SHOCKED😳 and APPALLED😱 learnt that theres a LIBERAL🤡 arts degree but there is NO CONSERVATIVE🧐 arts degree😡😡😡😡🤡🤡 literally so shocked and appaled and NOT horny

Art is hard.

Bret Easton Ellis' novels are known more for their transgressive nature, and highly debateable realism relative to the internal morality of the universe in which his characters exist, than they are for anything expository about its author, at least not directly. Less Than Zero's protagonist, Clay, is the avatar for Ellis, and his internal state is examined in a way few of Ellis' novels after that are; Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and even the sequel to Zero, Imperial Bedrooms (which was stylistically but not emotionally a return to form, and published after the subject of this post, Lunar Park) seem to distance the social critique from the internal state of its narrator. The novels became longer, less direct, more spectacle than incisive critique to make the points in an equally effective, but less cutting and impactful way, by the time of Glamorama.

Lunar Park, by contrast, is all of these things; what makes it astounding is that Ellis is fully self-aware of this, this is, in fact, the critique he makes of his own career in this novel, which is part pseudo-memoir, part-ghost story, and ultimately, a reassembly of an artist who found the craft compatible with a lifestyle that, on enriching him, keeps him broken when he becomes, in the narrative, barely functional.

American Psycho, the narrative suggests, was based on Ellis' father's generation of businessmen, comfortable with highly speculative, potentially (probably) predatory businesses of the sort that would gild the excesses of the Reagan-era with a veneer that, when the society that created it is reflected back onto the viewer, seems to make permanent a state of corruption and insatiability on the part of cultural elites.

The narrative of Lunar Park, discusses Patrick Bateman in great deal, among other elements from Ellis' career, but in this highly fractured way that is clear is all happening for the same reason, but why or how is not quite identified. Is he being haunted by his art, the familial trauma that informed his art, the trauma being inflicted by an indifferent society onto his (fictional) estranged-son's generation of young men in the (shockingly prescient in 2021) post-9/11 culture of fictional Midland County, NY with people like himself, a generation raised "without" fathers, not necessarily helpless but certainly clueless? This is because ultimately, the lesson of American Psycho is that morality and solidarity are eroded, civility doctrine can pass for compliance with a social contract in such a society.

Essentially, the narrative of the novel boils down to an essential question about the nature of experience, and the sublimation of these experiences into art, rather than hyperfixation on one grievance by highlighting another grievance that is different, not theorhetically worse, and often simpyl seeks to further erode a sense of solidarity. A recent example of this is discourse around a food production strike; some responses were individualistic beseechments about how they "need" those foods, and generics wouldn't satisfy that emotional need, an attachment, not a medical dependency. It's, in this context, rational to the speaker to implode a worker's movement for a vague consumer preference pathologized into an axis of oppression), as if the quality of life for the striking workers were not only a wholesale violation of their humanity, but that this consideration should supersede the workers' concerns. Based on the "calculus"' done by Twitter, for example, on "oppression", guess which position got a fair interpretation, and which was dismissed as class reductionism?

The question that really needs to be asked here is what happened to introspection, what happened to creating, making things, expressing these things, rather than channeling all of this energy into performance, artifice, whatever you want to call what these people are doing that is neither productive, nor is it helpful to anyone outside of that individual, as activism or "awareness". Art being poltical isn't news to anyone, but what happens when politics is no longer taking its cues from culture like art and depictions of society that often do inform and signify the zeitgeist, and instead, art is manufactured and marketed back, and controlled opposition in the form of an entrenched criticism class of these intellectual properties, not creations, is the only way you are, as a consumer, able to comprehend media, if you're also being encouraged to disregard those doing the work outside of an institution as somehow unqualified. "Podcasters", "bloggers", etc. are all meant as an implication of somehow independent media being less capable of, you know, citing sources and doing real analysis– backing by Jeff Bezos qualifies a paper of record that he owns to report on Amazon, ditto countless other corporatists on both end of the equation. Where's the consumer, the people, who supposedly wield all of this market control? Well, then you have to ask yourself if this power even exists, which of course, it does not.

Ellis' fictional self in this novel wrestles with these questions to a high degree, but in the microcosm of the novel's relationships, he asks succinctly: why does so little of his son's life center around poetry? Well, the answer is largely that, for Ellis, creating art, and then being traumatized by it, was the escape hatch for that sublimated intensity. For his son's generation, it's implied that they responded to an indifferent society by taking the more actionable step of checking out of society, depending on how you want to read into it, into a spiritual realm or simply a society of their own making. The spiritual angle is an important one: Ellis describes, in fulfilling his father's wishes upon cremation, a life different from the one he's described about himself and his father thus far. Underneath the poses they both put on, the memories, good and bad, contribute to the substance of who someone becomes; to explore one and not the other is to actively deny that your life had redeeming substance, which all people do, no matter how miserable. There's always something.

Ellis characterizes, in this fictional memoir written after the death of a longtime partner, the role of his son (implied to be a ghost of his father, himself, or maybe the creations of Ellis himself) was to teach the family what it means to live again, what life is like rather than the ways we fill days to be, as David Lipsky once put it, "a relief" from it. He finishes the novel with this montage of memories, they run parallel to the countless roman à clef from his novels and stories, we see where the sensitivity of his characters comes from. It's not a flattering depiction of Ellis, but it is one that reminds you that concepts of good and evil, viewing the world in those terms, requires a nuance that no longer really exists; would he say his father was a good person? Probably not, but he might say he is a reflection of a society engineering these attitudes, that he's not an anomaly, that there is still the capacity for love and fulfillment in loving others in these people. Essentially, the work must begin somewhere, and that place is usually very dark, very difficult, and perhaps not even you, but your children, will be compentent to sufficiently organize, heal as a culture, and you may never actually succeed.

The reality is that, even if you do this for personal reasons, as Ellis did in this novel, as an artist far from the path he successfully was guided onto, he lost sight of why his work had become a cultural phenomenon. In the 19 years since Lunar Park came out, he's still wrestling with a lot of this, and a lot of the conclusions are, to many, pretty common traps (familiar discourse about cancel culture, race, etc.) but to his credit, he seems intent upon finding answers, not working backwards from them, even if he has the misfortune to commit them to press. In his latest book, non-fiction, White, he muses broadly about many contemporary issues. He does so almost like the set of circumstances that were so metastisized culturally that American Psycho was the final word in what made it so pernicious were unimaginable to him that they simply would've considered intensifying to such a degree that the only people who do seem to realize what's happening, outside a media constructed narrative of an inert political binary that explains nothing by explaining its two poles, are saying so for exploitative reasons, essentially to fill a vacuum left by an unwilling productive catalyst for change, or at least an honest evaluation of the issues. It strikes me as more disciplined than something like what Joe Rogan does, but similar in its inclusion of commentary that has been flatly rejected for reasons that have everything to do with persona rather than content.

Ellis' perspective on, for example, the election of Trump earned him a label of being an apologist, a Kremlin agent, etc. all of the familiar smears, but what he said was that letting a Trump presidency define you is insane; the system works this way for a reason, and it doesn't require liking the result to understand that having a meltdown about it without attacking the actual source of the issue with this system is the most self-defeating vector for your opponents to satirize and dismiss. That his response was to begin having these discussions, I think, is consistent with this view that, simply, all across the political culture in the US, there's a lot of kneejerk reflexive hysteria, and it prevents and honest and informed evaluation of social issues, which is why the prevailing social commentary is overloaded with pseudoscience and propaganda, because only the grifters and propagandists are willing to speak frankly, even if it is absolute bullshit, and that's why it's important for the average person to re-learn how to be human, become less feral as a society of this level of accomplishment, take accountability for itself as a society, etc. He doesn't have to be right, just like you don't have to like what he says, for it to be acknowledged that it's time for frank discussions as a society, and that does, sometimes, in acknowledging that the solution will need to be systemic, require evaluating why you may feel that it doesn't. If he's wrong, and you think he's wrong, then that's the level upon which you need to articulate and express that belief and interrogate.

Ellis' goal, itself, in writing Lunar Park was to model for himself how to make sense of personal grief, and how it relates to societal complaint (American Psycho, in particular), and how none of this is individual, while your experience of it almost entirely is. How you stitch your sense of self back together to participate in society, how you sublimate trauma, is the process he is describing within this book. It's a story of learning to forgive the oppression in your personal life, so you can be a better citizen for a society where this no longer occurs. People no longer fall through the cracks, even when you/your peers feel they have no reason to, sink into Neverland.

He wrote in Lunar Park:

In a fishing boat that took us out beyond the wave line of the Pacific we finally put my father to rest. As the ashes rose up into the salted air they opened themselves to the wind and began moving backwards, falling into the past and coating the faces that lingered there, dusting everything, and then the ashes ignited into a prism and began forming patterns and started reflecting the men and women who had created him and me and Robby. They drifted over a mother's smile and shaded a sister's outstretched hand and shifted past all the things you wanted to share with everyone.I want to show you something,the ashes whispered. You watched as the ashes kept rising and danced across a multitude of images from the past, dipping down and then flying back into the air, and the ashes rose over a young couple looking upward and then the woman was staring at the man and he was holding out a flower and their hearts were pounding as they slowly opened and the ashes fell across their first kiss and then over a young couple pushing a baby in a stroller at the Farmer's Market and finally the ashes wheeled across a yard and swept themselves toward the pink stucco of the first, and only, house they bought as a family, on a street called Valley Vista, and then the ashes swirled down a hallway and behind the doors were children, and the ashes flew across the balloons and gently extinguished the candles burning delicately on the store-bought cake on the kitchen table on your birthday, and they twirled around a Christmas tree that stood in the center of the living room and dimmed the colored lights stringing the tree, and the ashes followed the racing bike you pedaled along a sidewalk when you were five, and then drifted onto the wet yellow Slip 'n'  Slide you and your sisters played on, and they floated in the air and landed in the palm fronds surrounding the house and a glass of milk you held as a child and your mother in a robe watching you swim in a clear, lit pool and a film of ash sprawled itself over the surface of the water, and your father was pitching you into the pool and you landed joyfully with a splash, and there was a song playing as a family drove out to the desert ('Someone Saved My Life Tonight,' the writer says) and the ashes dotted the Polaroids of your mother and father as young parents and all the places we went as a family and the lit pool kept steaming behind them with the scent of gardenia flowers rising up into the night air, wavering in the heat, and there was a small golden retriever, a puppy, bounding around the sides of the pool, ecstatic, chasing a Frisbee, and the ashes dusted the Legos that were spilled in front of you and in the morning there was your mother waving goodbye and calling softly and the ashes kept spinning into space with children running after them, and they dusted the keys of the piano you played and the backgammon board your father and you battled over, and they landed on the shore in Hawaii in a photograph of mountains partially blocked by lens flare and darkened an orange sunset above the rippling dunes of Monterey and rained over the pink tents of a circus and a Ferris wheel in Topanga Canyon and blackened a white cross that stood on a hillside in Cabo San Lucas, and they hid themselves within the rooms of the house on Valley Vista and the row of family portraits, drifting over all the promises canceled and the connections missed, the desires left unfulfilled and the disappointments met and the fears confirmed and every slammed door and reconciliation never made, and soon they were covering all the mirrors in every room we lived in, hiding our imperfections from ourselves even as the ashes flew through our blood, and they followed the brooding boy who ran away, the son who discovered what you are, and everyone was too young to grasp that our life was folding in on itself, it was so foolish and touching to think at one point that somehow we would all be spared, but the ashes pushed forward and covered an entire city with a departing cloud that was driven by the wind and kept ascending and the images began getting smaller and I could see the town where he was born as the ashes flew over the Nevada mountains mingling with the snow that fell there and crossed a river, and then I saw my father walking toward me, he was a child again and smiling and he was offering me an orange he held out with both hands as my grandfather's hunting dogs were chasing the ashes across the train tracks, dousing their coats, and the ashes began bleeding into the images and drifted over his mother as she slept and dusted the face of my son who was dreaming about the moon and in his dream they darkened its surface as they flew across it but once they passed by the moon was brighter than it had ever been, and the ashes rained down earthward and swirling, glittering now, were soon overtaken by a vision of light in which the images began to crumble. The ashes were collapsing into everything and following echoes. They sifted over the graves of his parents and finally entered the cold, lit world of the dead where they wept across the children standing in the cemetery and then somewhere out at the end of the Pacific, after they rustled across the pages of this book, scattering themselves over words and creating new ones, they began exiting the text, losing themselves somewhere beyond my reach, and then vanished, and the sun shifted its position and the world swayed and then moved on, and though it was all over, something new was conceived.

The sea reached to the land's edge where a family, in silhouette, stood watching us until the fog concealed them. From those of us who are left behind: you will be remembered, you were the one I needed, I loved you in my dreams.

Your memories, Ellis explained, can provide a salve for leaving things behind that no longer serve you; the negative feelings may have, at one time, powered you, but now are a barrier, and one you need to lower. An avatar of the society he was critiquing? Yes, his father certainly was, but responsible for it singularly, or even meaningfully? Probably not. Hanging onto it served no one, least of all himself, and true to the trauma response of many, doing so made things, in the fictional narrative (rife with metaphor), infinitely worsening.  

In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman is so overly consumed by saying and doing the right things that, when confronted by someone overtly saying the wrong things for all the wrong reasons, he's driven insane by the calculus of determining what is, and is not, ironic and satirical or merely sincerely, to the point where even overt racial and sexual violence is up for debate under the guise of respecting racial and sexual sensitivities. This is the future Bret Easton Ellis predicted at the end of the Reagan era, and it's the future Americans have grown into, where satire is now reality, and that it makes, simply, no sense, is the least of our problems as a society, it was the symptom and never the disease.