Much talk—some of it real, a lot of it fake—has been in the air over the last decade about empathy for the “other,” for people different from us. But no one has dwelled on the essential otherness of a work of art. There is, after all, that hackneyed but profound notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Genuine art makes you stake your credulity on the patently counterfeit. It takes you by surprise. And for art to take you by surprise, you have to put yourself in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.
Yet everything in our society, so saturated with economic imperatives, tells us not to surrender our interests even for a moment, tells us that the only forms of cultural expression we can trust are those that give us instant gratification, useful information, or a reflected image of ourselves. So we are flooded with the kind of art that deprecates attentiveness, tells us about the issues of the day, and corresponds to our own personalities.
This was written almost twenty years ago, and what Siegel worried about then could now be said to define our culture: the growing inability to accept any viewpoints that differ from the “morally superior” status quo. By coincidence I happened to be rereading this essay while listening to various college commencement speeches on YouTube in 2016, when it seemed more imperative than ever to advise students not to “Be Safe,” as so many of these speakers seemed to suggest, but rather to advise them to boldly “Be Unsafe” by refusing to live meekly within the bubble of the parenthesis.
The idea that if you can’t identify with someone or something then it’s not worth watching or reading or listening to is now commonplace in our society—and sometimes used as a weapon to attack somebody else: for not being more “woke” by failing to make something relatable; for being racist when perhaps the offender is, for instance, just an uninterested or clueless white person; or for being a sexual predator instead of, occasionally, plainly a douche, a boor, a loser. “I can’t relate to it” had come to be shorthand for “I won’t watch it,” much as “I can’t identify with it” now means “I won’t read or listen to that.” You hear this increasingly as a rallying cry, and not only from millennials, yet the idea behind it serves no progressive purpose; it marginalizes not only artists but also, ultimately, everybody on the planet. In essence, it’s fascist. Here’s the dead end of social media: after you’ve created your own bubble that reflects only what you relate to or what you identify with, after you’ve blocked and unfollowed people whose opinions and worldview you judge and disagree with, after you’ve created your own little utopia based on your cherished values, then a kind of demented narcissism begins to warp this pretty picture. Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else’s shoes—to view life differently from how you yourself experience it—is the first step toward being not empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they’re resisting.
I saw this disconnection at work in Amy Pascal’s speech to a gay group in 2014. A well-intentioned straight person, and formerly the head of Sony, she made a few excellent points about gay content and representation but then started talking about how we should get rid of every homophobic slur in film and TV as well as every stereotypical gay character, and I felt we were entering into a kind of Utopian weirdness that doesn’t exist and probably shouldn’t. I remember having the same odd concern in 2013 when at Comedy Central’s James Franco roast, millennial comedian Aziz Ansari derided all the other comics because he felt they’d told an inordinate number of often “inappropriate” gay jokes. These jokes existed obviously because they had something to do with Franco’s public persona, that of an earnest straight man turned super-gay supporter/experimenter/ dabbler (see King Cobra, for example, or his Cruising homage), and over the years many people both straight and gay had ribbed Franco and made fun of this on social media and in the entertainment press. On this occasion I recall feeling very distinctly that Ansari had managed to hijack the spirit of the roast—and he was, in fact, one of the first virtue-signaling celebrities I noticed. Were we now being too careful about “protecting” the gay baby pandas from crude sex jokes? Some of these jokes were funny, some weren’t, but within the context of a fucking roast everything seemed permissible: loser white guy jokes, ugly white guy jokes, sexist jokes about women, racist jokes. It was heartening to see a live audience of white people and black people, as well as men and women of all ages, laughing hysterically at the insensitive, noninclusive and politically incorrect material told by comics, white and black, young and old, male and female. Their laughter was the undeniable corrective to Ansari’s criticism: some shit’s just funny.
Ansari was exploring a particular narrative—the idea that it might be better to protect a marginalized group from being the brunt of jokes—and this seemed problematic, because was it really so progressive to marginalize gays even further by not making fun of them, by not even mentioning them in a roast which by definition makes fun of whoever’s being honored? But in this “inclusive” fantasy everyone has to be the same, must share the same values and outlook and sense of humor. The ascendant culture keeps proposing this again and again and again—until when? A genuinely inclusive idea of comedy would allow gay dudes to make fun of other gays and whoever else they wanted to, and straight people to make fun of gays or anybody else. If gay jokes are taken out of the equation, what goes next? And there’s the slippery slope, the maze that no one emerges from, the dark room whose door is quickly closing behind you. Do gay guys really need a straight guy like Ansari to be their defender? And what was Ansari defending at a roast? Is there now a revised rule book for comedy and freedom of expression? Should all ideas and opinions and content and language now be policed? Sometimes the funniest, most dangerous comedy does not reassure you that everything’s going to be okay. Exclusion and marginalization are often what makes a joke funny. Sometimes one’s identity is the punch line. Laugh at everything, or you’ll end up laughing at nothing. As a young writer in Ireland, James Joyce realized, “I have come to the conclusion that I cannot write without offending people.”
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In February 2014 I gave an interview to Vice (UK) to help promote The Canyons, a film I’d written and helped finance. There was still the hopeful idea that if Paul Schrader, the director, and I talked about the movie it might somehow find an audience that would be interested in it. But there was no telling who these people might be, because The Canyons was an experimental, guerrilla, DIY affair that had cost $250,000 to shoot ($90,000 out of our own pockets, the rest of it crowd-funded) over twenty days in LA during the summer of 2012, and which starred controversial millennials Lindsay Lohan and porn star James Deen. The young Vice journalist asked me what was preoccupying me at the moment: Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the best film I’d seen the year before; a movie I was writing for Kanye West (that never happened); my creeping misgivings about Terrence Malick; a miniseries I was developing about the Manson murders for Fox (which got canceled after another Manson series went into production at NBC); the Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, which I’d started a few months earlier; a new novel I was contemplating after that disastrous week in Palm Springs with my mad friend a year earlier.
We talked about my problems with David Foster Wallace; my love of Joan Didion; my theories regarding Empire versus the post-Empire moment, which I’d delineated in a controversial article in The Daily Beast that Tina Brown had published in 2011. And we talked, of course, about the doomed theatrical release of The Canyons. But the first question the young journalist asked me wasn’t about the movie but why I was always referring to millennials as Generation Wuss on my Twitter feed and podcast. And I answered her honestly, unprepared for the level of noise my comments would raise in the UK, and beyond, once the Vice piece was posted.
As it happens, by then I’d been living with a millennial for almost five years (twenty-two years my junior), and I was alte
rnately charmed and exasperated by how he and his friends—as well as other millennials I’d met and interacted with both in person and on social media—lived their lives. I had been occasionally tweeting about my amusement and frustration under the banner “Generation Wuss” in recent years. My huge generalities touched on millennials’ oversensitivity, their sense of entitlement, their insistence that they were always right despite sometimes overwhelming proof to the contrary, their failure to consider anything within its context, their joint tendencies of overreaction and passive-aggressive positivity—incidentally, all of these misdemeanors happening only sometimes, not always, and possibly exacerbated by the meds many this age had been fed since childhood by overprotective, helicopter moms and dads mapping their every move. These parents, whether tail-end baby boomers or Gen Xers, now seemed to be rebelling against their own rebelliousness because they felt they’d never really been loved by their own selfish narcissistic true-boomer parents, and who as a result were smothering their kids and not teaching them how to deal with life’s hardships about how things actually work: people might not like you, this person will not love you back, kids are really cruel, work sucks, it’s hard to be good at something, your days will be made up of failure and disappointment, you’re not talented, people suffer, people grow old, people die. And the response from Generation Wuss was to collapse into sentimentality and create victim narratives, instead of grappling with the cold realities by struggling and processing them and then moving on, better prepared to navigate an often hostile or indifferent world that doesn’t care if you exist.
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I never pretended to be an expert on millennials and my harmless tweeting was based solely on personal observation. The reactions to the tweets ran, predictably, along generational lines. One of the worst arguments my partner and I endured happened when we first started living together in 2010, and it revolved around the Tyler Clementi suicide in New Jersey earlier that year. Clementi was an eighteen-year-old Rutgers student who killed himself because he felt he’d been bullied by his roommate. Dharun Ravi hadn’t ever touched or threatened Tyler, but had—unbeknownst to Tyler—used a webcam on his dorm-room computer to film him making out with another man, and then tweeted about it. Deeply embarrassed by this prank, Tyler threw himself off the George Washington Bridge a few days later. The fight I had with my millennial partner was about cyberbullying and imagined versus genuine hands-on threats and actual assault of any kind. Was this just the case of an overly sensitive Generation Wuss “snowflake” (I enjoyed using this term because it seemed, amazingly, to press so many buttons) and had this tragic death made the national news because of how trendy the idea of cyberbullying had become? Or had a terribly sensitive young man simply snapped because he’d been brought down by his own shame and was subsequently turned into a victim/hero (they’re the same thing now for millennials) by a media eager to dispense with context—and turn Ravi into a monster just because he’d played a pretty harmless freshman dorm-room prank? People my own age tended to agree with my tweets referencing the case, but those my boyfriend’s age were prone to disagree vehemently.
Then again, my reaction had something to do with the fact that I was looking at millennials from the POV of a generation as pessimistic and ironic as any other that ever roamed the earth. Depending on what chart you’re consulting I was one of the very first members of Generation X, so when I heard about millennials being so damaged by cyberbullying that it became a gateway to suicide, it was, admittedly, difficult for me to process—was this a joke? Yet even my boyfriend agreed that Generation Wuss was far too sensitive, especially when facing any criticism, and he said he’d often noticed this in chats and threads, on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook. Unlike any previous generation, they had so many outlets to display whatever they wanted (thoughts, feelings, art) that it often went—unfettered, unedited—instantly and globally everywhere, and because of this freedom (or lack of any restraints at all) a lot of the time it tended to seem rushed and kind of shitty, but that was okay. It’s just the nature of things now, for everybody. (The Canyons felt like that to many people.) Yet when millennials were criticized for this sort of content, or for anything, really, they seemed to get so defensive they either collapsed into a spiraling depression or lashed out at the critical parties and called them haters, contrarians, trolls. This forced you to look again at the people who raised them, coddling them with praise and trying to shield them from the grim sides of life, which might well have created children who, as adults, appeared highly confident, competent and positive but at the hint of darkness or negativity often became paralyzed and unable to react except with disbelief and tears—You just victimized me!—and retreated, in effect, into their childhood bubbles.
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My generation was raised in a fantasy world at the height of the Empire: our baby boomer parents were the most privileged and best-educated children of the (so-called) Greatest Generation and enjoyed the economic prosperity of postwar America. While coming of age in the second and third stages of this era, people like me realized in the 1970s and 1980s that all this was by now, like most fantasies, more or less a lie. So we rebelled with irony and negativity, both numbness and attitude, or else just conveniently checked out, since we had enough money to do so. Compared to millennial reality, ours wasn’t one of economic uncertainty and hardship; we had the luxury to be depressed and ironic and cool and solvent all at once. Anxiety and neediness became the defining aspects of Generation Wuss, and when the world didn’t offer any financial cushion then you had to rely on your social media presence: maintaining it, keeping the brand in play, striving to be liked, to be liked, to be liked, an actor. And this created a further and ceaseless anxiety, which was why if people were snarky about this generation they were simply written off as a dick—case closed. No negativity allowed: we’re only asking to be admired in the display culture we were raised in. But this excuse is problematic because it limits debate. If we’re all silenced into liking everything—the millennial dream—won’t we instead be having (boring) conversations about how great it all is, and how often you’ve been liked on Instagram? In the spring of 2014 their iconic site BuzzFeed announced it would no longer run anything construed as “negative”—and if this notion keeps spreading, what will ultimately happen to discourse and debate? Will it cease to exist? If there doesn’t seem to be any economic path toward improving your circumstances, then the currency of popularity becomes the norm and also why you want to have thousands of people liking you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, wherever—and why, like an actor, you’ll try desperately to be liked. Your only hope of elevating yourself in society is through your brand, your profile, your status on social media. A friend of mine—in his early twenties—remarked recently that millennials are more curators than artists, a tribe of “aestheticists.” Any young artist who goes on Tumblr, he told me, doesn’t actually want to create art—only to steal the art or be the art.
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I’d forgotten about the Vice interview until the “Generation Wuss” component caused a minor explosion in the press. I was immediately asked to appear on talk shows and podcasts and radio programs to discuss “this phenomenon.” Though, as noted above, those who agreed with my tossed-off assessments skewed older, I was surprised by the number of young people who followed along as well, chiefly millennials with complaints about their peers. The older fringe wanted to share examples, which ran along the lines of a father watching in frustration as his son participated in a tug-of-war game with his classmates on the field of his elementary school, only to be stopped after a minute or two by the kindly coach, who announced the game was officially a tie, told the kids they all did a great job, and gave everyone a ribbon. But occasionally guilt-ridden parents told darker stories, chastising themselves for coddling kids who, when finally faced with middle- or high-school traumas, drifted into drugs as an escape…into actual trauma. Parent
s kept begging me to understand how tormented they were by the oppressive insistence to reward their kids constantly, no matter what, and that in doing so they effectively debilitated them from coping with the failures we all confront as we get older, leaving their children unequipped to deal with inevitable pain.
I didn’t accept any of the TV, radio or online invitations in the spring of 2014 because I hadn’t actually studied millennials or any other “generations” that seemed to be arriving behind them: Generation Z, the Founders, whoever. I never wanted to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring who were supplanting his own, though certain people definitely thought that’s exactly who I was. As someone who’d satirized my generation for their materialism, and shallowness, and passivity that Less Than Zero bordered on, and then crossed over into, amorality, I didn’t think pointing out aspects that I’d noticed in millennials was a big deal. But because of how our 24/7 news cycle runs itself dry and elevates certain voices who shouldn’t necessarily be heard, I was briefly considered an “expert” and bombarded with emails and tweets. What the Vice interviewer didn’t allow was that as someone who was living with a millennial I’d be sympathetic or, at most, harmlessly critical.
I never forgot the hellish year when my college-educated boyfriend looked for a job and could find only nonpaying internships, while also having to contend with a demeaning sexual atmosphere that places such a relentlessly superficial emphasis on looks (Tinder being, as of 2018, the most prevalent example) that it made the way my generation hooked up seem positively chaste and innocent by comparison. So I was sympathetic to their neurosis, narcissism and foolishness, to their having been raised in the aftermath of 9/11, born into two wars, a brutal recession, endless school shootings and the election of a president they couldn’t tolerate. It wasn’t hard to be sympathetic. But maybe I was more like Lena Dunham on her TV series Girls, which examined her own generation with a caustic, withering eye yet also remained supportive. And this is crucial: you can be both. In order to be an artist, to raise yourself above the overreacting fear-based din in which criticism is considered elitist, you need to be both. This, however, hasn’t been easy to do because millennials don’t seem capable of accepting this kind of cold-eyed, realistic and sometimes fallow take on themselves. And it’s why Generation Wuss only pleads now, Please, please, please, only give positive feedback, please…
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