I watched Fury beat up Wilder again, this time from a relative’s living room. I’ve done a ton of running and gym. Body weight is creeping down. The results of a quick beermat haul in Saddleworth will be on the blog soon. I visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park for the first time since I did GCSE Art (96-98). Great weather for it.
I finished reading White, the autobiography of Bret Easton Ellis. A short book, Ellis’ first non-fiction eschews life events for an incoherent collection of essays which are frequently unconnected to his life.
The first example of an ‘it is and it isn’t’ theme running through the book comes in the form of an entire discourse on the Richard Gere movie American Gigolo. The rambling chapter eventually leads to an anecdote from his own life, his own doings, but it’s fleeting.
It’s almost as if he’s trying to be his most well-known character, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, spouting off about things that aren’t really that important, but are in his mind and assumes are in ours too.
There must have been so many presumably outstanding moments in Ellis’ publishing career that he’s largely brushed over- publishing dates to his 7 novels, the release of several movie adaptations, some successful... yet we hear of none of this, bar a short piece on the Less Than Zero adaptation filming in 1987, a movie many aren’t aware exists.
He obsesses at length over trivialities like who he offends (hasn’t he spent his career offending people?), and twee overplayed pop songs that he’s way to old to be paying attention to. There’s more than one lengthy ramble about Trump, his own muted response to the election and his millennial boyfriend's contrasting fury, glossing over some of Trumps truly awful remarks yet declaring the Left as having ‘increasingly deranged and rabid resistance.’
After 200 pages of articulate but seemingly consistent complaints, we stumble hazily into the events of 11th September 2001, a time when Ellis was living in New York. He describes, along with the graphic horror he witnessed, a decision he made days after that atrocity: ‘I wasn’t going to complain any more. I would no longer be scared.’
Yet, in 2019, with White, that’s exactly what he does do, for a solid 260 pages. What happened when suing the creators of Zoolander for copyright infringement? What was the weirdest thing to happen on a book tour? How much involvement did he have with the productions of American Psycho and, more importantly, The Rules of Attraction, the adaptation of his work he said he liked the most? That movie alone featured Eric Stoltz, James Van Der Beek from Dawson’s Creek, Jessica Biel who would go on to marry Justin Timberlake, Ian Somerhalder, later of Vampire Diaries fame, and of course Bonnie Parker herself, Faye Dunaway. Did he have no contact at all with these people?
So many of his fictional characters were persistent name-droppers: Is Ellis really not like that at all?
The book rambles to the end, with no conclusion. The overlong rant at contemporary American society, full of complainers, as Ellis would have you believe, is void of conscious irony. In fact it reminds me of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, in particular the penultimate law 47: ‘do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn where to stop.’
And on that note...
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