Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
by Jaime Clarke
Part Four
JC: What from the 1980's is still true today? How different are things now?
BEE: I guess I can only react on a personal level. Two years ago, against all my better instincts, I went to the 10th anniversary of Nell's. I went there very early with a friend of mine; we thought we'd have a glass of champagne and it would be like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. I hadn't been there in five years and we realized it would be really scary but we had to do it. We had spent so much time hanging out there with so many. It was really at one point the nexus of publishing for a long time. It was the hub of where everyone who was involved with publishing in New York would hang out. I mean it was much more a place for publishing people and writers than it was for say, rock stars or actors or people from out of town. It was on some nights an incredibly intense publishing scene. Morgan Entrekin was always there. You could walk in on some nights and see Sonny Mehta with his wife wearing a sari, sitting in the front booth, or Raymond Carver would be there with Gary Fisketjon, or you could see all the young writers of that particular moment from Susan Minot to David Leavitt to the ubiquitous Jay McInerney.
So we walk in and there's Morgan Entrekin and Jay McInerney and Gary Fisketjon and we sit in the same booth we always sat in whenever we were there and then we noticed that a couple of us were drinking diet Cokes, people were smoking light cigarettes, no one was doing blow on the table, everyone was checking their watch because, you know, Jay has a wife and two kids now, Morgan's the head of a publishing house now and has to get up early. I guess I'm the only one that could have hung out all night but even I was tired from being the "responsible" person I've now become, I guess. Basically we all felt really old. We all thought, we're never going to the 20th anniversary of Nell's.
There's definitely a different tenor to the times. Everything is more anti-status, but that in it's own way has become it's own kind of status. I guess you can look at the cities I live in now: Los Angeles basically never changes, but New York is a pretty good guide for what's going on in terms of the times and what's going on or going to go on with the rest of the country, and the fact is no one really has the money they used to have in the 80's. I mean everyone was making enormous amounts of money for doing basically nothing. And everyone was controlled by how manic the times were, which sort of demanded that you rush out to every restaurant you possibly could, party with every famous person you possibly could, buy everything you read about in magazines, act this way, look this way, do this. That's not really happening now. I mean, I can only speak for people that I know and it just seems to me as you get older, you have more responsibilities and your body kind of gives out on you. You can't party the way you once did. An since you've done everything anyway, it's really not that interesting anymore.
I'm also a believer that Patrick Bateman can exist at anytime. Patrick Bateman is an example of what Hannah Arendt called, "the banality of evil." That's basically what he is. He could have existed a hundred years ago (he probably existed five hundred years ago). He'll probably exist five hundred years from now. He's just an example of the constantness of evil. He might be a creature of the eighties with all the trappings that implies, but I think he's really a creature of eternity. Man doesn't necessarily change for the better depending upon the decade, or depending upon how ten years have passed. I think man is born and is corrupted and is always capable of badness. (Pause) Capable of goodness, too, but badness gets more attention. We notice it more often. It makes more of an impact on us.
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