Hollywood Gone Wild and Crazy

This Bret Easton Ellis essay is adapted from his new book White. All things considered it’s going to be a very fun read. You might recall that Ellis famously wrote the book American Psycho, a book that horrified those who lived to be horrified, and that had nothing to do with the psycho profession. Or at least so it seemed.

In any event Ellis speaks in this essay forthrightly and clearly. Ostensibly, he is talking about his friendship with Kanye West and about the Hollywood reaction to West’s cozying up with Donald Trump. I will not rehash the West saga, except to add that when Kanye West was hospitalized for exhaustion, as they now call it, one of those who called him to wish him well was… Donald Trump. It was a gracious thing to do, thus, everyone ignored it.

In truth, Ellis is calling out Hollywood, that mecca of brain dead celebrity high school dropouts. And he does it so well that it deserves a blog post:

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. 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, as an apparently drunken Johnny Depp suggested, assassinated.

Fellow comrades had started to adhere to their new rule book: about humor, about freedom of expression, about what’s funny or offensive. Artists — or, in the local parlance, creatives — should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. This new policy required you to live in a world where one never got offended, where everyone was always nice and kind, where things were always spotless and sexless, preferably even genderless — and this is when I really started worrying, with enterprises professing control over not only what you say but your thoughts and impulses, even your dreams.

And then there were the prophets of gloom, the celebrity soothsayers who declared that he end was nigh and that the sky was falling. It began on the evening of November 9, 2016 when the New York Times resident idiot savant, Paul Krugman, declared that the stock market was crashing and would never recover:

Since November 2016, I had heard that a horrendous economic collapse was about to materialize, the planet was going to melt, countless people would die, the fraught situation in North Korea would send the United States into a nuclear Armageddon, and Trump would be impeached, brought down by a pee tape — leaving no jobs for anybody and Russian tanks in the streets.

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 “F–k Trump” at the Tony Awards, a television hostess called the first daughter “a feckless c–t” on her TV program, another actor suggested the president’s 11-year-old son should be put in a cage with pedophiles. And all of this from Hollywood: the land of inclusion and diversity. Maybe it was just another episode in the reality show that is still unfolding. Or maybe when you’re roiling in childish rage, the first thing you lose is judgment, and then comes common sense. And finally you lose your mind and along with that, your freedom.

Well said, and well worth noting. Especially at a time when we all seem to be taking our cues from Hollywood.