It’s year’s end, which means we’re doing a lot of roundups of our cultural touchstones from 2012. But not all roundups have to be of the things we liked, right? Enter American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, whose Twitter feed, as much as we hate to admit it, definitely ranked on our cultural radar this year. To be honest, a lot of what he says is truly hilarious, he recommends good books (he’s been on about Skippy Dies recently, which we also loved), and we actually find his insistence that Magic Mike was the best movie of 2012 kind of refreshing. But at this point, he’s much more famous for the pretty awful things he says than he is for the clever ones. And he can be an enormous jerk. Remember when he said bullying victims should “man up“? Or how about the time he compared watching Glee to stepping into a puddle of HIV? Or the time he celebrated J.D. Salinger’s death? Well, he’s only stepped up his game this year. After the jump, we present BEE’s most offensive, most left-field, and flat-out worst tweets of 2012. Feel free to argue with us in the comments.
September 6, 2012. We’re going to count Ellis’s early-September rant of David Foster Wallace-hating as one tweet here, mostly because we can’t pick the worst one. Yes, everyone is allowed to have their own opinion, and we may be sensitive here because we count ourselves among those “Literary Doucebag-Fools” [sic], but we find it incredibly classless to rail against a relatively recently-dead writer in this way.
Fun fact: at the New Yorker Festival’s panel “Re-Reading David Foster Wallace” in October, D.T. Max brought up Ellis’s tweets, and the fact that he had elsewhere referred to Wallace as being “too smart for fiction” to the panelists. Mary Karr shrugged, saying that it sounded to her like the complaint of someone not as smart as David. When the crowd cheered, she reminded us that we were all stupider than him too.
October 3, 2012. We’re pretty sure that’s not true. We’re also pretty sure that comparing people to Hitler is the cheapest and most obnoxious form of criticism on the planet.
November 22, 2012. Now, maybe this is just a sort of bizarre wishful thinking on Ellis’s part — that we as a society have so advanced that we no longer take offense to things? Maybe? But the comments people make can still hurt other people, so that doesn’t really track. We think it’s just what Ellis tells himself so that he can keep on saying whatever he wants. And he can! He even should. But that doesn’t make it “appropriate.”
October 17, 2012. Maybe we’re reading too much into it, but this kind of sounds like Ellis threatening to kill Lindsay Lohan.
August 8, 2012. Ellis took a lot of heat for this train of thought — that a gay actor can’t play a straight, sexual role — and rightly so. The job of an actor is to pretend to be someone else — that’s the definition of the word “actor” — so why would anyone be limited by their sexuality? Nonsense.
July 31, 2012. We don’t know which half of this statement offends us more.
September 22, 2012. These in response to the secretly recorded cab conversation in which Paris Hilton, discussing Grindr, said “Ewww. Eww. To get fucked? Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS…I would be so scared if I was a gay guy. You’ll like, die of AIDS.” Dumb on its own, but a private conversation — unlike Ellis’s public and bizarre support.
December 5, 2012. Ah, yes. Consider this a stand-in for all the times Ellis uses “Generation Wuss” — the clever name Ellis has come up with for all of the people who are offended/irritated/confused by his tweets. The idea being that if you don’t agree with him, you’re a “snowflake” and a “wuss,” so you’d better man up and learn to love being a jerk to everybody.
December 5, 2012/December 7, 2012. The most recent unfathomable tweet postulated that Kathryn Bigelow, who directed this year’s Zero Dark Thirty, only gets the attention she does because she’s a lady. News flash: it’s because her movies are great. Why are we arguing about this?
October 18, 2012. Now that’s just evil.