The Ben Shapiro Show - Bret Easton Ellis | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 61

00:00:00.000 I think there was actually a headline in the Daily Beast that was, and I'm saying this verbatim, what the f*** is wrong with Bret Easton Ellis?

00:00:07.000 So I think if you've written a piece and you've titled it, what the f*** is wrong with Bret Easton Ellis, maybe I've done my job.

00:00:14.000 I don't know.

00:00:22.000 Hello and welcome.

00:00:23.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.

00:00:24.000 We're joined today by Brett Easton Ellis, the author of, among other things, American Psycho and the brand new book, White.

00:00:30.000 Brett, thanks so much for stopping by.

00:00:31.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:32.000 Thanks for having me, Ben.

00:00:33.000 So I have to start with the most obvious question.

00:00:35.000 So you've now come out as anti-Trump and this has become your calling card in the political world.

00:00:42.000 How did you get to your anti-anti-Trump stance?

00:00:45.000 My anti-anti-Trump?

00:00:46.000 Oh yes, okay, my anti-anti-Trump stance.

00:00:50.000 I didn't want to get involved with it at all.

00:00:52.000 And somehow Trump forces everybody into this narrative that's about him.

00:00:57.000 And I guess it started happening really soon after he announced he was running for president in the summer of 2015, when he came down that escalator in the Trump Tower.

00:01:08.000 And I began to become interested in how he was being covered.

00:01:12.000 I can't say I was particularly that interested in Trump.

00:01:15.000 Of course, I'd known about him since he emerged on the scene, and I even wrote about him in American Psycho, where he is Patrick Bateman's father figure, where Patrick Bateman keeps wanting to meet Trump, wanting to see him.

00:01:27.000 Wanting to know what restaurants Trump likes.

00:01:29.000 It's throughout the book.

00:01:30.000 Trump is mentioned about 40 times in the book.

00:01:32.000 And that was because when I was doing research on the book and I was hanging out with those guys on Wall Street, they all loved Trump.

00:01:39.000 And it was something that was really, really kind of unsettling.

00:01:43.000 They'd all read The Art of the Deal.

00:01:45.000 He was this aspirational figure.

00:01:48.000 He had, you know, beautiful women hanging on to him.

00:01:52.000 He had this lifestyle that they all wanted to emulate.

00:01:55.000 And I thought it was amusing to put him in American Psycho.

00:01:58.000 But that was really about all that interested me about Trump.

00:02:02.000 Sure, I watched The Apprentice, which I somewhat enjoyed, and I followed his marriages and his children growing up.

00:02:09.000 But I really didn't think that I'd have to engage with him on the level that we all had to.

00:02:15.000 And I began to see how he was being covered in the summer of 2015 and into 2016.

00:02:21.000 And there was this disconnect between who I thought Trump was and what he was trying to do and how the media was covering him.

00:02:29.000 And it was disturbing.

00:02:30.000 And it was bothering me enough that I started to talk about it on my podcast.

00:02:36.000 I also live with someone who is about as far left as you can go.

00:02:39.000 I would say borderline communist, millennial. 0.67

00:02:43.000 And his overreaction to Trump also was troubling to me.

00:02:49.000 I just couldn't understand how Trump could make people melt down and freak out in the way that some of them did.

00:02:58.000 And I talk about this a lot in life.

00:02:59.000 Especially the elites.

00:03:01.000 Especially the elites that I've written about most of my life in my fiction.

00:03:05.000 Having dinner with them and seeing them, you know, get really incensed over the idea of Trump.

00:03:13.000 Months, sometimes a year after the election.

00:03:16.000 And it was, um... And so yeah, I started talking about how I was, I guess I was anti-Trump, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I was pro-Trump.

00:03:25.000 And I was never a Trump supporter, I didn't vote for him.

00:03:28.000 But there was something so bothersome, so high-pitched and hysterical about the reaction to him that it was, quite frankly, beyond annoying.

00:03:38.000 And that's covered in white, and I talk about this a lot on my podcast.

00:03:44.000 What is it about Trump that causes such massive TDS?

00:03:49.000 The impression that I get for a lot of these folks is they consider themselves sophisticated.

00:03:52.000 And here comes along this kind of boorish fellow from New York who doesn't play by any of their niceties. 0.74

00:03:57.000 And it's like they mask their hatred for the affectation with a hatred for his supposed politics.

00:04:03.000 So I remember I was sitting at some lunch with David Mamet, actually, and we were in, you know, the middle of Santa Monica.

00:04:09.000 It's a beautiful day outside, and it's the middle of the day, and yet in Santa Monica, everybody can take lunch off, so everybody's enjoying themselves, having a $200 bottle of wine.

00:04:16.000 And we're talking about Trump.

00:04:17.000 And we were noting to each other that if we said his name, people would pretty much start screaming aloud and talking about how the end of the world was nigh, in the middle of this beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, because they just had to save America.

00:04:27.000 And it's just, it is bewildering living out here, and you deal with these folks a lot more than I do in Hollywood, but this notion that they're saving the world by being part of the resistance, where is this coming from?

00:04:39.000 That's a very good question, and it has to stem from something about, and I truly believe this, Trump's aesthetics.

00:04:46.000 I'm not even sure if it's his policies, I'm not even sure if it's even whatever ideology he might or might not carry with him.

00:04:55.000 It really seems to be aesthetics. 0.89

00:04:57.000 It seems to be that this boorish clown Uh, you know, uh, walked into the china shop and started knocking things all over the place with his orange skin and his weird hair and his, uh, you know, this kind of persona that, look, I have always said you just cannot take Trump literally. 0.98

00:05:17.000 If you take Trump literally, your head is going to explode. 0.97

00:05:19.000 You've got to understand the overall message that Trump is putting out there.

00:05:24.000 Because in a lot of ways, he is really transparent.

00:05:27.000 He is a transparent person on one level, even if he lies a lot.

00:05:30.000 And you have to be able to juggle that and understand, okay, I get that when he's saying this, he's actually meaning this.

00:05:37.000 When he's saying this, he's actually meaning this.

00:05:39.000 So if you're going to let this aesthetic really throw you so off course, then you've really got to, I don't know, take a big stiff drink at the bar and start realigning How you feel about this person because it what you're reacting towards and how strongly you're reacting about it is just there's a disconnect Also, he doesn't he doesn't care.

00:06:03.000 I believe he doesn't care.

00:06:04.000 I know everyone's oh, this is really getting to Trump This is really gonna upset him.

00:06:07.000 This is really I don't know how much and I also don't know how much the resistance really Interest him at all.

00:06:13.000 I mean, I don't know how much he listens to the resistance but getting back to what you're talking about I really believe it all stems from how he looks and how he acts.

00:06:21.000 And maybe it was in a package like Mitt Romney, maybe it'd be easier to take. - Well, this I think is one of the keys to why Trump supporters, there's this huge disconnect.

00:06:30.000 So Trump supporters look at him and they say, "This man is as honest as the day is long.

00:06:34.000 He's incredibly honest, he speaks for me.

00:06:36.000 Whatever he says that comes out of his mouth, at least he's being honest." And people on the left think that he is lying like a rug all the time.

00:06:42.000 And everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie.

00:06:44.000 And people on the right say, OK, well, Barack Obama lied to us all the time also, and he didn't even have any problem with that.

00:06:49.000 It's like everyone wants to treat Trump as something out of the box, when in reality, in political terms, he kind of is just a politician, right?

00:06:56.000 I mean, he says stuff that's not true, but he says it in the service of whatever he thinks he needs to get done today.

00:07:02.000 But the fact that he's so transparent about it and non-smooth about it is what I think is sticking with a lot of folks.

00:07:06.000 No, I agree.

00:07:07.000 And I also think that there is just this, there's a stand-up comedian there that just drives people crazy as much as it makes people love him.

00:07:16.000 And there's something about that, that it's Kind of accessible in a way, the way that Trump behaves and the Trump presents himself to people.

00:07:26.000 He seems like he or someone trying to be an everyman in a lot of ways, even though, of course, he probably sees himself much better and much higher playing than the everyman.

00:07:37.000 But I think there's something about that.

00:07:39.000 Look, if you watch one of his speeches at one of these rallies, it really is kind of remarkable stand-up.

00:07:46.000 And a lot of it is funny.

00:07:47.000 That's the other thing.

00:07:49.000 Regardless if you hate Trump or you find him repugnant, he's also funny.

00:07:53.000 And he's funny in a way that is, you know, even as someone who is not a Trump supporter, he says some funny stuff in a way that I've never seen a president in my lifetime.

00:08:03.000 And I'm 55 and I've been around for, you know, whatever, many, many decades.

00:08:06.000 I've never seen a president actually behave this way.

00:08:10.000 And again, you can either take it in the way that it's simply offered or you can turn it into a disastrous, horrible narrative that's so full of darkness and is going to destroy the country and if not the country, the world.

00:08:28.000 And you're going to be really unhappy.

00:08:30.000 You're going to be a really unhappy person.

00:08:32.000 It's funny, when I think about Trump in sort of a cultural way, one of the things that I wonder if this is what drives the left nuts is that he is the right's answer to a bunch of things that the left really loves.

00:08:41.000 So one is cultural dominance.

00:08:42.000 The left is ascendant in culture.

00:08:44.000 They dominate culture, particularly Hollywood, at nearly every level, which I'd like to talk to you about a little bit more in a second.

00:08:49.000 And Trump is the right's version of Hollywood, which is to say he was a D-list celebrity that was in favor of them, or at least not pissing on them.

00:08:57.000 Yeah.

00:08:58.000 Of course.

00:08:58.000 They said, okay, fine, he's our cultural guy.

00:09:00.000 The left one.

00:09:00.000 This boob is your cultural guy.

00:09:02.000 I said, well, hey, you're the one who cast him in The Apprentice and then made a thing of him for 10 years.

00:09:05.000 At the same time, he is sort of the right to answer to Jon Stewart and to Jon Oliver.

00:09:10.000 Of course.

00:09:10.000 People who are this merger of politics and comedy who have decided that sometimes they're politicians and sometimes they're comedians and you're never going to be able to tell which one.

00:09:17.000 And Trump is just that except all the way.

00:09:20.000 And then he's also the answer to the left's suggestion that they are in touch with the common man.

00:09:25.000 And here's this guy who kind of runs around in this tie that's from the 1980s.

00:09:28.000 It's all the way down to his knees and is wider than the River Potomac.

00:09:32.000 And he and he, you know, is is our answer to on the right, you know, the the common man problem.

00:09:38.000 And the left looks at this.

00:09:39.000 And I think that it's almost like looking at this bizarro mirror image of themselves.

00:09:43.000 And they don't like what they see particularly much.

00:09:46.000 Well, no, it's not only that, but you have to understand that in the movie that was playing out in 2015 and 2016, he also beat the Queen.

00:09:56.000 He also beat Madame Hillary.

00:10:00.000 And that is another, it's not only that he won the election, but that it was him who won the election over her.

00:10:09.000 And I think that is the most painful aspect of it. 0.99

00:10:13.000 It's not only that Trump, to them, is a big boob and he seems like a fool and they think he's going to destroy America as we know it. 0.99

00:10:21.000 It's that he stepped in place of her. 1.00

00:10:26.000 And that still must sting.

00:10:28.000 And it still does for a lot of people I know.

00:10:30.000 Even people I know Didn't particularly like Hillary Clinton.

00:10:33.000 But that's a very tough thing to swallow, I think, on the left, as well as the idea that he came in and basically erased Barack Obama's legacy in a fairly short amount of time.

00:10:45.000 And I remember I was sitting with someone, actually a close friend of mine from college, who had raised a ton of money for Hillary Clinton, Bel Air, showbiz, Jewish, the whole package here in L.A.

00:10:57.000 And I'd gone to college with him, very good friends with him.

00:11:00.000 And, you know, he was somewhat disillusioned by, of course, Trump getting elected.

00:11:05.000 But about a year later, we were having dinner in a restaurant in Beverly Hills with a couple of friends of ours.

00:11:11.000 And he said, you know, I really can't believe it.

00:11:14.000 How effective a president was Obama if Trump, of all people, can come in and completely erase this legacy?

00:11:23.000 Maybe not effective at all.

00:11:25.000 And I think that is an incredibly painful pill for the left to swallow.

00:11:28.000 And it makes them very angry and it makes them overreact to things.

00:11:32.000 And it is, I think, part of the narrative that, again, stings the most.

00:11:40.000 So, how do you get away with saying all this stuff?

00:11:42.000 I mean, you work in Hollywood.

00:11:43.000 You still work in Hollywood.

00:11:44.000 You know what?

00:11:45.000 I would say that I have always worked... I've been an outsider in Hollywood.

00:11:49.000 That I work on the fringes.

00:11:50.000 I work in independent film.

00:11:54.000 I'm not... I've never been hired by the studios.

00:11:58.000 I've written many, many TV pilots, but nothing that has been made.

00:12:04.000 I have made a living in Hollywood, but I really have never seen myself as a player, as someone who is part of the scene.

00:12:13.000 Rarely go to parties, rarely go to red carpet events, stop going to screenings.

00:12:19.000 And it's always kind of been that way.

00:12:21.000 I know a lot of people in Hollywood, and I have a lot of friends because we all kind of grew up together, and I mean, I can take a meeting, but it doesn't necessarily mean that I am working in mainstream Hollywood.

00:12:37.000 Actually, a lot of people aren't working necessarily in mainstream Hollywood, especially when we talk about the movie business, because the movie business is really just about, you know, a group of writers trying to make animated films and Marvel movies.

00:12:50.000 So it's not really as if there is this huge pool of screenwriters like the ones who are writing movies for adults.

00:12:57.000 I mean, a lot of the screenwriters I knew who I came of age with who were making really good money in the 90s and into the 2000s now are, you know, I think one is overseeing a diner in Ojai.

00:13:08.000 Another one is selling real estate in Boise.

00:13:12.000 I mean, that is really where a lot of people went when everything kind of dried up in terms of being extremely well-paid for your screenwriting services.

00:13:21.000 It really is not that lucrative anymore, and I can probably do far better in books and writing books than I can in terms of, you know, making a living as a screenwriter.

00:13:34.000 So, look, I'm also not Walking around town with a MAGA hat on, drooling and saying how much I love Trump.

00:13:42.000 So it is, and a lot of people know me as being a bit of a contrarian, and as someone who, you know, I don't consciously want to do it, but I guess go against the grain of whatever the collective groupthink in the moment is.

00:13:55.000 And I think I'm known as that, and I've been known as that for many, many years.

00:14:00.000 So I don't know if it's that shocking that I am anti-anti-Trump to a degree.

00:14:06.000 But, you know, that's what this book is about, and it's very interesting to see how the mainstream media did react to the book, because they reacted exactly as I prophesied in the book, which is they're going to, they went nuts. 0.93

00:14:22.000 They went absolutely crazy, and I think there was actually a headline in the Daily Beast that was, and I'm saying this verbatim, what the f*** is wrong with Brett Easton Ellis?

00:14:31.000 So, I think if you've written a piece and you've titled it, What the F**k is Wrong with Freddie Scanellas, maybe I've done my job, I don't know. 0.96

00:14:39.000 But I don't worry about, I really don't worry about this notion, I mean, look, Hollywood is an extremely liberal enclave, but there are Little pockets of conservatives around there, and certainly, as I write about in white, not all of L.A.

00:14:54.000 went blue.

00:14:55.000 There was this little section of Beverly Hills that went red right above sunset, the northeastern edges of sunset.

00:15:02.000 So I don't know.

00:15:04.000 I also feel that as someone who has a podcast, and as a writer, and a cultural commentator, that you have to be true to yourself.

00:15:12.000 You simply have to.

00:15:13.000 And let the chips fall where they may.

00:15:15.000 Look, I'm sure I haven't gotten a job because of what I talk about in White, or what I've been talking about in my podcast for the last two or three years.

00:15:23.000 And I'm sure one or two things have not moved forward because of that.

00:15:28.000 But on the other hand, what do you do?

00:15:30.000 Do you just become a pod person and just start spouting the groupthink and, I don't know, living a sad little life of desperation?

00:15:40.000 I mean, I know a couple guys who were kicked off of a sports team in 2016, kind of like a semi-celebrity, like writers, directors.

00:15:40.000 But it is true.

00:15:50.000 because they cracked a couple of Hillary Clinton jokes in the locker room. 1.00

00:15:53.000 I mean, that's how bad it can be.

00:15:55.000 They were not asked back.

00:15:56.000 So the town can be that way, but it just seems...

00:16:00.000 I don't know, sometimes I think it's going to calm down and go away, but I don't know.

00:16:07.000 Okay, so in a second I want to ask you about not only how you've been treated in the peer group, but also some of the things that you've said that have been seen as contrarian.

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00:17:16.000 Okay, so when we talk about the sort of cultural censorship in Hollywood, one of the things that you did on your podcast, you do in white, that I've not seen anyone else do, is you will honestly critique other artists, other people in the movies.

00:17:27.000 You'll actually give your opinions about things, which is unique.

00:17:30.000 I mean, I speak to a lot of conservatives who are in Hollywood, and many of them, even in private conversation, won't say anything about movies or about other people who are working or their skill sets, specifically because they're afraid of the blowback.

00:17:42.000 Obviously, You've done that and it makes you one of the more interesting critics of film.

00:17:48.000 And one of the areas where I've seen you do that repeatedly is on movies about folks who are gay in Hollywood, movies about race in Hollywood.

00:17:56.000 So what's your approach to critiquing film?

00:17:58.000 Because there's so much politics that's invested in this stuff.

00:18:04.000 If you want that, what you're talking about, to stifle your real feelings about a movie, that's a problem in a way.

00:18:12.000 I don't think I'm ever mean.

00:18:15.000 I don't think I'm ever purposely hurtful towards someone who created something or acted in something.

00:18:21.000 I just give my honest reaction to what I saw and how I felt about it and what I'm thinking about it and what it...

00:18:32.000 And how it affected me.

00:18:34.000 That's all I'm doing.

00:18:36.000 And I really stress style and aesthetics over ideology.

00:18:41.000 Movies are about style.

00:18:43.000 Movies are about an individual filmmaker, I believe.

00:18:47.000 And that the best movies are made with one person's vision.

00:18:51.000 And the best movies are really... The message is in the aesthetics.

00:18:55.000 The message is in the style.

00:18:57.000 I am not a fan of movies that are all about ideology, that are about victimhood.

00:19:02.000 And unfortunately that has made it seem like I'm a homophobe, even though I'm a gay man, that I'm a racist, and that I'm a sexist because I don't like the...

00:19:12.000 The kind of approach towards movies about gay people, about black lives, and about female empowerment, unless it is folded into genre.

00:19:25.000 And then I really do like those movies, but I don't like pure message movies.

00:19:30.000 And every year, a lot of those get made, or maybe less so, but a lot of them get rewarded.

00:19:38.000 And that's a little annoying, you know, that representation becomes more important than how you make a movie.

00:19:45.000 It's something that has been bothersome to me.

00:19:49.000 And I talk about that a lot on my podcast when I'm talking about current movies.

00:19:52.000 On this podcast that's about to be released, I talk about two, I guess you'd call them female empowerment movies that are directed and created by women, Booksmart, and Late Night.

00:20:02.000 And one fails because it's all about ideology itself.

00:20:07.000 It's all about the message of inclusivity and feminism and intersectionality and the workforce and how if someone comes in and wipes away all the middle-aged white men, then everything is going to be so much better with this, you know, this diverse cast that's now at the writing table.

00:20:25.000 That's late night.

00:20:26.000 And the other movie, which is also written and directed by women, and it has a female empowerment vibe, is a teen comedy.

00:20:33.000 I prefer the teen comedy a lot more than I prefer the message movie.

00:20:37.000 So, you know, again, you have to be comfortable with what path you go on when you talk about movies.

00:20:46.000 But I appreciate people who are honest.

00:20:49.000 I appreciate people who are honest about my work.

00:20:51.000 I've lived with people who haven't responded to my work.

00:20:54.000 I've lived with people... I live with someone right now who really hates American Psycho, the novel.

00:20:57.000 It doesn't like it at all.

00:20:58.000 I'm completely fine with that.

00:21:00.000 I know people are sensitive and I know people get a little touchy about things, but I always, I hope that I come at film with a certain intelligence and a certain knowledge and that I know what I'm talking about and that I'm not just there like saying how much they suck or how dumb this is, but I hope that I come at film with a certain intelligence and a certain knowledge and that I know what I'm talking about and that I'm But, you know, again, if there's blowback on that, that's something you also have to deal with.

00:21:30.000 But I still have a lot of friends who are filmmakers whose movies I haven't particularly liked or producers whose movies I haven't liked and I'm quite honest with them.

00:21:38.000 And it doesn't seem to hurt our relationships.

00:21:40.000 It seems like particularly around Oscar season, there's always this attempt to award, as you say, all these kinds of films that you say that you don't like.

00:21:47.000 And it's a particular irritation, I think, to a lot of folks, including people in mainstream America, which is where I think there's some crossover here.

00:21:53.000 I think there are a lot of folks who look at the Oscars every year, and they say, I haven't seen any of these films.

00:21:57.000 And then I look at the Oscar previews, and basically, I can tell who's going to win Best Picture simply by looking at who checks the most woke boxes.

00:22:04.000 If the Moonlight was absolutely going to win the Oscar, because it was the wokest film that year.

00:22:08.000 It was gay, and it was black, and it was impoverished, and there was no question that it was going to win the Oscar. 1.00

00:22:14.000 And you see that almost every year.

00:22:16.000 I mean, there are just certain films where it checks enough boxes that people can feel good about themselves in the Academy, never having watched it, but then having signed off on it on the envelope.

00:22:26.000 And it's creating this massive culture gap between the stuff that people actually watch and then the stuff that this group of people want to be able to brag to their friends about.

00:22:34.000 I mean, that's what it feels like from the outside.

00:22:35.000 It feels like maybe this stuff is meaningful to the creators on a certain level, but on an artistic level, there are not a lot of people out there in the middle of the country who are desperate to watch Moonlight.

00:22:46.000 That is not a movie that is going to pick up huge scads of people, nor is it going to do a whole hell of a lot for gay empowerment if nobody ever watches the film.

00:22:53.000 Well, I think the problem with Moonlight, and I talk about this in my book, and what I'm shocked to find is that so few people have really seen Moonlight, is the other thing that's strange, is that, you know, it's not necessarily Moonlight's fault, in a way, that it became Embrace, this small little movie.

00:23:11.000 I don't think it's Barry Jenkins' fault.

00:23:12.000 I don't think he's pushing any kind of agenda.

00:23:14.000 I think he made the kind of movie that he wanted to make.

00:23:17.000 And I also think that sometimes we mistake all of this ideology in Moonlight. 0.89

00:23:21.000 Yes, he's poor, he's gay, he's black. 1.00

00:23:24.000 He's an orphan, you know, to a degree. 0.99

00:23:29.000 His mother's a drug addict.

00:23:31.000 And sometimes we miss the point that maybe it's really a movie about loneliness.

00:23:34.000 You know, maybe it's just that.

00:23:35.000 I know people who really like the movie respond to it on that vibe.

00:23:40.000 I also think that Moonlight became inordinately rewarded at those Oscars.

00:23:46.000 I actually thought La La Land was going to win Best Picture that year.

00:23:49.000 I think what happened to the narrative of Moonlight is that it opened in such a fraught period in 2016 where it seemed like every week we saw black men shot on camera. 0.92

00:24:01.000 And the bodies just had piled up, and it was just this inescapable thing.

00:24:07.000 And so when we see these, you know, the vibrant bodies in Moonlight, I think it touched a chord.

00:24:15.000 A connection was made in the entertainment press, and then it seeped over into Hollywood, that this wasn't a movie about gay representation, which it really was about being gay, and it became a movie about black representation, about Black Lives Matters.

00:24:28.000 And I think that's what started the ball rolling for Moonlight.

00:24:31.000 But it's true.

00:24:32.000 It has to be a certain kind of movie, though, or else there's going to be a lot of complaints.

00:24:38.000 And I think Moonlight is soft enough and innocuous enough that no one's really going to complain.

00:24:43.000 But no one got mad that it won, for example, Best Picture, unlike this past year when Green Book won Best Picture, and the entertainment press had a meltdown, and Hollywood in some way had a meltdown.

00:24:55.000 I mean, if you were watching people's Twitter feeds who are mainstream critics or people involved in Hollywood, they're involved in Hollywood a little less because they might have to work with these people and these producers.

00:25:06.000 It was as if that movie, which I do think has its own progressive elements, certainly the way that they deal with the gayness in that film seems very progressive in a way, because it's just kind of shrugged off and the main character, Tony Villalonga or whatever, is not... 0.78

00:25:26.000 Not bothered by Dr. Shirley's gayness. 0.98

00:25:29.000 And I thought that was kind of a progressive step.

00:25:32.000 But I don't know.

00:25:33.000 But again, that is the kind of movie that is rewarded in Hollywood.

00:25:39.000 But I have to say that I thought there was something about Green Book that was very hopeful.

00:25:48.000 It was out of all the black themed movies last year, whether it was Black Klansman, whether it was Sorry to Bother You, whatever they were, they were all hopeless. 1.00

00:25:59.000 There was a kind of fatalism and a kind of negativity about them.

00:26:03.000 And I think part of what made people like Green Book so much is that it offered a chance to mend, for people to come together.

00:26:13.000 And I cannot believe that people just didn't want to hear that message.

00:26:18.000 You actually don't want to hear that message and reward this.

00:26:21.000 That was a very telling moment in the culture. - Yeah, people were pissed.

00:26:26.000 I mean, there's a billboard out there on Sunset Boulevard of Trevor Noah for the Emmys saying, don't Green Book this thing.

00:26:31.000 He's now using it as a phrase.

00:26:33.000 It's like you blew it if you give Green Book an award because there's this sort of view that this represents the baby boomer take on race, that it's like a Joe Biden take on race where we can all come together in the end and be friends.

00:26:43.000 And in reality, we know after this many years that we cannot be friends, that there is no great coming together.

00:26:48.000 That can happen.

00:26:48.000 So if you voted for this, you're voting for a fantasy, whereas if you voted for black Klansmen and Spike Lee, or if you voted for if Beale Street could talk, which wasn't taught, but they think should have been, many of these folks, then that would have been a better representation of what race actually is in the United States.

00:27:02.000 Well, the Academy is full of baby boomers, and a lot of people are making those movies, so it wasn't necessarily a surprise to me that that movie won.

00:27:14.000 But what was surprising was that I know so many people who liked it.

00:27:18.000 I know a lot of people who liked it, maybe secretly, and they were saying, I loved Green Book.

00:27:24.000 And it made me feel good.

00:27:26.000 There was hope at the end that these two characters, so divided, finally saw past their differences and got together.

00:27:34.000 Sure, a fantasy, but at least there's a hopeful message there.

00:27:39.000 And yeah, the movie is what it is.

00:27:40.000 I mean, it's not a great film.

00:27:43.000 It's kind of a middle-of-the-road comedy.

00:27:46.000 But I don't know, I liked it a lot.

00:27:49.000 And I guess because it's under the guise of a kind of buddy comedy, and it has genre elements to it, maybe that's why I liked it.

00:27:58.000 I think that's why I liked the first half of Black Klansman. 0.85

00:28:00.000 I think the first half of Black Klansman was a really good Spike Lee movie.

00:28:04.000 Kind of the throwback to 70s black exploitation cop movies, and I really liked the feel of it.

00:28:10.000 And then It goes all Spike Lee and then it gets very ideological and then all the Klansmen are watching The Birth of a Nation while he's giving a speech about a lynching he saw and the movie just completely goes off the rails and becomes a complete ideology losing sense of what I think movies do best which is following their style and following their aesthetics.

00:28:32.000 Do you think that there is any sort of way that the cultural gap can be bridged at this point?

00:28:37.000 Because it feels like the vast majority of Americans want to watch Marvel Flex.

00:28:41.000 I understand this is in the theater.

00:28:42.000 If you're going to shawl 20 bucks, you want to see big explosions on screen and all of that.

00:28:45.000 But it seems like there are only two types of movies that Hollywood is making.

00:28:48.000 Woke movies and giant spectacle movies and nothing in between.

00:28:52.000 It's basically the Poseidon Adventure or whatever is the wokest movie of the day.

00:28:57.000 And there's nothing that just sort of is a broadly appealing nice movie unless it's a kid's movie.

00:29:03.000 Like it's G-rated films or Avengers or something so woke that if you are a Bible Belt voter, the chances that you want to see it are at least relatively low.

00:29:14.000 Well, I don't know.

00:29:15.000 I mean, the problem is how well do these woke movies really do?

00:29:21.000 And are they being made by Hollywood, or are they being made on the outside of Hollywood by independent production companies?

00:29:29.000 Because I don't think Hollywood is really doing anything at all except the movies you're talking about.

00:29:35.000 And so you have the independent film scene, which is making these movies.

00:29:39.000 And often, a lot of the times for Sundance, A lot of these movies are made to premiere at Sundance and be dropped into the glow of the festival where you have writers there who are hyping up everything possible because, you know, the places they work for, they've got to justify going to Sundance.

00:29:58.000 We found four major Amazing movies and, you know, you're also mingling with filmmakers and you're also getting drunk at parties with all these people.

00:30:09.000 So there is this, there is an over-inflated buzz about a lot of the movies that come out of Sundance that is both a gift and a curse.

00:30:17.000 Sometimes it's a gift because in that heady atmosphere, people are now writing checks for $12, $13 million to have the rights to release a movie.

00:30:27.000 And then it's a curse because usually these movies come out and they completely bomb.

00:30:32.000 So I don't know.

00:30:32.000 But I do think the festival circuit is one of the reasons why so many of these movies are getting made, because they get a lot of attention at those places.

00:30:40.000 I don't necessarily think that audiences are craving it.

00:30:44.000 I think audiences are craving really good movies.

00:30:46.000 And quite honestly, I think film critics are craving really good movies too.

00:30:50.000 I just don't believe the film critic that says, oh my god, I just saw the most amazing thing at South by Southwest.

00:30:55.000 It's this, you know, Latina, trans, handicapped chick and her travails in her neighborhood. 1.00

00:31:03.000 I don't believe he wants to see that.

00:31:04.000 I think they want to see Saturday Night Live.

00:31:06.000 They want to see Saturday Night Fever.

00:31:08.000 They want to see Taxi Driver.

00:31:09.000 They don't really want to see that movie that's so humble and so woke.

00:31:13.000 They want to see a real movie movie.

00:31:14.000 But we are in a place right now where in order to be considered woke and maybe even hireable at some of these places, I think you have to overprice certain movies that don't deserve it at all.

00:31:26.000 Yeah, so in a second I want to ask you about that because the critics, it seems to me, you can almost, it reeks off of some critics when they don't like a movie and yet they are banned by the prevailing dominant Hollywood culture from saying so.

00:31:37.000 Like, you can read it, it's not even between the lines.

00:31:39.000 It's basically seeping off the page and dripping down.

00:31:42.000 I'm going to ask you about that in just a second, but first...

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00:32:46.000 Okay, so one of the things that you talk about in White is a little bit about sort of how the critics treat particular films, and how if you criticize a film in an honest way, then this is treated horribly, whereas if people go out of their way not to critique a film, but to talk about how important a film is, for example, or how bold the film is without actually talking about the quality of the film, then this is the way to do it.

00:33:07.000 The most recent example that I saw was The Critical Treatment of Us by Jordan Peele, where his first movie, which I thought it was, you know, effective.

00:33:16.000 I didn't like it.

00:33:17.000 I critiqued it.

00:33:17.000 I thought that it had serious racial flaws.

00:33:20.000 I thought that it was actually racist in many ways because the implication of the film seemed to me to be that if you're a black person who's being dated by a white person and the white person's family tries to take you in, they're actually trying to steal your soul and make you not a person anymore and trying to destroy you as a human.

00:33:34.000 I had serious problems with that premise, but the film itself works and is good.

00:33:38.000 So Get Out, at least I thought, was well made.

00:33:41.000 Treatment of us made me not want to see it, because the critical treatment of us was, he's such a great filmmaker, Jordan Peele, and he's got so much potential, and while he didn't fulfill all of his potential here, he has some important things to say.

00:33:53.000 When people say, has some important things to say, I immediately signal, this is a bad film.

00:33:58.000 Why are so many critics hesitant to actually just critique a film?

00:34:01.000 You didn't want to see a horror movie about income inequality?

00:34:04.000 You weren't interested in seeing that movie?

00:34:08.000 Look, let's just be real here.

00:34:10.000 My favorite show on television is Atlanta.

00:34:13.000 I think Atlanta is absolutely a knockout.

00:34:15.000 I think it's beautiful.

00:34:16.000 I think it's brilliant.

00:34:17.000 And it's all about style.

00:34:19.000 It laces its ideology and its commentary through a beautiful style that is enveloping, that is rich, that is deeply moving.

00:34:30.000 I think that when you get down to, again, a kind of pure ideology overtaking your film or your content, you have a real problem there.

00:34:40.000 And I do think, again, you know, look, I got called out as being racist when I said something about Black Panther on my podcast.

00:34:49.000 30 seconds on my podcast.

00:34:52.000 I said something about Black Panther.

00:34:53.000 I said something about I'm sick of Disney or Marvel.

00:34:56.000 You know, pushing this movie as a masterpiece, when of course we're pushing it because it's a first, because of that representation.

00:35:02.000 And apparently no one heard me talk about how I loved the opening images of Wakanda, and I thought the blackness was the most interesting thing about the movie.

00:35:12.000 It just is another subpar Marvel movie, and that's what it is.

00:35:14.000 And we just can't really pretend that doesn't exist.

00:35:17.000 Or you can, if you want.

00:35:19.000 But I do think the most disturbing thing this year was the critical reaction and evaluation of us.

00:35:27.000 It was a moment where You realize that there's another world.

00:35:34.000 There's a secret world where everyone is either so scared of not calling out something on what it is, because I really don't know anybody who liked us, and I know a lot of people who went and saw it.

00:35:47.000 And I think that we're in this land where the critical consensus had to be that, that if you didn't love the movie and treat it with the utmost seriousness, which I'm not sure it really deserves, you were going to be not only not woke, but you were also going to be racist.

00:36:06.000 But this whole thing of being racist for not liking a black themed content or not liking a black movie, Has really spread out into the whole society.

00:36:14.000 So everything is now racist.

00:36:16.000 Everyone is now racist. 1.00

00:36:17.000 You're racist. 1.00

00:36:18.000 I'm racist. 1.00

00:36:19.000 Katy Perry is racist. 0.97

00:36:20.000 Bette Midler puts out a tweet. 1.00

00:36:22.000 She's racist. 1.00

00:36:23.000 I mean, we've gotten into a world where real racism seems to be like, you know, so diluted and watered down. 0.90

00:36:30.000 And we're now talking about it in cultural events and people reacting to movies or a pair of shoes or whatever.

00:36:35.000 We've really lost control of that narrative.

00:36:39.000 But getting back to what you're saying about us, I think that was the moment this year where you realized that there is a team and that they're all playing kind of the same game.

00:36:49.000 Even in a critic that I really like, I like Anthony Lane who writes for the New Yorker.

00:36:54.000 I just knew Us was absolutely not his kind of movie.

00:36:57.000 And you could see the path he took in order to craft that review of Us.

00:37:02.000 Very careful, doesn't come in right out and saying anything about it.

00:37:06.000 Stuff that I know because I've been reading him for 30 years that he wouldn't like.

00:37:11.000 Maybe he had to write it for the New Yorker.

00:37:13.000 Maybe the New Yorker, that's the new command, that you better like material like this.

00:37:21.000 So, how did you get into this industry in the first place?

00:37:23.000 I mean, how did you get into writing?

00:37:24.000 You talk a lot in White about your childhood and how you sort of inculcated the films of the early 80s and the late 70s.

00:37:31.000 How did you get into doing what you do?

00:37:34.000 Well, first off, growing up out here, all of my peers and I wanted to be filmmakers.

00:37:39.000 We all wanted to make movies.

00:37:41.000 It is, in some sections, a company town.

00:37:44.000 Much like Flint was a company town, whatever.

00:37:47.000 You grow up out here, you have connections to the movie industry, you want to make movies.

00:37:51.000 And you have to understand that the TV industry wasn't much of anything then.

00:37:56.000 So we all went to make movies and what happened was that I was also writing books.

00:38:02.000 And so I wrote a novel called Less Than Zero during this time, during my adolescence.

00:38:06.000 That was published when I was 21 and that became fairly successful.

00:38:10.000 And then I wanted to write other novels.

00:38:12.000 So the whole idea of going to film school, which I decided not to do and went back east to college, was out the window, and I thought I could finish all the books that I wanted to write in about the space of 10 years.

00:38:27.000 It ultimately took about 25 or 30 years to write those books.

00:38:30.000 And it was really only until about 10 years ago, 12 years ago, that I got back into wanting to make movies.

00:38:36.000 And the goal was never to be a screenwriter.

00:38:38.000 I mean, I grew up out here.

00:38:39.000 I knew that the screenwriter thing was just, you know, it was a lucrative business.

00:38:44.000 Very lucrative business in the 70s and into the 80s.

00:38:47.000 But it wasn't filmmaking.

00:38:49.000 It was this kind of very boring pedestrian job that you do.

00:38:53.000 And I can't imagine being creatively satisfying.

00:38:55.000 And it's really not creatively satisfying.

00:38:57.000 So it was always about filmmaking.

00:38:59.000 And what happened was that the kind of movies that I want to make, they stopped making.

00:39:05.000 But I still want to make those movies.

00:39:07.000 I was just on the phone with a financier and my producing partner this morning, and yeah, we can get a lot of the money from Europe, maybe some from here, but the goal was always ultimately to make movies.

00:39:23.000 And so when I came back out here, After being away, writing my novels in New York for about 25 years, I got involved producing and writing a movie called The Informers, which was based on a book of mine.

00:39:36.000 It was at the end of the expensive indie, which meant an expensive indie could cost $20 million, and no one would really blink an eye on that.

00:39:44.000 In the early 2000s, that was a possibility.

00:39:47.000 Unthinkable now.

00:39:49.000 And it was, let's say, a very fraught production, a very long production, very big cast, and it got ruined by the money people, producers, a whole host of reasons.

00:40:02.000 And it kind of soured my feeling about making movies.

00:40:06.000 But, you know, I still, I still, I mean, I grew up in that era.

00:40:11.000 And getting back to your initial question is that I grew up during the 1970s in this movie mad era Where great movies, great American movies were appearing in theaters almost, if not monthly, then weekly at certain stages during that decade.

00:40:25.000 And that was the prime time.

00:40:27.000 That was when I came of age with my friends.

00:40:29.000 And so we all became infected by the notion that you could make movies as great as these movies were.

00:40:38.000 And I have to say, all of my friends did get into the movie business.

00:40:43.000 And so, you know, you end up in the movie business and you do some screenwriting, you do some fiction writing, now you've done non-fiction writing, so which do you prefer?

00:40:52.000 Look, I've directed some commercials, I've directed a web series, I've directed a few short films.

00:41:00.000 I like doing that.

00:41:01.000 Once you start doing that, you kind of get bitten, and you want to keep doing it.

00:41:07.000 But they're all enjoyable to one degree or another.

00:41:09.000 Let's make it clear.

00:41:11.000 I thought writing this book was far more enjoyable than I ever thought it was going to be, because essentially when you're writing a book, it's a literary Experience anyway.

00:41:22.000 It still is.

00:41:22.000 I mean, it's like writing fiction in a lot of ways.

00:41:26.000 You know, you want the words to sound right.

00:41:28.000 You want the paragraphs to be clear.

00:41:31.000 You want the narrative to connect to a reader.

00:41:35.000 So I find them all pleasurable.

00:41:37.000 I wouldn't do any of them if I found like maybe one more pleasurable than the other.

00:41:42.000 I find them all pleasurable.

00:41:43.000 So when you're writing, what's your schedule and how much do you go over and polish your prose?

00:41:48.000 What's sort of your mode?

00:41:50.000 What's your style when you do this?

00:41:51.000 I have to adhere to a schedule.

00:41:54.000 I have to adhere to basically a 9 to 5, 10 to 6, maybe 11 to 7 schedule where I do write every day.

00:42:03.000 I have my morning ritual and then I'm in my office and then I take a break.

00:42:07.000 I either go to the gym or I'll go to a movie.

00:42:10.000 And then I'll come back and I'll work the rest of the afternoon up until about seven or so and then, you know, have a cocktail or whatever.

00:42:18.000 But I like adhering to that schedule and I pretty much have always followed it.

00:42:24.000 If I'm getting toward the end of something and I'm completing it, I might be working longer hours because I'm just excited about the prospect of finishing the book.

00:42:35.000 And I've always worked that way.

00:42:36.000 I've always worked that way since I was writing my novels in New York.

00:42:43.000 So, in the book you talk a little bit about David Foster Wallace, and I'm curious, which are the writers that, instead of contemporaneous writers or older writers, that you actually like versus some of the ones who you think are overrated?

00:42:53.000 Because you're very critical, obviously, of his writing.

00:42:56.000 Well, you know, I'm critical of, again, of an overreaction.

00:43:02.000 To David Foster Wallace, and I'm reacting toward a rewritten construct of the man. 0.99

00:43:09.000 I think the man was a far more complicated, a much darker person, and kind of like an ass.

00:43:16.000 Very unlikable, but he became kind of a self-help guru for a lot of kids, especially after the suicide, and he had done this commencement speech that went viral that was very heart-to-stomach. 0.92

00:43:27.000 It was, you know, very aspirational, and I don't know if David really believed in it.

00:43:31.000 But that's a good question.

00:43:34.000 Look, the writers that meant a lot to me, you really only need two.

00:43:38.000 Two or three.

00:43:39.000 You don't need more than that.

00:43:40.000 Everyone says, oh, who are all the influences?

00:43:42.000 Well, I think at a certain point, obviously when I was very young, it was Hemingway.

00:43:45.000 And Hemingway really opened the door.

00:43:48.000 Made me want to be a writer.

00:43:50.000 I love the writer Joan Didion.

00:43:52.000 Her non-fiction essays and her journalism were hugely impactful, very influential.

00:43:59.000 And I write about her in the book in white as well.

00:44:03.000 On one kind of level, Stephen King's novels were when I was an adolescent.

00:44:07.000 I came of age right when he started.

00:44:09.000 So I read Carrie when I was like 10, Salem's Lot when I was 12, The Shining when I was 13.

00:44:14.000 I read that like five or six times.

00:44:16.000 And The Shining actually is an influence on a book of mine called Lunar Park, which is kind of an homage to Stephen King.

00:44:23.000 But then I also was young enough, well it was the right period, and minimalism had spread throughout American fiction.

00:44:32.000 So people like Raymond Carver, to a degree Don DeLillo, this was happening in the early 80s and that was Definitely an influence on Less Than Zero.

00:44:44.000 But then, of course, they're just writers that I love.

00:44:46.000 I mean, I love Tolstoy.

00:44:48.000 I love Flaubert.

00:44:50.000 I love Joyce.

00:44:51.000 I mean, there's just a lot of... I just love... I love books.

00:44:55.000 I love novels.

00:44:55.000 And so one of the terms that you use in the book, you use specifically with regard to your partner, Itai, who's much younger than you are, and so you talk about him as a member of sort of the millennial generation, you call it Generation Wuss.

00:45:07.000 What are the characteristics of this generation?

00:45:08.000 What the hell do you think happened?

00:45:09.000 All right.

00:45:09.000 Well, what happened was, first of all, it was nothing to be taken seriously.

00:45:14.000 It was kind of a joke.

00:45:14.000 And I started to talk about this on Twitter when I was tweeting a lot more than I do now.

00:45:19.000 And I just noticed that when we started hanging out and we started living together, that he was triggered by a lot of stuff that just did not trigger me at all.

00:45:27.000 And we got into this terrible fight.

00:45:29.000 Our first fight was about the Tyler Clemente, Ravi Durham case where one college kid pulled a prank on another college kid causing the other kid to commit suicide.

00:45:41.000 And I could not believe how minor this prank was caused a kid to kill himself.

00:45:47.000 It was outrageous to me.

00:45:49.000 There was something wrong with the kid.

00:45:51.000 And my partner said, "No, I completely understand that." That is a violation.

00:45:55.000 That should never have happened.

00:45:57.000 This is a private moment for the other kid who committed suicide, blah, blah.

00:46:00.000 And I just couldn't believe that I was listening to this.

00:46:05.000 And then there were a lot of other things.

00:46:06.000 There was a kind of passive aggressive positivity that I knew was kind of not real.

00:46:11.000 There was this unwavering belief in all things inclusive, all things diverse, a kind of utopian attitude that just seemed so unreal to me, that this was just some kind of fantasy life.

00:46:27.000 And there was also this kind of deep-rooted shame.

00:46:31.000 About everything.

00:46:31.000 I think a lot of it connected to exhibiting yourself on social media and being like everyone is, criticized relentlessly.

00:46:41.000 So he was kind of crippled by all of these things.

00:46:43.000 Not to the point that he couldn't get out of bed or anything, but it was a vast difference between his generation and my generation.

00:46:51.000 His was kind of a touchy-feely millennial generation and I, of course, came out of Gen X.

00:46:56.000 Which is very cool and ironic and, I'm not saying cool, you know, cold, let's say cold, and aloof and ironic and nihilistic.

00:47:08.000 And I do think that the millennial generation is, for all their annoyances, all the things that I find annoying about them, is a reaction against that, is a reaction against Gen X thinking and the Gen X mindset.

00:47:21.000 And I think the reaction that millennials have to this section in white, it has been hysteric.

00:47:29.000 I mean, absolutely hysteric.

00:47:31.000 The millennial reviewers have one transgender millennial reviewer got so upset with this book that she wrote, I think, a 3,000, 4,000 page review talking about how old I am, how irrelevant I am.

00:47:46.000 How white I am, how unwoke I am, and she kept repeating this over and over and over in the most hysterical language possible for 4,000 words.

00:47:57.000 So that seems to me to be exhibit A of what I'm talking about when millennials have this overreaction to something.

00:48:04.000 But I guess she didn't read the final section of that particular section where I talk about why I'm sympathetic to them as well.

00:48:10.000 So why are you sympathetic to it?

00:48:13.000 Because, you know, look, they've been through a lot to a degree.

00:48:17.000 They've been through two wars.

00:48:19.000 They've been through... They're living with a president they can't stand.

00:48:23.000 Their economic reality is far different than mine was in terms of their fulfilling their hopes, their aspirations and their dreams.

00:48:35.000 It was much easier for my generation to do that because of an economic safety cushion.

00:48:41.000 And also because of the horrible damaging effects of social media, which I know I'm sounding like the old guy on the porch, but I am the old guy on the porch, and I always have been.

00:48:53.000 I was the old guy on the porch when I was a teenager, so really not a lot has changed.

00:48:57.000 So that's why I'm sympathetic.

00:48:59.000 I'm most sympathetic to my partner, who You know, a college graduate, going out for jobs and just being, the only things that were open were unpaid internships.

00:49:11.000 And it was kind of like, are you effing kidding me?

00:49:15.000 This is what, this is where your generation is.

00:49:19.000 So I'm sympathetic as much as I have been critical.

00:49:23.000 And look, I've lived with one for 10 years.

00:49:26.000 So it's not as if I'm not getting something out of it.

00:49:30.000 So you talk a lot about social media in White, and I, as a devotee of social media, particularly Twitter, I found that in the last six months to a year alone, I've realized that if I don't disconnect from this thing, it will kill me.

00:49:42.000 I was good friends with Andrew Breitbart, with whom I worked closely, and Andrew was connected at the hip to social media.

00:49:49.000 I am firmly convinced that it was responsible for much of his high blood pressure and a lot of the stress in his life.

00:49:57.000 Yes.

00:49:58.000 Social media, it's fascinating because you talk in the book about how you just tweeting things drives people up a wall and how you weren't really prepared for that.

00:50:05.000 Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the impact of Twitter.

00:50:08.000 Well, Twitter was fun.

00:50:09.000 See, this is what everyone forgets.

00:50:11.000 Twitter, when it started out, was fun.

00:50:14.000 And it was a place to make outrageous statements that didn't define your humanity.

00:50:19.000 They were just jokes.

00:50:20.000 And everything was in kind of quotation marks, it was kind of performative, and you said something kind of outrageous, everyone kind of gasped and then moved on five seconds later.

00:50:31.000 I never saw Twitter to be built as a place for me to virtue signal and talk about how wonderful I am and to attack other people for their opinions and for what their beliefs are.

00:50:46.000 Or to take them to task for being, you know, this whole notion that we should all be happy about speech lockdown, in a way, and that the language police are a good thing because it means that, well, no one can talk in racist terms, in sexist terms, in homophobic terms.

00:51:05.000 I don't believe that's really the thing that's going on.

00:51:08.000 I believe there's this vast puritanism that's going on right now, and that's keeping everyone a child forever. 0.97

00:51:15.000 Coddling them from offensive opinions, from viewpoints that are different from yours.

00:51:20.000 And I noticed the connection between this, between what Twitter once was and what Twitter warped into.

00:51:29.000 And as naughty and disturbing for some, Twitter was in its first days.

00:51:37.000 People had a good time.

00:51:38.000 People were not stressed out.

00:51:41.000 And then people started to lose jobs because of tweets.

00:51:43.000 Then people started to lose things because of tweets.

00:51:46.000 And then there was this flowering of social justice warriors and a flowering of virtue signaling and Calling out people to get their accounts cancelled because they said this thing or that thing.

00:52:02.000 And it really has.

00:52:03.000 It has warped into something that was really fun into really a toxic nightmare.

00:52:09.000 I keep it because my news feed is on it and it's very easy, it's very user-friendly in terms of like what I want on it.

00:52:18.000 But, and I do, I have really been careful at getting rid of people in terms of Okay, I don't want that toxicity in my life.

00:52:27.000 I don't want this.

00:52:28.000 I mean, I like people who are critical, who have opinions.

00:52:31.000 But then, when it gets into, you know, we're at, you know, level 100 of negativity and toxicity, then...

00:52:41.000 I can't bear it.

00:52:42.000 But I have gotten into trouble for tweets of mine, and that was kind of like the beginning of when I said, I'm in trouble for a tweet?

00:52:50.000 Twitter is real?

00:52:51.000 Twitter is this thing that you take so seriously?

00:52:53.000 It was kind of the best.

00:52:56.000 kind of the beginning of the end for me.

00:52:58.000 And I rarely use it.

00:53:00.000 I use it as a kind of promotional tool, though actually Facebook works better than Twitter does for me.

00:53:06.000 And every now and then I'll have an opinion on a movie or something, but I'm not the person, I don't have the Twitter persona that I once had.

00:53:14.000 And I know that people are disappointed by that, but it's just too exhausting. - It's rotten, it wrecks your life.

00:53:19.000 It does.

00:53:19.000 Completely.

00:53:19.000 life.

00:53:20.000 It does.

00:53:20.000 There's so many people also out there who are using those old tweets from the playful days as sort of the sort of Damocles hanging over you.

00:53:27.000 Completely.

00:53:27.000 Where if you do not just obey whatever is the diktat of the day, and the diktat changes daily.

00:53:32.000 Like, we don't know what the rules are, and so the rules change on a routine basis.

00:53:35.000 And so they'll hold some joke tweet that you had from 2009 over you.

00:53:39.000 And then if you say the wrong thing, then they retweet it at you, and suddenly it's a pile on.

00:53:43.000 And I'm not talking about me personally.

00:53:44.000 I'm talking about folks like James Gunn, right?

00:53:46.000 James Gunn was using Twitter in exactly this way back in 2009, 2010.

00:53:50.000 And then he ran afoul of some folks politically, and suddenly he was seeing all of these tweets resurfaced.

00:53:56.000 And the media were treating it as though it was actual news that he had made these gross jokes back in 2009, 2010, when he was doing shock comedy.

00:54:02.000 And we're seeing it with Kevin Hart, too.

00:54:04.000 I mean, just this, and it's not just Twitter anymore.

00:54:06.000 It's this whole thing where we are going to apply whatever is the modern sensibility to something that someone said not 80 years ago, but something that someone said 10 years ago and was considered perfectly mainstream in order to destroy their life and in order to cudgel them into line over here.

00:54:22.000 It really is.

00:54:23.000 It's devastating.

00:54:23.000 I don't know how you can have a culture, a common culture, when this is the way that things go.

00:54:27.000 Well, you can't, but I also have learned that I ultimately have learned that I don't really care that much.

00:54:33.000 I have never deleted any of my tweets.

00:54:36.000 And I'm someone who accidentally tweeted for drugs when I thought I was texting one night, where I was really wasted and my partner was out and he called me and said, "Oh, I'm gonna be home "about an hour." And then I put the phone down and I said, "Oh, yeah, maybe." And so I was texting him and I said, "Hey, come over, bring over some drugs." And then I went to bed and the next day I woke up and there was like a thousand.

00:55:00.000 And I had actually tweeted that out to my 600,000 followers in the middle of the night.

00:55:06.000 And that's still up there.

00:55:07.000 I have never deleted that tweet either.

00:55:09.000 So I find it toxic now.

00:55:12.000 It really kind of makes me nervous in a way, but I have not deleted any tweets and I can't I can't fall into the fear of people finding tweets of mine from 2010, 2011.

00:55:26.000 And how bad could they be after that one?

00:55:30.000 I mean, really?

00:55:33.000 You order drugs on Twitter?

00:55:36.000 What?

00:55:36.000 I make a... I don't know.

00:55:37.000 So, I mean, how weird is it for you to end up in a place where you're welcomed on Fox News, you come on shows like this one, you're more welcomed, I would say, on the political right by a lot of folks than you have been on the political left now.

00:55:51.000 You're obviously not politically conservative in like the traditional sense, I don't think.

00:55:56.000 So how did this happen?

00:55:57.000 I don't know.

00:55:58.000 I don't know.

00:55:58.000 How did this happen, Ben?

00:56:01.000 I, again, I think as someone who saw himself as really not caring about politics at all, really not, being much more focused on writing novels and on art and on film, There's just something about this moment that has dragged everybody into it.

00:56:21.000 And so I see myself as not a conservative, not a liberal.

00:56:25.000 I'm certainly not a Republican.

00:56:27.000 I'm certainly not a Democrat.

00:56:29.000 I'm not on the right.

00:56:30.000 I'm not on the left.

00:56:31.000 I'm an observer.

00:56:32.000 And there are things going on in the culture right now that kind of drive me to distraction.

00:56:39.000 And I'm annoyed by.

00:56:41.000 And I talk about this on my podcast.

00:56:43.000 And it mostly is about this puritanism that I see washing through the public.

00:56:51.000 And I don't know where that's going to go.

00:56:52.000 With an overreactive, hysteric populace that is overreacting to everything.

00:56:57.000 And including, I believe, Trump.

00:57:01.000 But that hit the nerve.

00:57:03.000 When I talk about it in other aspects of the culture, people will go, oh yeah, maybe, whatever. 0.75

00:57:09.000 But when you talk about this in terms of Trump, people go nuts. 0.97

00:57:11.000 And they assume, because you're criticizing the mainstream media, and you're criticizing people losing their shit over Trump, that you are, in fact, a Trump supporter, and that you support Trump, when that's not true. 0.95

00:57:24.000 But again, I feel the message is clear, and I am happy to talk to anybody. 0.98

00:57:30.000 I also don't live in a bubble, and this is something that I write about in White.

00:57:33.000 I have plenty of friends who like Trump, and I have plenty of friends who don't.

00:57:37.000 As I said, I live with a millennial communist, so I hear 24-7 everything horrible about Trump.

00:57:42.000 I have friends and acquaintances who really like Trump.

00:57:44.000 So I have always lived in hearing both sides, and I understand why my friends who like Trump like Trump, and I understand why my friends who don't like Trump don't like Trump.

00:57:54.000 But just because I have not taken a side doesn't mean that I'm on this side for Trump.

00:57:59.000 And I think that it's been very interesting how open, in a way, one side of the aisle has been in terms of having me on and talk about this book, and how closed one side has been as well.

00:58:12.000 Look, I've been profiled with the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.

00:58:17.000 But I also was profiled by Breitbart and I think that's totally acceptable and that's totally fine.

00:58:22.000 And if some person is going to pull their hair out and have, you know, writhe in horror that I'm doing this, well, you know, you need to relax a little bit.

00:58:32.000 I know my partner didn't like the notion that I would talk to Breitbart and certainly didn't like the idea that I went on Fox and talked to Tucker Carlson and was having a big problem with that.

00:58:43.000 But then, you know, Bernie went on Fox and it all kind of became okay for him in a way.

00:58:49.000 So it's like, okay, yeah, I think you can do more Fox shows, he said.

00:58:53.000 I think you should go do Steve Hilton and whoever else wants you on.

00:58:58.000 And I think that divide, I don't like that divide, that notion that we all can't be talking.

00:59:05.000 I'm sure there are things you and I do not agree on.

00:59:07.000 I'm sure there are things that we might strongly disagree on.

00:59:11.000 But that doesn't mean that I can't have a conversation with you.

00:59:14.000 I was highly, highly disturbed by what happened to you with Mark Duplass, who is someone I've had on my podcast.

00:59:20.000 And that whole, I mean, not to bring it all back out, but I just couldn't believe that there was this groupthink that sucked him in, made him rearrange his feelings about you, and then post them was kind of a real moment that I can still remember and then post them was kind of a real moment that I can still remember I think it's the same thing that happened when David Lynch gave an interview in 2018.

00:59:44.000 Well, who knows?

00:59:45.000 Maybe Donald Trump will be the greatest president in history.

00:59:48.000 And then there was so much outrage that he had to, and who knows who talked to him, had to print out on Facebook an apology that he said this.

00:59:56.000 I'm surprised that Lynch did that. 0.99

00:59:57.000 I mean, I would think he's too old and doesn't really give a shit about that. 0.99

01:00:00.000 But that's where we are. 0.99

01:00:01.000 And I hate that.

01:00:02.000 And I like the idea that people from different sides of the aisle can sit in a room like this and just talk about stuff.

01:00:10.000 And it doesn't necessarily have to be about The thing.

01:00:14.000 The DT.

01:00:16.000 It can be about a lot of other stuff.

01:00:18.000 But it is true. 0.90

01:00:19.000 The left is much, much more prone to not dealing with me with this book than the right has been.

01:00:29.000 But I don't like that.

01:00:30.000 I've always felt that way.

01:00:31.000 I talk to everybody.

01:00:33.000 Well, in just a second, I'm going to ask you the final question, which is, I want you to rank maybe your top five movies of all time, your five favorite movies.

01:00:39.000 But if you want to hear Bredi St.

01:00:41.000 Ellis' answer, then you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.

01:00:44.000 To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.

01:00:46.000 Click subscribe.

01:00:46.000 You can hear the end of our conversation over there.

01:00:49.000 Bredi St.

01:00:49.000 Ellis, thank you so much for stopping by.

01:00:51.000 Really great to see you.

01:00:52.000 Great to see you, Ben.

01:00:52.000 Thank you.

01:00:59.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.

01:01:02.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:01:04.000 Associate producer, Mathis Glover.

01:01:06.000 Edited by Donovan Fowler.

01:01:08.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.

01:01:10.000 Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.

01:01:12.000 Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.

01:01:13.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 28, 2019

Bret Easton Ellis | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 61

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