White - A Review
This review is about Bret Easton Ellis' book and not a review of the color white itself although the two seem to coalesce when you throw in the adjective old.
The artist should be separated from their art and judged differently, I agree with Ellis on that front. But in this case, since it's a book that reads essentially like a personal blog, it wouldn't work like that. If it was a fictional book I wouldn't bring up the author's personal attributes. They'd be irrelevant. So I'm going to literally take a page out of Ellis' book and get critical. He can take it. At least he claims he can.
First off let me say that Ellis is a great writer and no matter what time period he was born in, assuming writing was already invented and there was some large scale transport mechanism for books, he would have a voice. When I was a teenager American Psycho was an eye opening read. Its period-specific elements makes it paradoxically timeless and its deeply nuanced narrator was an inspiration.
Capsule review of White: It's a long way to say Get Off My Lawn!
He knows this. He even addresses it in the book. The source of Ellis' anger is misdirected at the younger generations. It's not an uncommon error in judgement. It's been going on for thousands of years. What's happening is that now the delays between technology upsets are getting much shorter and the divide is getting deeper.
Wait a minute aren't you old too? You might be asking yourself.
While true, with technology, you see, I've always been an early adapter. I had a blog and stopped long before anyone knew what it was. I had an MP3 player that doubled as a door stop. I carried around a Pocket PC before there were cell phones. I had an account on the Cleveland Freenet, setup webrings before there was google, trolled around on telnet, copied CD's when they were $20 a blank, wrote graphic text games like Bandersnatch 30 years ago, put fake hair on my bald boss in photoshop twenty-five years ago and produced terrible music when the software was first available, traded on P2P before there was an internet had an online church so long ago it predates the wayback machine and ran a BBS when hardly anyone had computers. I was programming since I was 12 on my Commodore 64 when I didn't even have a tape drive. I had to retype the program in every morning. I've worked on everything from internal server pages to world-wide science and industry search engines, pharma and phone apps. I've written articles that are long gone, responded to people asking for help and argued software engineering ethics in forums for decades. I've been a consultant for startups and entrepreneurs looking to get rich. In my own small way I've contributed to this new world,...
tl;dr - I believe I’m at least as qualified as you to address this. Besides, every woman I’ve ever dated has been in 25-29 year old range. Ellis' justification for being mean to millennials is that he had a millennial boyfriend.
What's changed younger people today is the internet. Despite what Ellis claims, you can take any generation even the vaunted "best" generation and give them the internet as children and they will end up coming across as assholes. You don't have access to the thoughts and musings of 99% of them. All you have until 15 years ago or so has been highly curated by publishing industry bigwigs. Now we get to hear every utterance from every moron out there. Everybody has a phone. Everyone thinks they're special and they are because they all have a voice. It's also become pretty obvious that so-called expertise is bullshit.
Let's go back through time and give everyone a phone. What do you think the people who attended witch burnings would be tweeting about? What review would Lenny Bruce have gotten on youtube from the people who booed him in theaters? What about when the Beatles albums were burned because Lennon (correctly) noticed that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus? What would their forum posts look like? What sort of trolls would the men who lynched people make? What would they have done for likes? The case can be made that they'd be much worse that what we have out there today.
No, Ellis' problem is with technology not birth date. Was it better when you couldn't read the thoughts of the people that comprise the general public? Maybe. But Ellis can still do that if he wanted to. He could even, probably, convince his manager or agent or whatever to not mention WHY he's losing book deals or speaking gigs and pretend it's just a couple of people making these decisions essentially on a whim.
The technology has made it so the decision whether to publish or not, whether to put someone on a talk show or not is a lot easier. The goal in this growing capitalistic dystopia is to sell things. In the past a small number of people would choose what they think might sell and it often didn't. It's not like that any more. It's more complicated but analysis isn't as necessary. The change in cultural flow can be spotted easier and more quickly. It's more egalitarian in a way, less a choice of wealthy businessmen. At the same time, it's easier now to market to specific groups of people which enables savvy publishers to court different voices.
Ellis' books have been the victim of censorship that had no basis in contemporary ethics. If it had been rightly turned down, then the book American Psycho would not have been a best seller when it was eventually released. Today something like American Psycho phenomenon would not be censored. The pulse of the public is easier to judge today, it's more realistic if more fleeting. Particular books might still not be published but the reasons for it have more of a basis in reality today than the early 90's.
So enjoy White for what it is, an old man sitting on his back porch yelling at the kids who are playing their crappy music too loudly. In the end the millenials that Ellis' anger is directed at are just as much a victim (sorry Brett) of this new technology as he is.
I hope it was critical enough. I know he hates blanket likes. Check this out.
The man has 2500 tweets and only 114 likes. Most of it is alt-right swarmy nonsense. But at least he's consistent.