April 5, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:09
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| My moment was the headline of the New York Times after I guess it was the first or second | ||
| Republican debate where Trump had gone on CNN and talked about how Megyn Kelly was bleeding | ||
| through her eyes. | ||
| I think it was first. | ||
| And I thought, okay, well, whatever. | ||
| But it was the top headline at the top of the New York Times. | ||
| And I thought, that is so strange. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| To humiliate Trump to some degree? | ||
| This was just something that you could kind of, you know, talk about minimally, but to create an entire narrative over this in order to humiliate him or to get him canceled was the beginning for me of like, oh, there's something else going on. | ||
| There's a secret history here. | ||
|
unidentified
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(dramatic music) | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Quick reminder, guys, to subscribe on YouTube and click that notification button so that you might just see our videos in your feed. | ||
| More importantly, joining me today is an author, screenwriter, podcaster, and bad gay, Bret Easton Ellis. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I just added bad gay on the fly there. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| Just from our little pre... | ||
| No, I've been called a bad gay by other gays, and it's been going on for a while now, so I'm fine with it. | ||
| And I'm just surprised that you threw that into the mix of what I do and who I am, but yeah, that's been a part of my, I guess, reputation for a little while now. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| So before we get to the bad gay, why is this guy a bad gay thing? | ||
| By the way, I'm considered a bad gay, too. | ||
| So you're in good company. | ||
| That is not a pejorative when I say bad gay. | ||
| There's a ton I want to talk to you about. | ||
| You're on the short list of people that I think relatively make sense in 2020, which is a very high compliment. | ||
| Many people think I don't, but I'm glad that you think I do. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| I don't know what that says about me. | ||
| But what I want to start with is you are actually from Los Angeles. | ||
|
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I am. | |
| You are a Los Angelino. | ||
| I am. | ||
| As they say, you grew up in Los Angeles. | ||
| I know how it framed a lot of your work. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about what it's like to grow up in this really bizarre city? | ||
| Well, I think it was perhaps less bizarre in many ways. | ||
| When I grew up in the 1970s, I was born in the 60s and basically my childhood was spent here in the San Fernando Valley and I think it wasn't necessarily that The geography of L.A. | ||
| was so special, though it was. | ||
| Growing up someplace where you can get to the beach in 20 minutes and then the mountains in an hour and then the desert in 90 minutes was kind of a very special, magical place to grow up. | ||
| There's a lot of freedom out here. | ||
| And there's a lot of freedom also for a child and a teenager because of cars and mobility and the freeways. | ||
| And once you get that driver's license at 15 and a half, your learner's permit, then you're off and running. | ||
| And you have all of this space to explore. | ||
| And that was what was so wonderful about growing up here in Los Angeles during that era. | ||
| I think the other thing that was special about it was just special about being a kid in the 1970s. | ||
| And that was, again, an emphasis on freedom. | ||
| A lot of freedom. | ||
| I barely saw my parents. | ||
| Maybe my mom more so than my father, who was, you know, a 9-to-5 guy who worked at a firm downtown. | ||
| But I just remember, especially now, knowing so many parents who have a kind of lockdown feeling about their children, that it was kind of amazing how much freedom we had and how that freedom aided us in growing up and slowly move toward adulthood. | ||
| And I really cherish that. | ||
| And I really love that sense that we were left to our own devices. | ||
| No parent was hovering over us, making sure we were doing this or doing that. | ||
| And that we had all of this room to roam. | ||
| And also just to like, I don't know, read whatever we wanted to read, see whatever movies we wanted to see. | ||
| And also in that decade, things were really not made for kids. | ||
| It was a culture that was completely made for adults. | ||
| And as a kid, That's where you navigated yourself through, and you really learned a lot about the secrets of the adult world, the world that you really did want to move into. | ||
| So that is kind of what I remember from my childhood, both on just as a human being and then as a kid growing up here in LA. | ||
| Yeah, so that's why I wanted to start there, because I think a lot of that, it's very obvious that that framed a good portion of your work, but then also when you see now the way LA has become, and because political correctness and everything that seemingly is so wrong with society that it seems like it all comes from right here, it must drive you crazy. | ||
| Like, you know, we can't have hosts at the Oscars anymore for a place that used to be edgy and free and artistic and all that good stuff. | ||
| Well, look, that's not just L.A. | ||
| That's pretty much everywhere, and it really is, particularly in the entertainment environs of, you know, the West Coast and the East Coast. | ||
| That's just where we are right now. | ||
| A kind of corporate culture mentality in terms of, like, the blanding out of the culture and making no one as offended and all that stuff. | ||
| No, I mean, I'm kind of disappointed in many ways at how the narrative turned out from my childhood of freedom in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s, 1980s, being an artist and how important it was to have a voice that was uncorrupted by corporate hands, let's say, and that you had the freedom to tell any story you wanted to, you know, cultural appropriation hadn't yet existed. | ||
| So my disappointment isn't necessarily in California politics and how they have kind of ruined a lot of the state, but more or less this mindset that says we all have to act and be a certain way. | ||
| That's the thing that I miss most. | ||
| And when you say that about, yes, the Oscars, that we can't have a host because, first of all, who wants to host it? | ||
| And second of all, they'll Google you if you're the host and they'll find out you said this. | ||
| Sometimes 17 years ago, or 12 years ago, and then you can't be. | ||
| We must be destroyed for what we said 17 years ago. | ||
| Canceled, canceled, canceled. | ||
| But no, that's a cultural thing that is really part of what, and I'm not here to plug the book, but what White is about. | ||
| White really is about the trajectory of being a Gen X guy who had all of this freedom and this sense of possibility about expression and expressing yourself, and then ending up in the summer of 2017 or 2018 going, What the hell happened? | ||
| What happened to all of that and where did that go? | ||
| Yeah, how much of your sort of view on all this is shaped by being a bad gay? | ||
| That gays are sort of outsiders off the bat and that does frame how you kind of look at the world a little bit. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| Well, look, it's what I think made me want to be a writer in many ways. | ||
| I think being gay as a kid then, I'm not so sure now, I think it's probably a lot easier and you're a lot more, what's the word, acclimated into culture in a way at a much earlier age than we ever were. | ||
| I'm a bit older than you, but growing up in the 70s and into the 80s, you were kind of a secret agent. | ||
| You were a little bit of a secret agent, but you were not out. | ||
| You had to navigate these paths on your own. | ||
| One of the things that I think is really interesting about being gay is that you have to look at the world in a much more realistic, Hard way than your straight counterpoints do. | ||
| I think that you see the world for what it's really like. | ||
| You're not really involved in the poses and in the gamemanship that goes on within, you know, societal structures. | ||
| And you also have to, you know, redefine most everything that you experience culturally, whether it's movies, whether it's pop songs, whether it's things you watch on TV, whether it's books you read. | ||
| So you really begin to see the world in a way that none of your other friends do. | ||
| You are an outsider. | ||
| You are an outsider because of that. | ||
| But I also have to say that I did not let it define me. | ||
| And it was not something that ever got me down. | ||
| I never got depressed by it. | ||
| It was something that I realized was just another thing I had to deal with among many other things I had to deal with. | ||
| It was not, and I think this is probably where, I was not that concerned with it. | ||
| And it became something that was, you know, I resented the fact that I couldn't express | ||
| myself in a certain way. | ||
| And I think that frustration certainly played a part in wanting to become a writer. | ||
| So I have to say, you know, thank you in a way. | ||
| I mean, it kind of worked for me, ultimately. | ||
| Yeah, but when you see what sort of has happened to the gay community, where it used to maybe in the 70s and 80s, and before that, there was a subversive nature to it, a lot of good art and music and underground scenes, and writing, and all sorts of things came from it, where now it seems like it's so the reverse. | ||
| It's the most sort of woke, sort of cemented, bland way of thinking. | ||
| In terms of mainstream gay, whatever the hell that is. | ||
| But I have to say, that's true of everything. | ||
| And it's just that what happened the last ten years is that gay life, whatever that means, and I do believe that there is a certain aspect, if you're a gay person, that you do have A bit of a gay life. | ||
| It doesn't mean that it overwhelms you and everything becomes gay. | ||
| It means that, yeah, sure, you have the same preoccupations and some of the same concerns as fellow gay people. | ||
| You obviously have to in terms of 20 years ago politics, or even further back than that, how the United States was dealing with the AIDS crisis, for example. | ||
| So you are pushed together to a degree. | ||
| But I think that that's happening all over the place. | ||
| I do find it distressing, though, that the gay community And I have gay friends who hate me even using that term now, the gay community. | ||
| They really resent it. | ||
| But there is a gay community. | ||
| I live in West Hollywood. | ||
| I see it on the boulevard all the time. | ||
| But I think the problem is that that is happening everywhere. | ||
| And I do think that I would love it if the gay community listened more to someone like Morrissey, who is constantly criticized by the gay community. | ||
| For just being open and honest and saying what he feels. | ||
| I don't think he's attacking anybody. | ||
| He's just, he's not really on the right side of the political curve for most gay people. | ||
| And he's automatically attacked. | ||
| Now, that is really true for a lot of people. | ||
| I wish that was pulled back. | ||
| And I wish that the conversation was much more open. | ||
| It just isn't right now. | ||
| And that is a problem. | ||
| But it's not just affecting the gay community. | ||
| It's, I think, everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, do you see that as sort of a direct offshoot of what identity politics has done? | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Like, if you don't identify enough as gay, or the new thing is that you can be gay, so there's like a Peter Thiel, Pete Buttigieg, maybe the way we are, a little bit version of gay, but we're not queer, sort of. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, we don't prescribe to the whole set of ideas. | ||
| It's not enough to be an out gay person living in West Hollywood. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, from LA for, you know, 50 years. | ||
| That doesn't quite get it. | ||
| But you have to understand, I kind of made my way through that in the 80s as a young writer. | ||
| And I knew, I was in what I called the glass closet. | ||
| Meaning everyone I knew knew I was gay, and I had a partner. | ||
| When I talked to the media, I couched it. | ||
| Back in those days, basically, if you came out and you were a gay writer, you were ghettoized to a degree. | ||
| You were put into the gay section of bookstores. | ||
| I don't think they have those anymore. | ||
| I'm not sure if they do, but they did have them, and it meant a kind of death, in a way, for a mainstream acceptance. | ||
| Right, so even if you weren't writing about gay things specifically, sort of, you were gay, so, oh, right. | ||
| Look, I was on the gay channel on SiriusXM. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| I didn't want to be on the gay channel. | ||
| I wanted to be on any of the politics channels. | ||
| I would beg them, put me on the left channel, put me on the right channel, the other channel, anything, but they were like, well, you're gay. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What do we do with the gay? | ||
| Exactly, which is the problem, and that is what I always resisted, because I knew I was so much more than simply gay, or who I wanted to have sex with. | ||
| I always knew that from a very early age, that I was a writer, that I was a person, that I liked movies, all these things that I wanted to do, and then there was gay somewhere over here. | ||
| And I never felt the need to make that the number one aspect of my identity. | ||
| I don't even think I even came out to anybody. | ||
| It just sort of happened gradually. | ||
| Oh, you're bringing Jim to the party, or Jim's coming for the weekend, or whatever. | ||
| And that was how it was. | ||
| I really didn't think that anyone kind of deserved a tearful coming out for me, and I never even felt that. | ||
| Now that's not to say that people needed to go through that narrative, and that's fine, but I just didn't tie myself into with a gay identity. | ||
| And so I do think that that is a problem, but again, not just for gay people, but for people of color, for women, it really had But I also believe, Dave, that this is an online problem, in a way. | ||
| There is an offline world out there. | ||
| An offline world. | ||
| Does that thing still exist? | ||
| Which are we right now? | ||
| Well, I think we're having an offline conversation, I hope. | ||
| I hope I live my entire life offline to a degree, even when I'm online. | ||
| And I have done that. | ||
| I've gotten into a lot of trouble over the past decade or so. | ||
| But I think there's an offline world, and I am... | ||
| I'm part of it, and I know that the way women and men and gay people express themselves are very different than how they express themselves online. | ||
| And that is kind of where we're at right now, and I think a lot of people are too afraid to say things that they say offline, online, and we'll just see where this, you know, plays itself out. | ||
| So it's funny you bring that up because I was going to mention a little bit later since this is jumping ahead that American Psycho, it's almost to me, which was your third novel, right? | ||
| It was the third novel, yes. | ||
| That it's like we're all sort of behaving like American Psycho now. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like we're all sort of sane in the functional world, in the real world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then everyone with their secret avatars and their anonymous accounts or whatever is a psychopath online. | ||
| So like it's maybe there's your sequel or something. | ||
| Well, that's really interesting. | ||
| I mean, I talk a lot about the creation of American Psycho in the book White, and for some reason it's haunted me because it was something that I really thought was going to be this strange, experimental novel that maybe 3,000 people read. | ||
| I thought it was so weird, so out there, so super violent and pornographic that it would never find a mainstream audience. | ||
| Don't forget misogynistic, because it costs you some stuff. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I'm not saying that. | ||
| that I'm saying what the criticism yeah a misogyny just because there's acts of | ||
| misogyny doesn't mean the book is misogynist of course that is so so I | ||
| really didn't think that many people were gonna read it but I also think that | ||
| one of the reasons why it's still look popular today and still in print and | ||
| tons of people read the book A lot of it has to do with the movie. | ||
| The movie definitely made people reinterested in the book. | ||
| It was because Patrick Bateman is kind of a curator of his life in a way. | ||
| Very much the way people are now. | ||
| A lot of American Psycho is almost as if Patrick Bateman is showing you a series of selfies on his Instagram. | ||
| He's constantly describing his life, and what he's wearing, and what he's eating, and where he's going, and what restaurant he's at, and what dishes he's eating in the restaurant. | ||
| It basically is how people treat their lives today, from this kind of like almost God's eye view of, you know, not living or participating in it, but actually just like photographing it. | ||
| and curating their life rather than living their life. | ||
| Yeah, and what about the part about having sort of two separate lives in a way? | ||
| Because that's what seems to me people are doing online right now. | ||
| Well, that is true, but you can also, I don't know if I have a lot of sympathy for that. | ||
| It kind of is frustrating to see people do that. | ||
| But look, I know a lot of people on Instagram do that. | ||
| You know, I talked to my partner's sister, who one morning was extremely depressed. | ||
| They were on the phone and she was just complaining about her life and how unhappy she was. | ||
| And then, you know, 15 minutes later, she took these Instagram photos of herself, totally happy with the kids. | ||
| Great Monday, looking forward to the week. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think people are complicated and I think, you know, people are basically wrecks a lot of the time. | ||
| And I think that social media gives them a chance to make them feel better about themselves to a degree. | ||
| But I do wonder if there is, if the ties are going to turn and we are going to have a more realistic, authentic social media. | ||
| Or if maybe it's just not possible because of the medium itself. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting. | ||
| I mean, I think some of us are trying to fight through it and do something more authentic and be a little more real. | ||
| I think you certainly do. | ||
| Well, I try, but it's like you have to kind of try to do it as opposed to just waking up and... I mean, I've stopped. | ||
| Right, so you're on Twitter much less, yeah. | ||
| I tweet my podcast out. | ||
| And occasionally I'll make a joke about, I don't know what. | ||
| I made a joke about the coronavirus a week ago and then people thought it was racist. | ||
| So it was sort of like, it was a doge. | ||
| It was a doge meme. | ||
| You know, one of those, remember those dogs? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it was going, oh, ordering some bat soup and then saying, oh, I've got the virums or whatever. | ||
| Something in doge. | ||
| Oh, so you were being anti-Asian. | ||
| Anti-Asian, yes, because the Doge was buying the bat soup from a dog that had an Asian mustache, and oh, whatever, and got a lot of racism from that. | ||
| So I don't do it. | ||
| I don't really do it anymore. | ||
| I don't really care. | ||
| I'm older. | ||
| It doesn't really matter that much to me. | ||
| I have a podcast. | ||
| I can say a lot of what I want to say on the podcast without having to be careful about how it's worded in a 200-word tweet. | ||
| And so that's one of the reasons why podcasting began to seem so interesting to me | ||
| because you could place everything within context in a way that you can't on social media. | ||
| Yeah, are you not surprised then that people actually care about this sort of thing? | ||
| What sort of thing? | ||
| Well, meaning conversation, like actual just decent conversation | ||
| where if you watch everything on mainstream media and the sound bites and everything, | ||
| it's just like we're getting clubbed over the head. | ||
| And then it doesn't seem very, like people always say, "Oh Dave, it's so great. | ||
| "You bring people in, you treat them fairly, you have nice conversations, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| This is not rocket science. | ||
| Well, this is also not the mainstream media. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my podcast is not the mainstream media. | ||
| No, that's what I mean, that people are starving for something else. | ||
| Oh, I certainly think that's why podcasts blew up. | ||
| I mean, that's one reason why podcasts blew up and why it's become such a popular thing because of its authenticity and that it is two people having a real conversation compared to, I mean, I really don't, I don't understand. | ||
| Because we can get into the questions. | ||
| They're all here, and I needed to do them in two minutes each, you know? | ||
|
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What? | |
| The... The gotcha questions. | ||
| They're all there. | ||
| Oh, I'm fine with the gotcha questions. | ||
| I love gotcha questions. | ||
| I love that when you walked in, immediately, you were like, hey, whatever you want to do. | ||
| Yeah, whatever you want to do is totally fine. | ||
| But I do think that it's hard for me to watch people on talk shows now, or on morning shows, promoting whatever they are, and pretending to have some kind of real conversation. | ||
| It's unfathomable to me that anybody can do that, let alone read a... | ||
| A magazine article about a celebrity, it just seems like because they're so... | ||
| Neutered. | ||
| One of the things I've been thinking about lately is when I go on my book tour for my first book, so you've been through this rodeo before, is that I'm gonna have to go on these shows. | ||
| And it's like the idea that I would have to change from this mode, which is just me being myself sitting across from you doing it, you know, no time constraints, the rest of it, versus now go on all those shows between commercial breaks, the pointed questions, you gotta get somebody riled up about something, like that actually gives me a little anxiety versus like You want to just talk about whatever you want to talk about for as long as you want to, I'm good to go. | ||
| But you can do it offensively. | ||
| Because I hadn't been on a book tour for 10 years, and I went on one last year, and I'm still kind of on it. | ||
| And I was shaky at first, not doing it for 10 years. | ||
| 2010 to 2019, a lot has changed. | ||
| And so I kind of like... | ||
| I got used to it, and I figured out how you do that, and you stay an authentic person. | ||
| Also, I have to tell you, a lot of it was print. | ||
| And the things that I did that were media were surprisingly... I mean, look, I did a lot of mainstream stuff. | ||
| I did Bill Maher, I did stuff on Fox, but a lot of the mainstream media didn't want to touch me. | ||
| So that was something that I really didn't have to worry about. | ||
| A little bit different in England, a little bit different in France. | ||
| But when I did the mainstream stuff, the talk shows, I was just myself and people liked it. | ||
| People liked it. | ||
| I think that's what you have to do. | ||
| People can smell inauthenticity. | ||
| And part of the problem now is that, and my partner and I talk about this all the time, is that how do you survive in this day and age without being authentic? | ||
| You can't really do it. | ||
| You might have been able to do it 10 years ago and done your pose and said your scripted lines. | ||
| It just doesn't work now. | ||
| People smell it. | ||
| And that also means that you will be hated by a lot of people. | ||
| And you just have to live your life and let the cards fall where they may. | ||
| And that means maybe you're not going to get that job or be on that show or whatever, but you have to be able to sleep at night. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because one of the things that I like about that sort of pressure of authenticity, maybe that's not the right word, pressure, but it constantly forces you to reinvent yourself in a way because it's like, if I give a talk and then I give the same talk the next night, which I never try to do, I'm always trying to push myself to change it and feel, you know, really just like, what am I really thinking right now? | ||
| Like, did I think this and now I moved it forward a little bit, or did this thought go the other way, or whatever. | ||
| And that's actually good, creatively. | ||
| But you're also doing that, when you say that, kind of naturally. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not really trying. | ||
| The fact that you're even thinking about that means that you are concerned about this and it's coming to you naturally. | ||
| I don't think you're sweating it, necessarily. | ||
| Because I feel the same way. | ||
| I feel that I've been able to adapt in many ways and want to adapt to what's going on in the world. | ||
| And my career is very different now than it was at one point. | ||
| And I also think it's hard to keep a career going that long without adapting. | ||
| I think you're stuck in a kind of stasis, and that as an artist, or as a creator, that you want to adapt. | ||
| That it's something that you want to do, that it feels natural to you. | ||
| If this is making sense. | ||
| It makes some sense. | ||
| I'm kind of there. | ||
| You mentioned cancel culture before, and then I brought up the charges of misogyny related to American Psycho. | ||
| So I just read on your Wikipedia, and if it's on Wikipedia, it's gotta be true, that you had the deal for American Psycho with Simon & Schuster, but then because, what was it, women of now, or the now of women, or the, something, they accused you of being misogynistic. | ||
| And then, was the book dropped? | ||
| I mean, this is sort of an early version of cancel calls. | ||
| Oh, it is, it was. | ||
| Clean that story up for me, I got it on Wikipedia. | ||
| I had a deal at Simon & Schuster, a big deal at Simon & Schuster. | ||
| I turned the book in, This is a long time ago, in December of 1989. | ||
| And throughout 1990, the book kind of moved through the usual rungs of the ladder that it does through a publishing house. | ||
| Getting copy edited, we figure out a cover, your editor does some basic editing on it. | ||
| But there were people in the publishing house who were very offended by American Psycho. | ||
| usually assistants, young people working in the publishing house. | ||
| And leaks started happening. | ||
| Leaks of some of the most violent passages were being sent to the press and certain members | ||
| of the press. | ||
| And so suddenly it became a story. | ||
| The book hadn't been published yet, but it became a story. | ||
| And it became more and more controversial the more and more that these notorious scenes | ||
| were leaked. | ||
| And of course out of context they're horrible. | ||
| And so anyway, the controversy got louder and louder and louder, and yes, kind of like today in a way, Simon & Schuster collapsed and said we are not going to publish this book because of the outcry in the media. | ||
| This is another thing that happened then, is that it was actually the corporation that owned Simon & Schuster that demanded the cancellation. | ||
| It was Gulf & Western, who owned Simon & Schuster, and the head of Gulf & Western did not like the controversy, did not like the fact that his corporation was being blemished by this book, who ordered the cancellation. | ||
| I knew the head of that company of Simon & Schuster quite well, and I knew that he wasn't the one who canceled it, but he was the fall guy. | ||
| Yeah, to take it. | ||
| So, anyway, that is what happened. | ||
| It's a happy ending because a better publisher picked up American Psycho and they published it a few months later and, you know, the rest is whatever it is. | ||
| Right, so it definitely ends happily and a movie's made and everything else. | ||
| And I have to say, one thing that's very interesting is that Tammy Bruce was the head of NOW, who was the most against American Psycho. | ||
| She was my nemesis then, in 1991, and now... That's hilarious! | ||
| And now she's on, she's one of the leading lights, the bright lights on Fox, actually. | ||
| And so, I don't know, I find that kind of ironic in the way that the culture works. | ||
| I mean, that fits so much of a lot of the stuff that we've talked about privately, because I've only met Tammy Bruce once. | ||
| It was at a David Horowitz Freedom Center thing, and David Horowitz was a famous lefty, children of communists. | ||
| Of course, of course. | ||
| Who then, you know, became conservative. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And at his conference, he did a thing on sort of the new generation of former lefties that have sort of woken up, and it was me, Tammy Bruce, Candace Owens, and a couple other people. | ||
| So that's the only time I met her. | ||
| And it's funny, she was opposed to you back then, and here you are. | ||
| That's actually a great segue for a little political stuff. | ||
| Where are you politically? | ||
| I mean, I have a sense of kind of where you're at, and everything these days feels sort of amorphous. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I was never a political person. | ||
| I just wasn't. | ||
| Maybe it was because I was privileged to a degree and politics just didn't interest me. | ||
| Why would they? | ||
| I was a privileged white kid. | ||
| And moving from high school into college during the Reagan 80s, everything seemed whatever. | ||
| I mean, I guess I complained about Reagan mindlessly like all of my other kids. | ||
| kids in my class and a lot of people took American Psycho to be a book that was critical | ||
| of the values of the Reagan 80s. | ||
| And it was critical of some of the cultural values, certainly about greed and about yuppiedom, | ||
| but I didn't end up beefing with Ronald Reagan. | ||
| I mean, that wasn't part of what that book was about. | ||
| Some of his iconography is used in the book, but he was just the president during the time | ||
| that that book took place. | ||
| And then, you know, I was living with someone for a long time who was very invested in politics, actually ran a couple of gubernatorial campaigns in the 90s, and I got a close-up look to that and I just hated it. | ||
| I just hated the whole notion of how it was all played out and none of it interested me. | ||
| And it really, and I, during the Obama era, everything's fine. | ||
| I mean, I wasn't really paying attention. | ||
| Something happened with Trump. | ||
| Something happened with Trump that I think has happened to all of us to one degree or another. | ||
| Something was announced. | ||
| And I, again, another presidential election cycle is coming up, and I'm kind of following it, but suddenly I'm following it because it's very interesting to me how the media is treating the Donald Trump narrative. | ||
| Now I'm talking about a media that I've been following closely for 30 years and trusted somewhat. | ||
| The New York Times, CNN. | ||
| New York Times and CNN. | ||
| All of my life. | ||
| I read them and I trusted them and I believed in them and it was all, they were, you know. | ||
| And I began to think that they were missing the story. | ||
| That they were going off a different path that really wasn't the reality. | ||
| That wasn't the reality. | ||
| That there was a new narrative that they were forming. | ||
| And this began to bother me. | ||
| And I don't know why. | ||
| I hear ya. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I'm non-partisan. | ||
| I never saw myself as... I think we have a similar trajectory. | ||
| I think that I was a liberal guy who was gay and was rightly so. | ||
| Rightly so. | ||
| It was fine. | ||
| Never stridently. | ||
| Never far left or whatever. | ||
| But I believed in the good fight on the liberal side. | ||
| Something happened. | ||
| I began to see that this side was curdling. | ||
| Do you remember a moment? | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| A lot of people have, like, the moment. | ||
| Yeah, what was your moment? | ||
| My moment was the headline of the New York Times after, I guess it was the first or second Republican debate where Trump had gone on CNN and talked about how Megyn Kelly was bleeding through her eyes. | ||
| I think it was first. | ||
| And I thought, okay, well, whatever, but it was, The top headline at the top of the New York Times. | ||
| And I thought, that is so strange. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| To humiliate Trump to some degree? | ||
| This was just something that you could kind of talk about minimally, but to create an entire narrative over this in order to humiliate him or to get him canceled was the beginning for me of like, oh, there's something else going on. | ||
| There's a secret history here. | ||
| And that is how I began to become somewhat radicalized in a way from who I thought I was to where I ended up being. | ||
| And again, I have to say I'm not a partisan. | ||
| I still am someone who is loathe to vote. | ||
| I'm in the majority of this country. | ||
| And yet, what I've noticed- You mean you didn't go to my dumpy polling station over here, where I'm pretty sure I contracted coronavirus? | ||
| You weren't there yesterday? | ||
| No, I was not there, and I'm not going to be there either. | ||
| But what I found so interesting, and really what White, a lot of it is about, is about how I saw the left begin to disintegrate. | ||
| And a part of the aisle that I thought I was on, I thought I was in that part, that side of the theater. | ||
| And I realize that I'm not, and I don't want to be on this side of the theater if it is this hysterical, this crazed, and also I really hated the creation of narratives that were obviously not true that were being used to undermine a legally elected president, whether I liked him or didn't like him. | ||
| I just thought there was something so distinctly un-American about the way the left was creating their stories that it just began to to unnerve me. | ||
| Yeah, you know what's super interesting about that? | ||
| That David Horowitz, who we just mentioned, when I had him in here, he's a huge Trump supporter, and I asked him, do you have a moment when that happened? | ||
| And he mentioned the Megyn Kelly bleeding line, because he said for him, as someone that was a conservative, but didn't understand the Trump thing, he's like, that moment got it for him, because it was basically Trump being like, screw all of you, I play by none of your rules. | ||
| So that same moment that sort of had you wake up from a media perspective as a lefty for him as a conservative was like that was why he loved Trump. | ||
| But it's so weird because yes the Trump screw all the rules guy is what everyone loves. | ||
| That's what everybody loves. | ||
| And it's so interesting that yet on the other side it's what a lot of people are horrified by. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who would normally love that in a person? | |
| And yet, because it's Trump, and this is the problem with Trump, and I talk about this again in the book, it is about, I really believe it's about an aesthetic. | ||
| It's about this guy and what he looks like, and I always have said that if Trump was in the package of a Mitt Romney, it might be more palatable for a lot of people, and we certainly would not have this kind of, like, what is truly, I believe, Trump Derangement Syndrome. | ||
| I believe it exists. | ||
| Do you mean purely physically? | ||
| Or you also mean some of the language, the tweets, everything. | ||
| Even, look, my mom is a huge Trump supporter, as is my stepdad, as are a lot of friends of mine. | ||
| And that is the one complaint that kind of comes up that they wish he was, that he would take things down a bit. | ||
| Though I don't believe that. | ||
| I don't believe that either. | ||
| I believe that is exactly why they like him. | ||
| And that, again, it's that kind of like, well, it proves that you're like a better person than perhaps you really are. | ||
| To say something like Well, that's what I always think of sort of the never Trump liberals or the never Trump conservatives. | ||
| It's like he did all the dirty work, he had to do all the tweets and all that stuff, and then he won. | ||
| You guys just always lose. | ||
| So it's like easy to crap on him so you can still go to nice parties. | ||
| But it really is, I think, part of the problem is that for some reason Trump just, I mean, I still hear it from people, this notion, and they're still not over it, that he's not presidential. | ||
| I think people are talking like it's 2015. | ||
| I think everything has changed. | ||
| A lot of things have changed about the presidency under Trump. | ||
| He's really, you know, he's been the bull in the china shop. | ||
| And, you know, he's still there. | ||
| And he's still the disruptor, which is what a lot of people wanted from him. | ||
| What I don't get on the other side, and believe me, I live with someone who is a far-left Bernie Sanders supporter who really crumples at the thought of Trump or seeing him on TV every night. | ||
| Just completely loses his shit over Trump. | ||
| I just don't understand where there wasn't a moment where a kind of cunning didn't come into liberal thinking about how to deal with Trump. | ||
| That instead it was just pandemonium, apocalyptic hysteria. | ||
| It was everything. | ||
| Let's create the Russian theory. | ||
| Let's create this. | ||
| Let's bring Stormy Daniels out. | ||
| Let's bring Michael Avenatti. | ||
| Let's do all of these things. | ||
| Instead of, I think, just finding that perfect Southern leftists who could kind of like play with Trump on his own field. | ||
| Right, like have a nice sense of humor, be kind of respectable. | ||
| And I think basically, and I think part of the problem that happened during those three years was that the left became fractured, became over, they lost judgment. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| They lost judgment with Trump. | ||
| Because once you start getting that hysterical and you start making up all this stuff, you lose your judgment. | ||
| And I think that is ultimately where they are now. | ||
| But again, we'll see how it plays out. | ||
| As a writer though, is Trump in a way like the most perfect character that someone could ever come up with because of that? | ||
| Because of his ability to have so many people have completely polar opposite reactions when he says, One thing, and if you look at Twitter and it's like one person heard the end of the world and one person heard the Messiah coming, like that as a character for a writer must be like, whoa, that's what I want to come up with. | ||
| Well, look, I am a fairly positive person. | ||
| So if those people hear the Messiah coming, well, they heard the Messiah coming. | ||
| I think the other side is deaf and blind to whatever Trump offers. | ||
| The other side, that's the problem. | ||
| The conversation isn't happening. | ||
| It is so one note on one side in terms of understanding Trump, of getting out of your bubble and understanding the appeal of Trump. | ||
| If you're not able to do that, you're dead. | ||
| You're basically not, you're gonna be a very unhappy, very miserable person. | ||
| That's also why I see a lot of people that I thought were pretty relevant a couple years ago, politically and socially, that now seem crazy to me. | ||
| Because they've been unable to recalibrate after this, or at least see a little bit of something that other people saw. | ||
| I'm reading this book called Antisocial by Andrew Marantz, who's a writer for The New Yorker, and it really is about his hellish descent into, starting with the deplorable at the, in Washington, inauguration in 2017, and trying to figure out alt-right people like, whatever, Mike Cernovich, or Milo, And it really reads like a lot of stuff in The New Yorker in a very musty way. | ||
| We're still in 2015 and you really are still lost, kind of complaining about things that we've all kind of moved on from in a way. | ||
| And I see the left kind of stuck in that pocket, that they're still thinking about things that have long been dismantled. | ||
| And that it's, you know, a brand new world in a way, and they're just not, they're not ushering themselves into it. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| And they don't listen to anybody either. | ||
| So since you told me that nothing's off topic and you already brought him up, so you mentioned, you say partner. | ||
| I say partner, yeah. | ||
| You say partner, that always reminds me... My boyfriend! | ||
| Boyfriend. | ||
| Partner always seems like you're playing tennis together. | ||
| He was a boyfriend for two years. | ||
| Or you're playing golf or something. | ||
| He was a boyfriend for two years, and now it's been going on 11. | ||
| He's a partner now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He moved it to partner. | ||
| Alright, he's partner. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So... He's not my husband. | ||
| So he's a Bernie guy, and obviously you're not. | ||
| And I think that's super interesting. | ||
| We had dinner one night, the four of us, and I think it's super interesting Because I get a whole lot of email from people that are breaking up over this kind of stuff. | ||
| I'm talking about marriages. | ||
| I've had people email me that they have had divorces or are in the midst of a divorce because of this, yet you guys can somehow work past that. | ||
| I think, look, because politics are not the be-all end-all, even though many people might feel that way in this crazy environment and atmosphere that we're living in. | ||
| I won't allow it. | ||
| I simply won't allow it. | ||
| And I don't think he will allow it either. | ||
| Because we like each other more than that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But is that generally easier, do you think, for someone coming from your perspective than usually the leftist perspective? | ||
| We don't have to make this about your boyfriend specifically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Your partner. | |
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| I find people that are coming from a more as, oh, politics isn't everything perspective can let a lot of stuff go versus a lot of lefties. | ||
| They think politics is everything, right? | ||
| They believe that this thing is everything. | ||
| I am of that demo. | ||
| I will not let politics destroy a relationship, and I will not let it destroy a friendship at all. | ||
| I had dinner last night with three friends who are on the right, who are conservative. | ||
| I'm having dinner tomorrow night with three friends who are Democrat and heavily SoCal liberals. | ||
| I move through both worlds and I will never define a friend or not have a friend based on what their politics are. | ||
| I simply won't do it. | ||
| I won't disinvite someone based on their politics. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| Though of course this has happened and it's happened to me through this book and through my podcast even though I am not a vocal Trump supporter and what I do is I've been criticizing the media and I've been criticizing people who have been losing their minds over Trump. | ||
| That gets you disinvited from a lot of stuff. | ||
| To be clear, you talk about this in the book, you didn't even vote for Trump. | ||
| No, I didn't vote for Trump. | ||
| Right, but so much of the book is related to this. | ||
| It's not enough. | ||
| Yeah, it's not enough. | ||
| You have to claw your face off. | ||
| You have to claw your face off. | ||
| But anyway, I have to say, and it would be absurd to me if I lost my relationship with my boyfriend over politics. | ||
| I think that would be absurd. | ||
| Yet, it's come close. | ||
| It's come close at times, certainly the summer of 2018 when everything looked like it was blowing up and the Kavanaugh hearings were happening, and we were on separate sides of the aisle. | ||
| I thought the Kavanaugh hearings were a joke, a complete joke. | ||
| He thought she was a hero, a heroine, a heroine. | ||
| But I thought it was insane. | ||
| I thought it was absolutely insane. | ||
| And so we did get to a couple of, you know, whisper screaming arguments in pavilions or whatever. | ||
| You know, it was just nuts. | ||
| And I could barely drive the car because we were screaming at each other over this. | ||
| And I couldn't believe how fast it would come on. | ||
| It wasn't a slow burn. | ||
| It would go one to a hundred in like five seconds. | ||
| And you're screaming at each other over this. | ||
| You cannot believe how one person... | ||
| At the same time, you know, you take a deep breath and you realize, what is this about? | ||
| What is this about? | ||
| And I will say, I am the more mature one. | ||
| I don't say anything anymore. | ||
| I just keep it closed. | ||
| You'll suck it up and say you're the more mature one. | ||
| He was saying some things about Bernie and about Trump that just like... | ||
| Maybe, you know. | ||
| But I can't imagine letting politics define not only my love life, but my friendships. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| So all the people, when they've gone crazy, one of the guys who helped frame some of this for me, do you know Michael Malice by any chance? | ||
| I don't know if I do. | ||
| He's an interesting guy, you'd like a lot. | ||
| He's really sort of a, he's not even a libertarian. | ||
| He's more of like an ancap, you know, no government. | ||
| He likes kind of chaos. | ||
| I call him the Willy Wonka of politics. | ||
| He's just kind of out there, really interesting thinker. | ||
| But he loves the tumult that we're in right now. | ||
| Where I think my default is a little more, if everyone could just calm down. | ||
| Yeah, that's what mine is too. | ||
| I think things would be a little bit better. | ||
| But I would imagine though, also as a writer, and generally as a creative person, | ||
| it's like you kind of have to like it a little bit if you can get to get anything done | ||
| Like, if you were hating this entire thing right now, do you think you could be creative through it? | ||
| I actually do hate a lot of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I really do hate a lot of it. | ||
| And it's not, again, the side that elected Trump that I hate. | ||
| I really do hate what's become of the other side of the aisle. | ||
| That's really my problem. | ||
| And that's what makes me so sad and depresses me all the time is that there is this complete absence of connection, of wanting to connect. | ||
| And wanting to stem this divide that's happening. | ||
| Wanting to mend, mend something. | ||
| And I do think that the media is at fault. | ||
| A huge part of it is at fault. | ||
| I don't think Russian bots are there to blame for anything. | ||
| The media must be blamed for really sowing these seeds of discord. | ||
| And the fact that my friends on the left cannot speak to somebody often On the right is a problem. | ||
| I think there was some poll taken where 92% of people on the right would have a liberal over, 8% of liberals would have a conservative, whatever that is. | ||
| I really do see that. | ||
| I see that around LA and I see that around the people that I know in New York. | ||
| That actually makes me depressed. | ||
| That is a depressing thing. | ||
| It doesn't make me happy to be alive or to be a writer. | ||
| And a lot of what I'm writing right now really has nothing to do with any of this. | ||
| I'm writing a novel that's set in 1980. | ||
| I'm writing another novel that's based on an intellectual property, so I don't know if there's anything about this period that I necessarily want to write about. | ||
| I do think that it is kind of a very depressing, stressful period to a degree. | ||
| I'm a lot older, so I kind of let it run off me, but there is stress floating around everywhere. | ||
| Are you surprised how it's worldwide now? | ||
| You know, a little L.A. | ||
| bubble, it's not just a little American thing that seems to be everywhere now? | ||
| Well, look, I was surprised that this book was being published in as many countries as it was because it's non-fiction and it seems to be specifically about the United States and what's been going on the last five or ten years here, culturally, politically to a degree. | ||
| But I did two tours of France for this book because they see the same thing kind of happening. | ||
| Cancel culture is rearing its head. | ||
| Political correctness to an almost frightening degree. | ||
| Cultural appropriation is starting to also rear its head. | ||
| The Me Too movement is being weaponized in ways that go against whatever its initial promise was when it began. | ||
| And a lot of people were getting worried. | ||
| Certainly, when I was touring through Italy, of all places, the same concerns. | ||
| That all of these things that we're talking about here is kind of sweeping along Europe, at least, throughout Europe. | ||
| And that nationalism, another thing, is sweeping along Europe as well, which of course drives You know, your average liberal, quite insane. | ||
| Quite Benez. | ||
| But look, but also, I mean, what is being recorded? | ||
| I mean, what is being recorded or reported? | ||
| I mean, you know, the elections in Israel happened the last few days. | ||
| I could hear a cricket about anything about Netanyahu. | ||
| I mean, anything. | ||
| And it seems, I mean, and the way the headlines were in the New York Times and the LA Times were, might be, looks like it, instead of like, you know, decisively saying that this has happened. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I think we're in a very weird place in terms of how we're getting our information and how we're getting information from everywhere. | ||
| So like you're saying, yes, around the world, This, whatever this might be. | ||
| Yeah, it's happening. | ||
| Do you think maybe we're starting to enter a time when we won't need institutions the way we needed them? | ||
| So you mentioned the New York Times and CNN before, these things that were pillars that we all believed in and maybe that's part of why younger people are just like, eh. | ||
| Yes, and it's all becoming niche. | ||
| I'm seeing so much shit drop away from me. | ||
| So much stuff that I used to believe in, that I used to watch, that I used to read, just dropping away from me because of, really most of the time, a kind of bias that I smell and I can't deal with. | ||
| So I find a lot of that just dropping away from me. | ||
| Do you think there's a risk, though, if they all crumble? | ||
| Well, interesting. | ||
| What's the risk? | ||
| Well, the risk being that if all the institutions crumble, the things that sort of link us to something kind of mainstream, that the Overton window will be so blown away that we're just going to have factions of people constantly warring over what is actually true, because there will be no institutions that are able to... | ||
| You know, I do think that's happening, and I've started to come to believe that maybe that is the only alternative. | ||
| But I do think maybe for a democracy to work, you still need some sort of functioning. | ||
| Do you think having the New York Times being the gray lady of our country is really healthy? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| No, I don't either. | ||
| I absolutely don't. | ||
| I just wonder in the absence of all institutions, as we watch I think easier for younger people, perhaps, who did not grow up like us with, for a long time, a belief in these institutions. | ||
| And now the political, we're watching the Democratic Party crumble in front of our eyes. | ||
| Well, what comes after, you know? | ||
| I think easier for younger people perhaps, who did not grow up like us with, | ||
| for a long time, a belief in these institutions. | ||
| Todd-- | ||
| Yeah, that's the heart of what I'm asking. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because again, my partner is very easily more adaptable to a wide range of places | ||
| to get his information. | ||
| And I don't even think he reads the New York Times. | ||
| But also his antennae. | ||
|
unidentified
|
(clears throat) | |
| Has been, I don't know, sharpened during the last three years, too. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| And he has gone to many, many different sources to get his information. | ||
| And I remember there was a moment the week of the Mueller report when it came out. | ||
| And he was so excited. | ||
| He had been fed these conspiracy theories by Rachel Maddow for three years. | ||
| Been sitting there at six o'clock here. | ||
| California time, waiting for Rachel to come on and, you know, and the Mueller report was going to come out and it was going to completely justify all the reports. | ||
| Well, that night happened, and I remember how quiet it was in the house. | ||
| And I remember that he did not turn on MSNBC for about five days, did not turn it on, and grumbled about it to me. | ||
| He said, you know, God, what was I thinking? | ||
| How could this have... I mean, God, I wasted so much time listening to this all the time. | ||
| And that was really the beginning where I noticed that he was beginning to get his news from a wide variety of places that were extremely niche. | ||
| YouTube, social media. | ||
| He's fine with that. | ||
| I still have a frustration with the fact that these structures that I believed in for so long are no longer trustworthy. | ||
| For him, it's a shrug. | ||
| For me, it's a bit of a moral grappling hook. | ||
| Yeah, well I think that maybe that is justice. | ||
| And that's what I mean by we're sort of like this last generation that grew up pre-internet, right? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| The Gen Xers. | ||
| So it's like we still have an affinity for a certain amount of old things. | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| And they weren't all bad. | ||
| The New York Times wasn't always bad. | ||
| No, no, no, not at all. | ||
| So to watch it go to where it's gone... | ||
| It's disturbing, yeah. | ||
| It is disturbing. | ||
| But I have kind of gotten over that, to the degree that I've gotten over CNN. | ||
| CNN and now look at it, but it's very hard to then get your news, you know, you | ||
| build your own news feed basically. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I was never that person. | ||
| So I really do look at both sides constantly. | ||
| If you look at my Twitter feed, I'm looking at stuff from the left, from the right, from all over the place. | ||
| And I'm interested in how people define the news that's important to them and what they feel is vital. | ||
| And what they don't. | ||
| And so, again, that thing about, you know, the Israeli elections, or whether it's about how woke Invisible Man is, the movie that came out this last weekend, or not woke it is. | ||
| I mean, I'm interested in both sides of the story, both sides of the aisle. | ||
| And I feel that that is missing from so many people now, that they only want to hear the narrative that verifies their belief, rather than being open to the possibilities of being wrong. | ||
| Maybe I'm, or not being wrong, but just maybe that's not how I feel about something. | ||
| I've always wanted that my entire life. | ||
| That's what I've always wanted. | ||
| I wanted to hear the other side of the story. | ||
| And maybe I'm just old enough to still be that guy. | ||
| I don't know if certainly my boyfriend feels that way. | ||
| He wants to be validated. | ||
| Yeah, that could be just a gen... you're not that off generation-wise, but yeah, there could be just a certain amount of years separating that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, let's move past politics. | ||
| You want to put politics away? | ||
| You got anything else to say about politics? | ||
| Let's spend the remaining time doing something that's a little more in your direct wheelhouse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just sort of movies in general and the state of Yes. | ||
| Things like that. | ||
| I watched two movies this weekend. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One I thought was the most bizarre, strange, I could not figure out if I liked it or hated it, | ||
| or even if it was a full movie. | ||
| I don't even remember what it was called. | ||
| It was Color of Something with Nicolas Cage. | ||
| Color Out of Space? | ||
| Color Out of Space. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see this by any chance? | ||
| I did. | ||
| Okay, so it doesn't, I won't even go into it, but it was such a, it was a complete, like, cluster of insanity. | ||
| But I was like, someone made this movie, it's insane, I can't believe it. | ||
| And then I watched Uncut Gems. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that. | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| The Adam Sandler movie. | ||
| Yeah, I thought it was Absolutely, wickedly brilliant and almost perfect. | ||
| The pacing, the music, everything. | ||
| And when we finished watching it I was like, and I really hadn't heard a tiny bit about it, I didn't know what we were watching, so it's like really nice when you know nothing about a movie and then it just kind of blows you away. | ||
| Anyway, I say all of that to say I haven't had that experience in a while where I just turned on something And I just loved it. | ||
| What do you make of the state of movies right now and the state of art and the things that we're getting these days? | ||
| Well, because first of all, that's very rare to find a movie as well done as Uncut Gems. | ||
| It's not like there are 150 of them that come out every year. | ||
| They just simply don't. | ||
| Most years are bad years for movies, and that is true from 1968 to 1976 through 1989, whatever. | ||
| There are great years for movies. | ||
| 1999 is a famously great year for films. | ||
| What was 99? | ||
| 99 was everything from Magnolia to American Beauty to Fight Club to just an explosion of kind of Indie movies that were also... | ||
| Had movie stars that were big-scale event pitchers. | ||
| But I think part of the problem is that most movies aren't great, and it is a very hit-or-miss medium in terms of something achieving greatness, or even the enjoyable movie like Uncut Gems is a rare thing to do. | ||
| What do I think? | ||
| I think that I am just going... | ||
| With the flow. | ||
| I think that last year was a very, very good year for movies. | ||
| And I have a podcast about films and about culture. | ||
| And I usually spend most of my time the last five years, since I started this podcast in 2013, complaining about the year in movies. | ||
| This past year, I couldn't. | ||
| It was a really good year for movies. | ||
| And Uncut Gems was one of those movies. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of the time, and I see a lot of movies, it is color out of space. | ||
| It is Nick Cage, you know, Unleashed. | ||
| What happened to that guy? | ||
| Does anyone know what happened? | ||
| Because even watch, I know, I guess he lost all his money and then, I don't know what exactly happened, but the movie, the plot, everything about it was such a mess. | ||
| I was like, this is either the most brilliant thing I've ever seen or the worst movie. | ||
| Like, there was no in-between with this thing. | ||
| But more importantly, watching him, it's like, what's happening to this guy? | ||
| Is he an actor anymore? | ||
| Like, what the hell's going on? | ||
| Nick Cage started out as a weirdo in the early 80s in movies like, even in Valley Girl, one of his first movies, he was this outsider. | ||
| And I don't think people remember Vampire's Kiss, which was a movie where he played a literary agent in New York who thought he was a vampire or became a vampire. | ||
| A wacko, nut-jaw performance. | ||
| A lot of people remember his performance in Peggy Sue Got Married. | ||
| As a performance that marred that movie, because it was so bizarre. | ||
| And even Coppola, who directed Peggy Sue Got Married, was thinking, what are you doing? | ||
| And even the co-star Kathleen Turner was going, who am I acting with here? | ||
| So we've got to understand that Nick Cage has been this kind of actor for many, many, many years. | ||
| And even the movie that he won the Oscar for, Leaving Las Vegas, was a kind of weird, offbeat performance about a guy who drinks himself to death in Las Vegas. | ||
| So, I don't know. | ||
| I think what's happened is that he's felt a lot more free in terms of expressing his inner freak. | ||
| And that can be a healthy thing or not. | ||
| I know he needs to make money and I know that he did lose all of his money and that he has, he will, you know, do a movie. | ||
| If you write the check, which is about a million bucks. | ||
| By the way, for the record... Honestly, he's sometimes good. | ||
| We have to understand, he's not... He was really good in a movie called Mandy. | ||
| Oh, so that was the other one. | ||
| I could have bought both at the same time. | ||
| But Mandy works. | ||
| Color Out of Space doesn't work. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The whole time I was like, maybe this is the best performance I've ever seen. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| There was something about him that I was like, I can't stop thinking about. | ||
| No, Nick Cage has hit or miss and he's a miss in Color Out of Space. | ||
| So I know Nick Cage fans are gonna... | ||
| They're gonna cut, now you're gonna get, you can't mess with the Nic Cage fans, they're worse than the intersectional feminists! | ||
| I've been cancelled so many times, I don't care if I'm cancelled over Nic Cage, believe me, there's, but so I don't know, I mean look, I have a belief in the medium, I want to make movies, I'm going to direct something soon, so I really do believe in the medium, but again, we're older, and movies still have this patina of something about them that I still find special, even though I find myself constantly disappointed by them to a certain degree. | ||
| So I'm, and especially after a year like last year when there was like, I thought, 12 or 13 terrific movies released by the studios, I'm still a believer. | ||
| So as a guy that is a believer, when you see fan films popping up all over YouTube, and like for me, Star Wars was just so mangled and beaten at this point and wrecked, and yet I watch these little fan films that people make, these little ten minute things that stay true, and they're artistically beautiful, and the tech and the special effects are all great, and I'm like, Man, Kathleen Kennedy or whoever's running it now, give it to these people. | ||
| Does that stuff inspire you? | ||
| To a degree, but a lot of that cannot sustain a two-hour movie. | ||
| A lot of these fan films are very sweet, and I get caught up in them as well, but they are not enough to sustain a full-fledged movie, and all the working parts that you have to think about when you're putting together a proper piece of cinematic entertainment, whatever that is. | ||
| I sound like a... | ||
| Old school college professor. | ||
| But it's true. | ||
| And I think this is a very interesting thing that happens among people my partner's age. | ||
| He's a millennial. | ||
| He's 33. | ||
| Is that there is something about craft that they don't necessarily care about. | ||
| Craftsmanship is old school. | ||
| Craftsmanship is empire. | ||
| Empire back to the 20th century. | ||
| I think that's a mistake. | ||
| I think craft is Big part of why a lot of things work. | ||
| I think style is a big part of why things work. | ||
| And I think that all of this is kind of taking place in a kind of style-free zone | ||
| that really doesn't care about aesthetics, but it's about ideology. | ||
| And it's also about either the, I mean, a fan film, these movies that we see, | ||
| are really based on your feelings of nostalgia or sentimentality over a particular work of movies. | ||
| It's not its own thing. | ||
| It's not creating your own reflection of that to a degree. | ||
| It's kind of stealing from the movie and recreating it in a way with music or whatever. | ||
| So I don't know. | ||
| That seems to me to be a little bit of a problem. | ||
| And that's why I also don't find them that interesting. | ||
| I can watch a few and then... Yeah, well that's what it is. | ||
| I watch a few and I'm doing cardio and then I'm like... But you're right! | ||
| But there's something there. | ||
| At least it's something where I go to so many movies now and I'm like, They're soulless. | ||
| They're nothing. | ||
| That is true. | ||
| And so, you're right to a degree. | ||
| Why not just hand them off to these people? | ||
| Because they can't do any worse than the people who are making them now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does Hollywood ever get out of this thing? | ||
| Or is that the same symptom of this sort of institutional crumble? | ||
| Well, I do see that something interesting has happened is that the director, the authorial voice, is being wiped away in Hollywood. | ||
| That's actually what I wanted to ask you next about, about just new stories. | ||
| Because I feel like when I've now, like Star Wars to me feels, and this is my whole house is Star Wars, like I love Star Wars so much and my ethos is from Star Wars, but like, it feels dead to me now. | ||
| Marvel movies, like with the last Avengers, they just, they killed it. | ||
| It really took you this long? | ||
| Yeah, like it's enough already. | ||
| We need new stories. | ||
| That's the thought that both of those movies, when they ended, I was like, give me something new. | ||
| Not the same, you know, like I've had it with these heroes. | ||
| I've had it with all this stuff. | ||
| I was feeling this a lot longer than you were. | ||
| You do have a couple of years on me, that's why. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I do. | |
| And I was never a Star Wars person. | ||
| But generally speaking, that concept of needing new stories. | ||
| were the ones that made. | ||
| You do have a couple years on me, that's why. | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| I do, and I was never a Star Wars person. | ||
| But generally speaking, that concept of needing new stories was so much of what-- | ||
| It's not stories, it's the people telling them. | ||
| It's not the story. | ||
| I think if you had gotten really terrific directors with signature styles who were dropped into the Star Wars world, maybe they could make marvelous movies. | ||
| But I don't think that's the corporate directive. | ||
| Star Wars has become a corporation. | ||
| People have been fired from movies before because they brought a little bit too much attitude, a little bit too much of their own spice into the movies. | ||
| I remember the whole controversy about Solo, that standalone Han Solo as a young guy movie, where the directors were replaced by Ron Howard at a certain point because they were bringing too much of their comedic edge into that film. | ||
| And that seems to be the case where the brand Is more important than who is kind of telling the story in a way. | ||
| They want the brand to stay on topic. | ||
| And they don't want it to veer too much out of a certain corporate thing. | ||
| And I think JJ Abrams does the same way. | ||
| I don't think JJ Abrams brings anything particularly special to the Star Wars movies compared to other people. | ||
| Do you think so? | ||
| I've never seen Rise of the Skywalker. | ||
| I did not see it. | ||
| I walked out of the Rian Johnson movie and I vowed never to go see another one again. | ||
| That made Colorado Lines or whatever the hell movie I saw look like. | ||
| Go with the wind. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Ryse Garber was fine, but yes, he just tied it up. | ||
| It was just like, we have such a mess here, he came in and he was just like, let's just tie this thing up so we can just... Right, and still, you know... And also the same thing is, I mean, true with the Marvel movies, is, I mean, they all feel basically the same. | ||
| You realize they try to cancel every director that says this, right? | ||
| Because doesn't the director every now, like, Coppola or somebody will come out and say this every few months? | ||
| Yeah, Scorsese said it last year and got into a lot of trouble for it. | ||
| He's essentially right to a certain degree, but I do think that those movies, of course, offer huge audiences a lot of pleasure, and you can't deny that. | ||
| And you do sound like a bit of a grump in terms of proclaiming that Marvel movies aren't cinema. | ||
| I think they are cinema. | ||
| I think cinema encompasses the fan films that you and I were just talking about. | ||
| And to David Lynch's 24-hour version of Twin Peaks that he put on Showtime three years ago, that's cinema too. | ||
| A lot of things are cinema. | ||
| A lot of things are cinema, a lot of things are conversation. | ||
| We're out of time. | ||
| Well, thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| We'll continue this over dinner. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| We'll see if we can convert your partner boyfriend to the dark side. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Now we've really tied it together. | ||
| I hope so, too. | ||
| Follow this man, he makes sense, at Brett Easton Ellis on the Twitter. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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