todd is just all love. Todd is just all about love.” So all is forgiven? “Yes, of course.” I wonder if he thinks he’d be just like Todd too, had he only been born 25 years later. He considers the question carefully, and allows a rueful smile. “Yes, I do.”
Exclusive extract: White by Bret Easton Ellis
“This epidemic of self-victimisation is actually an illness… a new kind of mania”
These parents, whether tail-end baby-boomers or gen X-ers, 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. And the response from generation wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.
Even my boyfriend agreed that generation wuss was far too sensitive, especially when facing any criticism. Unlike any previous generation, they had so many outlets to display whatever they wanted (thoughts, feelings, art) that it often went — unfettered, unedited — instantly and globally everywhere, and because of this, a lot of the time it tended to seem rushed and kind of shitty.
When millennials were criticised for this sort of content, or for anything, really, they seemed to get so defensive they either collapsed into a spiralling depression or lashed out at the critical parties and called them haters, contrarians, trolls. 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 paralysed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears — You just victimised me! — and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles.
But if you’re a smart person who happens to be so traumatised by something that you refer to yourself in conversation as a “survivor-victim”, you probably should contact the National Centre for Victims and ask them for help. If you’re an 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 victimisation, 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 maths?” or offers a “God bless you” after you sneeze, or a drunken guy tries to grope you at a Christmas party, or some douche purposefully brushes against you at a valet stand in order to cop a feel, or someone merely insulted you, or the candidate you voted for wasn’t elected, 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. Victimising oneself is like a drug — it feels so delicious, you get so much attention from people, it does in fact define you, making you feel alive and even important while showing off your supposed wounds, no matter how minor, so people can lick them. Don’t they taste so good?
This widespread epidemic of self-victimisation is actually an illness. It’s something one needs to resolve in order to participate in society, because otherwise one’s not only harming oneself but also seriously annoying family and friends, neighbours and strangers who haven’t victimised themselves. The fact that one can’t listen to a joke or view specific imagery (a painting or even a tweet) and that one might characterise everything as either sexist or racist (whether or not it legitimately is) and therefore harmful and intolerable — ergo nobody else should be able to hear it or view it or tolerate it, either — is a new kind of mania, a psychosis that the culture has been coddling.
This delusion encourages people to think that life should be a smooth utopia designed and built for their fragile and exacting sensibilities and in essence encourages them to remain a child for ever, living within a fairy tale of good intentions. It’s impossible for a child or an adolescent to move past certain traumas and pain, though not necessarily for an adult. Pain can be useful because it can motivate you and it often provides the building blocks for great writing and music and art. But it seems people no longer want to learn from past traumas by navigating through them and examining them in their context, by striving to understand them, break them down, put them to rest and move on. To do this can be complicated and takes a lot of effort, but you would think someone in that much pain would try to figure out how to lessen it, however great the cost, instead of flinging it at others, expecting them to automatically sympathise with you and not recoil with irritation and disgust.
© Bret Easton Ellis 2019. Extracted from White (Picador £16.99)
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