‘The Shards’ parachutes us back into the world before teenagers became so sensitive. ‘We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us.’
I am sick to the back teeth of reading 'GenX', 'Boomer', 'Millennial', 'Zoomer' in articles. OK I can work out what 'Millennial' means (clue: it doesn't mean what the word actually means), but this idea that there are ten-yearly groups of people with homogeneous views, life experiences etc is rubbish; it's depersonalising, it's identify politics, it's actually offensive (in the old-fashioned sense) to be told that someone knows what you think because of the year in which you were born. I have no idea (and don't want to know) to which category my 53 years commits me; I do know that even though I'm as gay as Mr Ellis and about the same age (I think), there is nothing in his canon that suggests my life is like his in any way whatsoever. So please, write about characters in any way you like, but stop having them wave metaphorical banners shrieking 'This is like, so, like the zeitgeist' above their heads. (If only Woody Allen would remake American Psycho. That would make me laugh. A random post-script but the idea is making me laugh.)
I stopped reading this at 'over dinner at Matú in Beverly Hills'. Unless this is an homage to Jason Bateman, this is a huge reader turn off. I say this as I love Easton-Elis's work.
I think there are some important issues that deserve more attention touched on in this piece. As a GenXer the idea that we didn't consider our self victims is real. Victims were those who allowed being victimized define them. People who were victimized and moved past it were people who had overcome adversity. That was the ideal.
My last point has to be that the writing here seems like it would difficult for a lot of folks to follow. I get it but honestly I'm pretty much a weirdo. My wife or adult daughters wouldn't know what to make of this.
"“We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us,” Ellis told me."
How is that not happening any more, compared with the 1980s?
Consider the AIDS crisis. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence. It led to many people in that era putting the brakes on what had formerly been carefree sexual behavior. Medical research has since made impressive progress, in both effective treatment and prevention. Nowadays, ads for FDA-approved, insurance covered medications like Truvada run on the television.
I'm a bit older than Ellis- 8 1/2 years older, to be more exact- and I recall the 1980s as the most repressive American era of my lived experience. That political situation only began to improve in October 1986, after the reports went out over the news wire that US citizen Eugene Hasenfus had been captured by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas after bailing out of an American-registered C-123 cargo plane that had been shot down. (The Fat Lady, one of Barry Seal's airplanes.) Thus leading to the disclosures of the Iran-Contra scandal, which really set the Reagan administration back on its heels and undoubtedly checked its ambitions in some respects.
The "cancellation", "helicopter parenting", and call-out culture of the second decade of the 21st century are nothing, compared to the firsthand experience of watching the Drug War expand by an order of magnitude during the Reagan era. Although evidently there were social class and economic strata where that development received only derisory notice; there always are. The practical effect of measures like the War on Drugs has always been to convert common rights into highly prized privileges. (Not to be confused with an actual restrictive effect on supply in the street market, which is nil, in any society less totalitarian than Singapore. Which is not to say that Singapore doesn't play host to its own population of drug fanciers; it's merely smaller numerically, because the criteria are more selective.)
For what it's worth, in case any of the readers haven't noticed: The War on Drugs is still very much in effect. Thankfully at a less repressive level than it was in the 1980s. But look at the toll that it's taken over the decades. If you dare.
I couldn't relate to this story at all or the author but I appreciate it nonetheless. It wasn't the most captivating articles in the collection but they can't all be stellar.
I have mixed feelings about Easton Ellis's books (though I enjoyed American Psycho movie ), but he has offered masterful cultural commentary over the years via his podcast
This book took me awhile to get into, but once I did it was well worth it. Being about the same age as Ellis, I could completely relate to a lot of the things in this book and it definitely captured the 80s spirit of Los Angeles, very similar to how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood captured the 60s spirit--a warm, beautiful sunny place with an ominous undercurrent.
As follow up to my original comment in response to a question on what I did to try and raise my two zgen kids in current climate I share the following...
My kids were in both progressive private and suburban public primary schools as well as state and Ivy league east coast colleges. At various times we dealt with this divisive radicalizing of the world lens. I did my best to make it a point to be aware of what my kids were being presented with at these institutions and to present all counter narratives to prevent them from being indoctrinated into viewing society as hostile and irredeemable which in turn is often used to justify the perpetuation of illiberal actions. I made sure they engaged and not enraged in all aspects of life. I had a philosophy as seeing social challenges in a discovery mode where you are open to hearing and future thinking and not to see it in defend mode where you only see things as a threat in the present. It isn't easy where every step of the way as white straight males the institutions and authority figures in their lives message that their accomplishments or actions to get ahead because of their race and gender causes the fall of another race and gender... the oppressed( ie certain selected identities) and the oppressor(white privilege) Literally every single things they do school, applications, activities, internships, jobs, attending programs, activities, clubs, scholarships etc etc requires then to identify their race and gender (immutable characteristics) up front. We saw many of their peers in same boat be indoctrinated into the memetic desire to adopt a victims identity to escape their identity of oppressor. To do this it often involved canabalizing many loving and caring support systems in their lives to "purify" themselves by denouncing and calling out others. This is my kids generations very sad daily reality.
I think there's a conversation to be had about how GenX fits into our world today, its unique and mostly ignored experience, whether we had any impact on society at all now that we're all in our middle ages, what we could've done better, and whether we can still leave a mark in history. That said, I for one don't think Bret Easton Ellis is the representative voice for our generation. Sure, I'm quite familiar with the scene of the 80s and 90s he wrote about. But in the big scheme of things, his point of view feels very niche, obscure and obtuse, and even foreign to me despite that he had written two very successful novels. I find the choice of singling him out for a feature highly perplexing.
I would've much more preferred to know what thoughts and reflections, if any, Douglas Copeland has about our Generation today now that we have the benefit of hindsight.
Or, perhaps even a different angle of analyzing Ron DeSantis, who might very well be the first GenX president in the White House. Notwithstanding that I personally can't say I'm a supporter, I would find an analysis of how or if the GenX experience has shaped him quite interesting.
So, Bret lead a rather privileged life and writes books about it interlaced with popular trends. Basically, he’s like a brand building TikTokker…but of course, far more “sophisticated”.
LOL I kind of wonder about how many "BEE" novels this reviewer actually read to have made the astounding claim that the characters in BEE's writings were doing anything resembling "proto-adulthood". Literally every character he wrote was a nihistic (and wrt to Patrick Bateman, and later on, Clay from "Less Than Zero" into his sequel "Imperial Bedrooms", total sociopaths) rich kid "rebelling" against every notion of "adulthood" (and supposed social morality) possible. Extreme drug use, sexual assault and fetishism, suicidal ideations, etc, were core components to his characters, and few to zero ("less than zero" shall we say), were redeemable characters at the end of his novels. And one should certainly take exception from BEE himself that a more "adult" generation would have simply accepted "casting couch auditions" as a "norm", and not actually a pretty toxic practice.
And the fact the reviewer thinks BEE was writing some "love letters" about 1980s culture, again, belies that he's not really read Easton's works from that actual era, because they were not, at all, "love letters" about 80's culture and society, but darkly satiric (or just plain dark) readings of 1980's era pop culture trends of "disposable" music, fashion, and the evolution of the economy into the emerging era of sociopathic (again, "American Psycho") corporate/finance/media economies and culture. And almost all were written under BEE's own drug addicted haze and lens, to where some of his later period works really jumped the shark into almost incomprehensiveness ("Lunar Park") - which I still "enjoyed" because he IS a good writer, but damn if you can make sense of that book!
Look, I get the criticisms of how Millennial and Gen Z generations have been raised and are turning out, but I don't think BEE is exactly the prophet of these criticisms, or had somehow envisioned a more "englighted" or more capable "youth generation" from the 80's. His writings are massively cynical jabs at the 1980s culture, specifically wrt to that of the "elite" at the time. And I say this as someone who has "enjoyed" (not sure if that's the right term, but am a somewhat "fan" of his works), but to frame his writings and characters as "aspirational", "adult", is to have either not have read his works at all, or to have taken a very surface and shallow read to make a point that this newsletter is guiding ("Youth all messed up, olds are good").
Oh, but thanks for notifying me there's a new BEE novel. I'll put it on my library holds ; )
If all Savodnik has to write about is Bret Ellis then he needs to get a life. Did The Free Press actually pay him for this crap. What value exchange should I derive from it, much less the pathetic Ellis. If your motivation for publishing this is building a flourishing world then as a non-believer god help us all.
Bari ,as editor that claims TFP is built on the bedrock of great journalism then this article has undermined it.
Beautifully written as always, Peter. A tribute to more dangerous, risk-ridden times.
I am sick to the back teeth of reading 'GenX', 'Boomer', 'Millennial', 'Zoomer' in articles. OK I can work out what 'Millennial' means (clue: it doesn't mean what the word actually means), but this idea that there are ten-yearly groups of people with homogeneous views, life experiences etc is rubbish; it's depersonalising, it's identify politics, it's actually offensive (in the old-fashioned sense) to be told that someone knows what you think because of the year in which you were born. I have no idea (and don't want to know) to which category my 53 years commits me; I do know that even though I'm as gay as Mr Ellis and about the same age (I think), there is nothing in his canon that suggests my life is like his in any way whatsoever. So please, write about characters in any way you like, but stop having them wave metaphorical banners shrieking 'This is like, so, like the zeitgeist' above their heads. (If only Woody Allen would remake American Psycho. That would make me laugh. A random post-script but the idea is making me laugh.)
I stopped reading this at 'over dinner at Matú in Beverly Hills'. Unless this is an homage to Jason Bateman, this is a huge reader turn off. I say this as I love Easton-Elis's work.
I think there are some important issues that deserve more attention touched on in this piece. As a GenXer the idea that we didn't consider our self victims is real. Victims were those who allowed being victimized define them. People who were victimized and moved past it were people who had overcome adversity. That was the ideal.
My last point has to be that the writing here seems like it would difficult for a lot of folks to follow. I get it but honestly I'm pretty much a weirdo. My wife or adult daughters wouldn't know what to make of this.
"“We were very, very free to explore things that might hurt us, potentially might damage us,” Ellis told me."
How is that not happening any more, compared with the 1980s?
Consider the AIDS crisis. In the 1980s, AIDS was a death sentence. It led to many people in that era putting the brakes on what had formerly been carefree sexual behavior. Medical research has since made impressive progress, in both effective treatment and prevention. Nowadays, ads for FDA-approved, insurance covered medications like Truvada run on the television.
I'm a bit older than Ellis- 8 1/2 years older, to be more exact- and I recall the 1980s as the most repressive American era of my lived experience. That political situation only began to improve in October 1986, after the reports went out over the news wire that US citizen Eugene Hasenfus had been captured by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas after bailing out of an American-registered C-123 cargo plane that had been shot down. (The Fat Lady, one of Barry Seal's airplanes.) Thus leading to the disclosures of the Iran-Contra scandal, which really set the Reagan administration back on its heels and undoubtedly checked its ambitions in some respects.
The "cancellation", "helicopter parenting", and call-out culture of the second decade of the 21st century are nothing, compared to the firsthand experience of watching the Drug War expand by an order of magnitude during the Reagan era. Although evidently there were social class and economic strata where that development received only derisory notice; there always are. The practical effect of measures like the War on Drugs has always been to convert common rights into highly prized privileges. (Not to be confused with an actual restrictive effect on supply in the street market, which is nil, in any society less totalitarian than Singapore. Which is not to say that Singapore doesn't play host to its own population of drug fanciers; it's merely smaller numerically, because the criteria are more selective.)
For what it's worth, in case any of the readers haven't noticed: The War on Drugs is still very much in effect. Thankfully at a less repressive level than it was in the 1980s. But look at the toll that it's taken over the decades. If you dare.
I couldn't relate to this story at all or the author but I appreciate it nonetheless. It wasn't the most captivating articles in the collection but they can't all be stellar.
I have mixed feelings about Easton Ellis's books (though I enjoyed American Psycho movie ), but he has offered masterful cultural commentary over the years via his podcast
This book took me awhile to get into, but once I did it was well worth it. Being about the same age as Ellis, I could completely relate to a lot of the things in this book and it definitely captured the 80s spirit of Los Angeles, very similar to how Once Upon a Time in Hollywood captured the 60s spirit--a warm, beautiful sunny place with an ominous undercurrent.
As follow up to my original comment in response to a question on what I did to try and raise my two zgen kids in current climate I share the following...
My kids were in both progressive private and suburban public primary schools as well as state and Ivy league east coast colleges. At various times we dealt with this divisive radicalizing of the world lens. I did my best to make it a point to be aware of what my kids were being presented with at these institutions and to present all counter narratives to prevent them from being indoctrinated into viewing society as hostile and irredeemable which in turn is often used to justify the perpetuation of illiberal actions. I made sure they engaged and not enraged in all aspects of life. I had a philosophy as seeing social challenges in a discovery mode where you are open to hearing and future thinking and not to see it in defend mode where you only see things as a threat in the present. It isn't easy where every step of the way as white straight males the institutions and authority figures in their lives message that their accomplishments or actions to get ahead because of their race and gender causes the fall of another race and gender... the oppressed( ie certain selected identities) and the oppressor(white privilege) Literally every single things they do school, applications, activities, internships, jobs, attending programs, activities, clubs, scholarships etc etc requires then to identify their race and gender (immutable characteristics) up front. We saw many of their peers in same boat be indoctrinated into the memetic desire to adopt a victims identity to escape their identity of oppressor. To do this it often involved canabalizing many loving and caring support systems in their lives to "purify" themselves by denouncing and calling out others. This is my kids generations very sad daily reality.
I think there's a conversation to be had about how GenX fits into our world today, its unique and mostly ignored experience, whether we had any impact on society at all now that we're all in our middle ages, what we could've done better, and whether we can still leave a mark in history. That said, I for one don't think Bret Easton Ellis is the representative voice for our generation. Sure, I'm quite familiar with the scene of the 80s and 90s he wrote about. But in the big scheme of things, his point of view feels very niche, obscure and obtuse, and even foreign to me despite that he had written two very successful novels. I find the choice of singling him out for a feature highly perplexing.
I would've much more preferred to know what thoughts and reflections, if any, Douglas Copeland has about our Generation today now that we have the benefit of hindsight.
Or, perhaps even a different angle of analyzing Ron DeSantis, who might very well be the first GenX president in the White House. Notwithstanding that I personally can't say I'm a supporter, I would find an analysis of how or if the GenX experience has shaped him quite interesting.
So, Bret lead a rather privileged life and writes books about it interlaced with popular trends. Basically, he’s like a brand building TikTokker…but of course, far more “sophisticated”.
I remember reading American Psycho decades ago......gruesome and hilarious. In fact, what I remember best was how funny I found it.
I read much less fiction these days, but the review, despite the periodicity, intrigues me. Thank you for writing it, Peter.
LOL I kind of wonder about how many "BEE" novels this reviewer actually read to have made the astounding claim that the characters in BEE's writings were doing anything resembling "proto-adulthood". Literally every character he wrote was a nihistic (and wrt to Patrick Bateman, and later on, Clay from "Less Than Zero" into his sequel "Imperial Bedrooms", total sociopaths) rich kid "rebelling" against every notion of "adulthood" (and supposed social morality) possible. Extreme drug use, sexual assault and fetishism, suicidal ideations, etc, were core components to his characters, and few to zero ("less than zero" shall we say), were redeemable characters at the end of his novels. And one should certainly take exception from BEE himself that a more "adult" generation would have simply accepted "casting couch auditions" as a "norm", and not actually a pretty toxic practice.
And the fact the reviewer thinks BEE was writing some "love letters" about 1980s culture, again, belies that he's not really read Easton's works from that actual era, because they were not, at all, "love letters" about 80's culture and society, but darkly satiric (or just plain dark) readings of 1980's era pop culture trends of "disposable" music, fashion, and the evolution of the economy into the emerging era of sociopathic (again, "American Psycho") corporate/finance/media economies and culture. And almost all were written under BEE's own drug addicted haze and lens, to where some of his later period works really jumped the shark into almost incomprehensiveness ("Lunar Park") - which I still "enjoyed" because he IS a good writer, but damn if you can make sense of that book!
Look, I get the criticisms of how Millennial and Gen Z generations have been raised and are turning out, but I don't think BEE is exactly the prophet of these criticisms, or had somehow envisioned a more "englighted" or more capable "youth generation" from the 80's. His writings are massively cynical jabs at the 1980s culture, specifically wrt to that of the "elite" at the time. And I say this as someone who has "enjoyed" (not sure if that's the right term, but am a somewhat "fan" of his works), but to frame his writings and characters as "aspirational", "adult", is to have either not have read his works at all, or to have taken a very surface and shallow read to make a point that this newsletter is guiding ("Youth all messed up, olds are good").
Oh, but thanks for notifying me there's a new BEE novel. I'll put it on my library holds ; )
I plodded through BEE’s “White”.
Precious lost time that I will never recover.
What a waste of trees.
Saw the photo with the article and wondered, "Who's that old guy?" But then I often think that when I look in the mirror these days, too.
If all Savodnik has to write about is Bret Ellis then he needs to get a life. Did The Free Press actually pay him for this crap. What value exchange should I derive from it, much less the pathetic Ellis. If your motivation for publishing this is building a flourishing world then as a non-believer god help us all.
Bari ,as editor that claims TFP is built on the bedrock of great journalism then this article has undermined it.