If at some point in your adolescence you were not fascinated by socialist ideas, you wasted your youth.
At sixteen, I read a lengthy interview with Oliver Stone in some British magazine. He was travelling around Central America during that period, visiting countries like Guatemala and Cuba. This particular interview was him enchanted by the 'Freedom Island' and its unfading leader, Fidel Castro. What struck me then was that I was under the spell of his words about Castro and socialism and yet I never really cared for his filmmaking (except for Salvador, ironically).
More than that. A little later I was having a conversation about Soviet socialism with an American acquaintance, and somehow we got to the subject of Oliver Stone and The Doors. I said I did not like the film but I liked the man. This was bullshit, of course, as my opinion was based on my brief fascination with people like Leon Trotsky as well as the Oliver Stone interview in a British magazine. The American said, "It's interesting... You like Oliver Stone but you don't like the film". Which was basically him saying, "My dear man, you are making no sense".
And - emphatically - I was not. Years later, I would be disappointed with Oliver Stone as an artist (Alexander was hammy filmmaking at its worst) and as a socialist (which in Stone's world presupposes sycophantic admiration for corrupt dictators). But the feeling stuck: you can dislike the art but fall in love with the artist.
I do not dislike the art of Bret Easton Ellis. I loved American Psycho and I loved The Rules of Attraction (the latter a great deal more than the former), but I could never get into any of his other books, scripts and (do I even need to bring this up?) attempts at directing. And yet somehow I have always loved the man and could listen to him talk for hours on that great podcast of his where he speaks about movies and SJWs and has this incredible ability to formulate a question with a million words and then get a brief reply from a guest. His thoughts are incisive and articulate and his interviews with people like Mark Z. Danielewski and Quentin Tarantino are fascinating. In fact, these opinions and these interviews rival the best pages from his greatest books. So it was an easy decision, in that very German and very orderly bookstore in Bonn, to choose his first collection of non-fiction called White (but of course) over the latest novel by Ian McEwan.
And it is a great book. The title alone is a stroke of genius and will no doubt provoke all the right people. You could call these people whatever you want, but the term that Bret Easton Ellis uses is 'snowflakes'. Snowflakes, or social justice warriors, are those thin-skinned hypocrites who are thrashed with special gusto in the book as well as on the B.E.E. podcast. In White, Ellis recounts several stories of him being attacked for his opinions (Trump, #MeToo) on Twitter and elsewhere. In times less hysterical than ours, these opinions would raise no hackles at all, but in this day and age one word in feeble support of Donald Trump or Kevin Spacey means you will be eaten alive. It is infuriating and yet it leads to a set of thrilling stories. In fact, Ellis's views on Trump and post-2016 America are perfectly reasonable and so are his views on the hapless Democrats who have resorted to the same tactics they decry and have thus been 'Trumped'. And remember: this is all coming from someone whose most famous novel was so prescient in predicting Trump and even had him as one of its (unlikable) characters.
The book is full of Ellis's thoughts on the aesthetics of movies, his fickle friendships and his great heroes, his struggles and successes as a writer and a journalist (his first New Yorker assignment is a particularly good story) as well as his rumination on identity politics and the perils of having it all in one click. He is not scathing or dismissive of younger generation (his boyfriend happens to be a millennial), but he is concerned about so many of them turning into a faceless army of snowflake warriors who have a very skewed idea of justice and who do not understand the key principle underlying the freedom of speech: "Laugh at everything or you will end up laughing at nothing".
