Opinion: Bret Easton Ellis is still a provocateur. Too bad he’s no longer a novelist.
Writer Bret Easton Ellis at his home in West Hollywood on April 10. By Sonny Bunch Sonny Bunch Bio Follow April 24 at 2:53 PM Bret Easton Ellis’s new collection of essays, “White,” has been dismissed as a provocation by a well-known provocateur, a reaction made more understandable by some of the disastrous PR surrounding it.
Ellis is an insightful and incisive critic; it’s always a treat to see how an artist examines art made by others, and the chapter in which he compares and contrasts the Oscar-winning “Moonlight” with the critically maligned “King Cobra” is fascinating. Ellis, who is gay, prefers the latter to the former, complaining that “Moonlight” is “overly invested in [protagonist] Chiron’s pain because without it the movie wouldn’t exist — this is a victim narrative.
Ellis is fixated on actors, the double lives they lead and, most importantly, the fact that their fictions are now everyone’s. “Most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense we’ve all become actors,” he writes.
That Ellis, the author of “American Psycho” and “Less than Zero,” seems to have given up on the novel as a form — he calls it a “fake enclave” and suggests he’ll never write another — is a shame. “White” would likely have been harder to dismiss as a more generalized fiction than the specific and personal complaint he has written, one that comes across as the lament a person who is Very Online and trying to explain the latest Twitter controversies to someone who has never been on the site.
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