American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis has returned to notoriety.
His latest work, White, is a reflection on both his own life and how freedom of speech, identity politics, and social media have shaped America. Ellis has been panned by the media for his role as a provocateur — “white” is short for “white privileged male” — but behind the impishness, the novelist has something interesting to say.
When he spoke with Vogue about his first nonfiction book, out this week, Ellis explained how when it comes to the presidency, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and Ellis’ acquaintance Kanye West have one thing in common.
They both love President Trump.
This isn’t an indictment of West (whose “narcissistic dragon energy power … allowed him, no matter what others thought, to be totally free”) or even of the president (“I see Trump really purely being himself, id and all”).
West, who has quieted his vocal support for the president lately, has been widely seen as a man on a power trip, a egomaniac attracted to an equal ego. Ellis writes in White:
Ellis says West was mischaracterized by “the hysterical media.” And Trump, Ellis claims, is also not worth the collective freak-out. “I really do think that White is an argument for not being enraged,” he told Vogue.
Nonetheless, Ellis tweeted on the night of the 2016 election, “Somewhere, Patrick Bateman is smiling.” In American Psycho, Bateman (a riff on Norman Bates) leaves his Wall Street day job to become a serial killer by night. The postmodern horror novel critiqued America’s “consumerist kind of void,” as Ellis put it to Oregon Live.
American Psycho was published in 1991, several years after the completion of Trump Tower. As a narcissistic New Yorker, Bateman idolized Donald Trump. Ellis told Vogue:
Ellis may not have tried to be prescient (like “The Simpsons,” which also accidentally foreshadowed Trump’s rise to power), but the novelist understands some aspects of human character. People like leaders whom they can imitate. Trump’s presidency makes Ellis “nervous,” but not outraged, he told Rolling Stone last year.
Ellis straddles a strange gulf: Whining millennials should dump their Trump-free safe spaces, but at the same time, Trump would have been the ideal president for a deranged serial killer.
Ellis isn’t scared, but that doesn’t mean we’re not living, as he said, in “Bateman’s dream America.”
