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July 28, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:01:16

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

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	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?
	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.
	I don't know.
	Hello and welcome.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
	We're joined today by Brett Easton Ellis, the author of, among other things, American Psycho and the brand new book, White.
	Brett, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thanks for having me, Ben.
	So I have to start with the most obvious question.
	So you've now come out as anti-Trump and this has become your calling card in the political world.
	How did you get to your anti-anti-Trump stance?
	My anti-anti-Trump?
	Oh yes, okay, my anti-anti-Trump stance.
	I didn't want to get involved with it at all.
	And somehow Trump forces everybody into this narrative that's about him.
	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.
	And I began to become interested in how he was being covered.
	I can't say I was particularly that interested in Trump.
	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.
	Wanting to know what restaurants Trump likes.
	It's throughout the book.
	Trump is mentioned about 40 times in the book.
	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.
	And it was something that was really, really kind of unsettling.
	They'd all read The Art of the Deal.
	He was this aspirational figure.
	He had, you know, beautiful women hanging on to him.
	He had this lifestyle that they all wanted to emulate.
	And I thought it was amusing to put him in American Psycho.
	But that was really about all that interested me about Trump.
	Sure, I watched The Apprentice, which I somewhat enjoyed, and I followed his marriages and his children growing up.
	But I really didn't think that I'd have to engage with him on the level that we all had to.
	And I began to see how he was being covered in the summer of 2015 and into 2016.
	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.
	And it was disturbing.
	And it was bothering me enough that I started to talk about it on my podcast.
	I also live with someone who is about as far left as you can go.
	I would say borderline communist, millennial.
	And his overreaction to Trump also was troubling to me.
	I just couldn't understand how Trump could make people melt down and freak out in the way that some of them did.
	And I talk about this a lot in life.
	Especially the elites.
	Especially the elites that I've written about most of my life in my fiction.
	Having dinner with them and seeing them, you know, get really incensed over the idea of Trump.
	Months, sometimes a year after the election.
	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.
	And I was never a Trump supporter, I didn't vote for him.
	But there was something so bothersome, so high-pitched and hysterical about the reaction to him that it was, quite frankly, beyond annoying.
	And that's covered in white, and I talk about this a lot on my podcast.
	What is it about Trump that causes such massive TDS?
	The impression that I get for a lot of these folks is they consider themselves sophisticated.
	And here comes along this kind of boorish fellow from New York who doesn't play by any of their niceties.
	And it's like they mask their hatred for the affectation with a hatred for his supposed politics.
	So I remember I was sitting at some lunch with David Mamet, actually, and we were in, you know, the middle of Santa Monica.
	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.
	And we're talking about Trump.
	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.
	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?
	That's a very good question, and it has to stem from something about, and I truly believe this, Trump's aesthetics.
	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.
	It really seems to be aesthetics.
	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.
	If you take Trump literally, your head is going to explode.
	You've got to understand the overall message that Trump is putting out there.
	Because in a lot of ways, he is really transparent.
	He is a transparent person on one level, even if he lies a lot.
	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.
	When he's saying this, he's actually meaning this.
	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.
	I believe he doesn't care.
	I know everyone's oh, this is really getting to Trump This is really gonna upset him.
	This is really I don't know how much and I also don't know how much the resistance really Interest him at all.
	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.
	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.
	So Trump supporters look at him and they say, "This man is as honest as the day is long.
	He's incredibly honest, he speaks for me.
	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.
	And everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie.
	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.
	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?
	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.
	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.
	No, I agree.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	But I think there's something about that.
	Look, if you watch one of his speeches at one of these rallies, it really is kind of remarkable stand-up.
	And a lot of it is funny.
	That's the other thing.
	Regardless if you hate Trump or you find him repugnant, he's also funny.
	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.
	And I'm 55 and I've been around for, you know, whatever, many, many decades.
	I've never seen a president actually behave this way.
	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.
	And you're going to be really unhappy.
	You're going to be a really unhappy person.
	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.
	So one is cultural dominance.
	The left is ascendant in culture.
	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.
	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.
	Yeah.
	Of course.
	They said, okay, fine, he's our cultural guy.
	The left one.
	This boob is your cultural guy.
	I said, well, hey, you're the one who cast him in The Apprentice and then made a thing of him for 10 years.
	At the same time, he is sort of the right to answer to Jon Stewart and to Jon Oliver.
	Of course.
	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.
	And Trump is just that except all the way.
	And then he's also the answer to the left's suggestion that they are in touch with the common man.
	And here's this guy who kind of runs around in this tie that's from the 1980s.
	It's all the way down to his knees and is wider than the River Potomac.
	And he and he, you know, is is our answer to on the right, you know, the the common man problem.
	And the left looks at this.
	And I think that it's almost like looking at this bizarro mirror image of themselves.
	And they don't like what they see particularly much.
	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.
	He also beat Madame Hillary.
	And that is another, it's not only that he won the election, but that it was him who won the election over her.
	And I think that is the most painful aspect of it.
	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.
	It's that he stepped in place of her.
	And that still must sting.
	And it still does for a lot of people I know.
	Even people I know Didn't particularly like Hillary Clinton.
	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.
	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.
	And I'd gone to college with him, very good friends with him.
	And, you know, he was somewhat disillusioned by, of course, Trump getting elected.
	But about a year later, we were having dinner in a restaurant in Beverly Hills with a couple of friends of ours.
	And he said, you know, I really can't believe it.
	How effective a president was Obama if Trump, of all people, can come in and completely erase this legacy?
	Maybe not effective at all.
	And I think that is an incredibly painful pill for the left to swallow.
	And it makes them very angry and it makes them overreact to things.
	And it is, I think, part of the narrative that, again, stings the most.
	So, how do you get away with saying all this stuff?
	I mean, you work in Hollywood.
	You still work in Hollywood.
	You know what?
	I would say that I have always worked... I've been an outsider in Hollywood.
	That I work on the fringes.
	I work in independent film.
	I'm not... I've never been hired by the studios.
	I've written many, many TV pilots, but nothing that has been made.
	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.
	Rarely go to parties, rarely go to red carpet events, stop going to screenings.
	And it's always kind of been that way.
	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.
	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.
	So it's not really as if there is this huge pool of screenwriters like the ones who are writing movies for adults.
	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.
	Another one is selling real estate in Boise.
	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.
	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.
	So, look, I'm also not Walking around town with a MAGA hat on, drooling and saying how much I love Trump.
	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.
	And I think I'm known as that, and I've been known as that for many, many years.
	So I don't know if it's that shocking that I am anti-anti-Trump to a degree.
	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.
	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?
	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.
	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.
	went blue.
	There was this little section of Beverly Hills that went red right above sunset, the northeastern edges of sunset.
	So I don't know.
	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.
	You simply have to.
	And let the chips fall where they may.
	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.
	And I'm sure one or two things have not moved forward because of that.
	But on the other hand, what do you do?
	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?
	But it is true.
	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.
	because they cracked a couple of Hillary Clinton jokes in the locker room.
	I mean, that's how bad it can be.
	They were not asked back.
	So the town can be that way, but it just seems...
	I don't know, sometimes I think it's going to calm down and go away, but I don't know.
	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.
	We'll get to that in just one second.
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	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.
	You'll actually give your opinions about things, which is unique.
	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.
	Obviously, You've done that and it makes you one of the more interesting critics of film.
	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.
	So what's your approach to critiquing film?
	Because there's so much politics that's invested in this stuff.
	If you want that, what you're talking about, to stifle your real feelings about a movie, that's a problem in a way.
	I don't think I'm ever mean.
	I don't think I'm ever purposely hurtful towards someone who created something or acted in something.
	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...
	And how it affected me.
	That's all I'm doing.
	And I really stress style and aesthetics over ideology.
	Movies are about style.
	Movies are about an individual filmmaker, I believe.
	And that the best movies are made with one person's vision.
	And the best movies are really... The message is in the aesthetics.
	The message is in the style.
	I am not a fan of movies that are all about ideology, that are about victimhood.
	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...
	The kind of approach towards movies about gay people, about black lives, and about female empowerment, unless it is folded into genre.
	And then I really do like those movies, but I don't like pure message movies.
	And every year, a lot of those get made, or maybe less so, but a lot of them get rewarded.
	And that's a little annoying, you know, that representation becomes more important than how you make a movie.
	It's something that has been bothersome to me.
	And I talk about that a lot on my podcast when I'm talking about current movies.
	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.
	And one fails because it's all about ideology itself.
	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.
	That's late night.
	And the other movie, which is also written and directed by women, and it has a female empowerment vibe, is a teen comedy.
	I prefer the teen comedy a lot more than I prefer the message movie.
	So, you know, again, you have to be comfortable with what path you go on when you talk about movies.
	But I appreciate people who are honest.
	I appreciate people who are honest about my work.
	I've lived with people who haven't responded to my work.
	I've lived with people... I live with someone right now who really hates American Psycho, the novel.
	It doesn't like it at all.
	I'm completely fine with that.
	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.
	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.
	And it doesn't seem to hurt our relationships.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	If the Moonlight was absolutely going to win the Oscar, because it was the wokest film that year.
	It was gay, and it was black, and it was impoverished, and there was no question that it was going to win the Oscar.
	And you see that almost every year.
	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.
	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.
	I mean, that's what it feels like from the outside.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	I don't think it's Barry Jenkins' fault.
	I don't think he's pushing any kind of agenda.
	I think he made the kind of movie that he wanted to make.
	And I also think that sometimes we mistake all of this ideology in Moonlight.
	Yes, he's poor, he's gay, he's black.
	He's an orphan, you know, to a degree.
	His mother's a drug addict.
	And sometimes we miss the point that maybe it's really a movie about loneliness.
	You know, maybe it's just that.
	I know people who really like the movie respond to it on that vibe.
	I also think that Moonlight became inordinately rewarded at those Oscars.
	I actually thought La La Land was going to win Best Picture that year.
	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.
	And the bodies just had piled up, and it was just this inescapable thing.
	And so when we see these, you know, the vibrant bodies in Moonlight, I think it touched a chord.
	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.
	And I think that's what started the ball rolling for Moonlight.
	But it's true.
	It has to be a certain kind of movie, though, or else there's going to be a lot of complaints.
	And I think Moonlight is soft enough and innocuous enough that no one's really going to complain.
	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.
	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.
	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...
	Not bothered by Dr. Shirley's gayness.
	And I thought that was kind of a progressive step.
	But I don't know.
	But again, that is the kind of movie that is rewarded in Hollywood.
	But I have to say that I thought there was something about Green Book that was very hopeful.
	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.
	There was a kind of fatalism and a kind of negativity about them.
	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.
	And I cannot believe that people just didn't want to hear that message.
	You actually don't want to hear that message and reward this.
	That was a very telling moment in the culture. - Yeah, people were pissed.
	I mean, there's a billboard out there on Sunset Boulevard of Trevor Noah for the Emmys saying, don't Green Book this thing.
	He's now using it as a phrase.
	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.
	And in reality, we know after this many years that we cannot be friends, that there is no great coming together.
	That can happen.
	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.
	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.
	But what was surprising was that I know so many people who liked it.
	I know a lot of people who liked it, maybe secretly, and they were saying, I loved Green Book.
	And it made me feel good.
	There was hope at the end that these two characters, so divided, finally saw past their differences and got together.
	Sure, a fantasy, but at least there's a hopeful message there.
	And yeah, the movie is what it is.
	I mean, it's not a great film.
	It's kind of a middle-of-the-road comedy.
	But I don't know, I liked it a lot.
	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.
	I think that's why I liked the first half of Black Klansman.
	I think the first half of Black Klansman was a really good Spike Lee movie.
	Kind of the throwback to 70s black exploitation cop movies, and I really liked the feel of it.
	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.
	Do you think that there is any sort of way that the cultural gap can be bridged at this point?
	Because it feels like the vast majority of Americans want to watch Marvel Flex.
	I understand this is in the theater.
	If you're going to shawl 20 bucks, you want to see big explosions on screen and all of that.
	But it seems like there are only two types of movies that Hollywood is making.
	Woke movies and giant spectacle movies and nothing in between.
	It's basically the Poseidon Adventure or whatever is the wokest movie of the day.
	And there's nothing that just sort of is a broadly appealing nice movie unless it's a kid's movie.
	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.
	Well, I don't know.
	I mean, the problem is how well do these woke movies really do?
	And are they being made by Hollywood, or are they being made on the outside of Hollywood by independent production companies?
	Because I don't think Hollywood is really doing anything at all except the movies you're talking about.
	And so you have the independent film scene, which is making these movies.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	And then it's a curse because usually these movies come out and they completely bomb.
	So I don't know.
	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.
	I don't necessarily think that audiences are craving it.
	I think audiences are craving really good movies.
	And quite honestly, I think film critics are craving really good movies too.
	I just don't believe the film critic that says, oh my god, I just saw the most amazing thing at South by Southwest.
	It's this, you know, Latina, trans, handicapped chick and her travails in her neighborhood.
	I don't believe he wants to see that.
	I think they want to see Saturday Night Live.
	They want to see Saturday Night Fever.
	They want to see Taxi Driver.
	They don't really want to see that movie that's so humble and so woke.
	They want to see a real movie movie.
	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.
	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.
	Like, you can read it, it's not even between the lines.
	It's basically seeping off the page and dripping down.
	I'm going to ask you about that in just a second, but first...
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	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.
	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.
	I didn't like it.
	I critiqued it.
	I thought that it had serious racial flaws.
	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.
	I had serious problems with that premise, but the film itself works and is good.
	So Get Out, at least I thought, was well made.
	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.
	When people say, has some important things to say, I immediately signal, this is a bad film.
	Why are so many critics hesitant to actually just critique a film?
	You didn't want to see a horror movie about income inequality?
	You weren't interested in seeing that movie?
	Look, let's just be real here.
	My favorite show on television is Atlanta.
	I think Atlanta is absolutely a knockout.
	I think it's beautiful.
	I think it's brilliant.
	And it's all about style.
	It laces its ideology and its commentary through a beautiful style that is enveloping, that is rich, that is deeply moving.
	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.
	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.
	30 seconds on my podcast.
	I said something about Black Panther.
	I said something about I'm sick of Disney or Marvel.
	You know, pushing this movie as a masterpiece, when of course we're pushing it because it's a first, because of that representation.
	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.
	It just is another subpar Marvel movie, and that's what it is.
	And we just can't really pretend that doesn't exist.
	Or you can, if you want.
	But I do think the most disturbing thing this year was the critical reaction and evaluation of us.
	It was a moment where You realize that there's another world.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	So everything is now racist.
	Everyone is now racist.
	You're racist.
	I'm racist.
	Katy Perry is racist.
	Bette Midler puts out a tweet.
	She's racist.
	I mean, we've gotten into a world where real racism seems to be like, you know, so diluted and watered down.
	And we're now talking about it in cultural events and people reacting to movies or a pair of shoes or whatever.
	We've really lost control of that narrative.
	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.
	Even in a critic that I really like, I like Anthony Lane who writes for the New Yorker.
	I just knew Us was absolutely not his kind of movie.
	And you could see the path he took in order to craft that review of Us.
	Very careful, doesn't come in right out and saying anything about it.
	Stuff that I know because I've been reading him for 30 years that he wouldn't like.
	Maybe he had to write it for the New Yorker.
	Maybe the New Yorker, that's the new command, that you better like material like this.
	So, how did you get into this industry in the first place?
	I mean, how did you get into writing?
	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.
	How did you get into doing what you do?
	Well, first off, growing up out here, all of my peers and I wanted to be filmmakers.
	We all wanted to make movies.
	It is, in some sections, a company town.
	Much like Flint was a company town, whatever.
	You grow up out here, you have connections to the movie industry, you want to make movies.
	And you have to understand that the TV industry wasn't much of anything then.
	So we all went to make movies and what happened was that I was also writing books.
	And so I wrote a novel called Less Than Zero during this time, during my adolescence.
	That was published when I was 21 and that became fairly successful.
	And then I wanted to write other novels.
	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.
	It ultimately took about 25 or 30 years to write those books.
	And it was really only until about 10 years ago, 12 years ago, that I got back into wanting to make movies.
	And the goal was never to be a screenwriter.
	I mean, I grew up out here.
	I knew that the screenwriter thing was just, you know, it was a lucrative business.
	Very lucrative business in the 70s and into the 80s.
	But it wasn't filmmaking.
	It was this kind of very boring pedestrian job that you do.
	And I can't imagine being creatively satisfying.
	And it's really not creatively satisfying.
	So it was always about filmmaking.
	And what happened was that the kind of movies that I want to make, they stopped making.
	But I still want to make those movies.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	In the early 2000s, that was a possibility.
	Unthinkable now.
	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.
	And it kind of soured my feeling about making movies.
	But, you know, I still, I still, I mean, I grew up in that era.
	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.
	And that was the prime time.
	That was when I came of age with my friends.
	And so we all became infected by the notion that you could make movies as great as these movies were.
	And I have to say, all of my friends did get into the movie business.
	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?
	Look, I've directed some commercials, I've directed a web series, I've directed a few short films.
	I like doing that.
	Once you start doing that, you kind of get bitten, and you want to keep doing it.
	But they're all enjoyable to one degree or another.
	Let's make it clear.
	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.
	It still is.
	I mean, it's like writing fiction in a lot of ways.
	You know, you want the words to sound right.
	You want the paragraphs to be clear.
	You want the narrative to connect to a reader.
	So I find them all pleasurable.
	I wouldn't do any of them if I found like maybe one more pleasurable than the other.
	I find them all pleasurable.
	So when you're writing, what's your schedule and how much do you go over and polish your prose?
	What's sort of your mode?
	What's your style when you do this?
	I have to adhere to a schedule.
	I have to adhere to basically a 9 to 5, 10 to 6, maybe 11 to 7 schedule where I do write every day.
	I have my morning ritual and then I'm in my office and then I take a break.
	I either go to the gym or I'll go to a movie.
	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.
	But I like adhering to that schedule and I pretty much have always followed it.
	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.
	And I've always worked that way.
	I've always worked that way since I was writing my novels in New York.
	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?
	Because you're very critical, obviously, of his writing.
	Well, you know, I'm critical of, again, of an overreaction.
	To David Foster Wallace, and I'm reacting toward a rewritten construct of the man.
	I think the man was a far more complicated, a much darker person, and kind of like an ass.
	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.
	It was, you know, very aspirational, and I don't know if David really believed in it.
	But that's a good question.
	Look, the writers that meant a lot to me, you really only need two.
	Two or three.
	You don't need more than that.
	Everyone says, oh, who are all the influences?
	Well, I think at a certain point, obviously when I was very young, it was Hemingway.
	And Hemingway really opened the door.
	Made me want to be a writer.
	I love the writer Joan Didion.
	Her non-fiction essays and her journalism were hugely impactful, very influential.
	And I write about her in the book in white as well.
	On one kind of level, Stephen King's novels were when I was an adolescent.
	I came of age right when he started.
	So I read Carrie when I was like 10, Salem's Lot when I was 12, The Shining when I was 13.
	I read that like five or six times.
	And The Shining actually is an influence on a book of mine called Lunar Park, which is kind of an homage to Stephen King.
	But then I also was young enough, well it was the right period, and minimalism had spread throughout American fiction.
	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.
	But then, of course, they're just writers that I love.
	I mean, I love Tolstoy.
	I love Flaubert.
	I love Joyce.
	I mean, there's just a lot of... I just love... I love books.
	I love novels.
	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.
	What are the characteristics of this generation?
	What the hell do you think happened?
	All right.
	Well, what happened was, first of all, it was nothing to be taken seriously.
	It was kind of a joke.
	And I started to talk about this on Twitter when I was tweeting a lot more than I do now.
	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.
	And we got into this terrible fight.
	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.
	And I could not believe how minor this prank was caused a kid to kill himself.
	It was outrageous to me.
	There was something wrong with the kid.
	And my partner said, "No, I completely understand that." That is a violation.
	That should never have happened.
	This is a private moment for the other kid who committed suicide, blah, blah.
	And I just couldn't believe that I was listening to this.
	And then there were a lot of other things.
	There was a kind of passive aggressive positivity that I knew was kind of not real.
	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.
	And there was also this kind of deep-rooted shame.
	About everything.
	I think a lot of it connected to exhibiting yourself on social media and being like everyone is, criticized relentlessly.
	So he was kind of crippled by all of these things.
	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.
	His was kind of a touchy-feely millennial generation and I, of course, came out of Gen X.
	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.
	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.
	And I think the reaction that millennials have to this section in white, it has been hysteric.
	I mean, absolutely hysteric.
	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.
	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.
	So that seems to me to be exhibit A of what I'm talking about when millennials have this overreaction to something.
	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.
	So why are you sympathetic to it?
	Because, you know, look, they've been through a lot to a degree.
	They've been through two wars.
	They've been through... They're living with a president they can't stand.
	Their economic reality is far different than mine was in terms of their fulfilling their hopes, their aspirations and their dreams.
	It was much easier for my generation to do that because of an economic safety cushion.
	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.
	I was the old guy on the porch when I was a teenager, so really not a lot has changed.
	So that's why I'm sympathetic.
	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.
	And it was kind of like, are you effing kidding me?
	This is what, this is where your generation is.
	So I'm sympathetic as much as I have been critical.
	And look, I've lived with one for 10 years.
	So it's not as if I'm not getting something out of it.
	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.
	I was good friends with Andrew Breitbart, with whom I worked closely, and Andrew was connected at the hip to social media.
	I am firmly convinced that it was responsible for much of his high blood pressure and a lot of the stress in his life.
	Yes.
	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.
	Maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the impact of Twitter.
	Well, Twitter was fun.
	See, this is what everyone forgets.
	Twitter, when it started out, was fun.
	And it was a place to make outrageous statements that didn't define your humanity.
	They were just jokes.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	I don't believe that's really the thing that's going on.
	I believe there's this vast puritanism that's going on right now, and that's keeping everyone a child forever.
	Coddling them from offensive opinions, from viewpoints that are different from yours.
	And I noticed the connection between this, between what Twitter once was and what Twitter warped into.
	And as naughty and disturbing for some, Twitter was in its first days.
	People had a good time.
	People were not stressed out.
	And then people started to lose jobs because of tweets.
	Then people started to lose things because of tweets.
	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.
	And it really has.
	It has warped into something that was really fun into really a toxic nightmare.
	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.
	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.
	I don't want this.
	I mean, I like people who are critical, who have opinions.
	But then, when it gets into, you know, we're at, you know, level 100 of negativity and toxicity, then...
	I can't bear it.
	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?
	Twitter is real?
	Twitter is this thing that you take so seriously?
	It was kind of the best.
	kind of the beginning of the end for me.
	And I rarely use it.
	I use it as a kind of promotional tool, though actually Facebook works better than Twitter does for me.
	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.
	And I know that people are disappointed by that, but it's just too exhausting. - It's rotten, it wrecks your life.
	It does.
	Completely.
	life.
	It does.
	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.
	Completely.
	Where if you do not just obey whatever is the diktat of the day, and the diktat changes daily.
	Like, we don't know what the rules are, and so the rules change on a routine basis.
	And so they'll hold some joke tweet that you had from 2009 over you.
	And then if you say the wrong thing, then they retweet it at you, and suddenly it's a pile on.
	And I'm not talking about me personally.
	I'm talking about folks like James Gunn, right?
	James Gunn was using Twitter in exactly this way back in 2009, 2010.
	And then he ran afoul of some folks politically, and suddenly he was seeing all of these tweets resurfaced.
	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.
	And we're seeing it with Kevin Hart, too.
	I mean, just this, and it's not just Twitter anymore.
	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.
	It really is.
	It's devastating.
	I don't know how you can have a culture, a common culture, when this is the way that things go.
	Well, you can't, but I also have learned that I ultimately have learned that I don't really care that much.
	I have never deleted any of my tweets.
	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.
	And I had actually tweeted that out to my 600,000 followers in the middle of the night.
	And that's still up there.
	I have never deleted that tweet either.
	So I find it toxic now.
	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.
	And how bad could they be after that one?
	I mean, really?
	You order drugs on Twitter?
	What?
	I make a... I don't know.
	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.
	You're obviously not politically conservative in like the traditional sense, I don't think.
	So how did this happen?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	How did this happen, Ben?
	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.
	And so I see myself as not a conservative, not a liberal.
	I'm certainly not a Republican.
	I'm certainly not a Democrat.
	I'm not on the right.
	I'm not on the left.
	I'm an observer.
	And there are things going on in the culture right now that kind of drive me to distraction.
	And I'm annoyed by.
	And I talk about this on my podcast.
	And it mostly is about this puritanism that I see washing through the public.
	And I don't know where that's going to go.
	With an overreactive, hysteric populace that is overreacting to everything.
	And including, I believe, Trump.
	But that hit the nerve.
	When I talk about it in other aspects of the culture, people will go, oh yeah, maybe, whatever.
	But when you talk about this in terms of Trump, people go nuts.
	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.
	But again, I feel the message is clear, and I am happy to talk to anybody.
	I also don't live in a bubble, and this is something that I write about in White.
	I have plenty of friends who like Trump, and I have plenty of friends who don't.
	As I said, I live with a millennial communist, so I hear 24-7 everything horrible about Trump.
	I have friends and acquaintances who really like Trump.
	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.
	But just because I have not taken a side doesn't mean that I'm on this side for Trump.
	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.
	Look, I've been profiled with the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post.
	But I also was profiled by Breitbart and I think that's totally acceptable and that's totally fine.
	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.
	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.
	But then, you know, Bernie went on Fox and it all kind of became okay for him in a way.
	So it's like, okay, yeah, I think you can do more Fox shows, he said.
	I think you should go do Steve Hilton and whoever else wants you on.
	And I think that divide, I don't like that divide, that notion that we all can't be talking.
	I'm sure there are things you and I do not agree on.
	I'm sure there are things that we might strongly disagree on.
	But that doesn't mean that I can't have a conversation with you.
	I was highly, highly disturbed by what happened to you with Mark Duplass, who is someone I've had on my podcast.
	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.
	Well, who knows?
	Maybe Donald Trump will be the greatest president in history.
	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.
	I'm surprised that Lynch did that.
	I mean, I would think he's too old and doesn't really give a shit about that.
	But that's where we are.
	And I hate that.
	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.
	And it doesn't necessarily have to be about The thing.
	The DT.
	It can be about a lot of other stuff.
	But it is true.
	The left is much, much more prone to not dealing with me with this book than the right has been.
	But I don't like that.
	I've always felt that way.
	I talk to everybody.
	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.
	But if you want to hear Bredi St.
	Ellis' answer, then you actually have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
	To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
	Click subscribe.
	You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Bredi St.
	Ellis, thank you so much for stopping by.
	Really great to see you.
	Great to see you, Ben.
	Thank you.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer, Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromino.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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