#winning
All I do is win win win no matter what/
Got money on my mind I can never get enough
When was the last time you thought about Charlie Sheen? I mean, really thought about him - not the sixty second shrug you probably made when you heard the news last year that he had been living with HIV. There was nothing to think about then. That Sheen Update was a bad rerun of a show that no one had enjoyed the first time and besides, wasn't that the only way that the Sheen show could have turned out? Charlie Sheen’s story is a Hollywood story, and in a Hollywood movie the debauched and the reckless eventually get punished for their moral failings. After the downfall they are offered a chance to repent. But life isn’t a Hollywood movie, so I do feel a little bad shaping the arc of his life to fit the storyline of the made for TV movie that will someday be made about the arc of his life on TV. And I will always remember him fondly for Hot Shots Part Deux and Major League.
There was a time a few years ago when Charlie Sheen mattered, wasn’t there? In the dark twisted fantasy that is 21st century American history, Charlie Sheen imploded. After years of assaulting women without career repercussions, he broke the cardinal rule of Hollywood and bit the hands that fed him. (“I wanna bite that hand that feeds me/ I wanna bite that hand so badly/” croons Elvis Costello.) He proto-doxxed his producer Chuck Lorre as “Chaim Levine,” and turned his life into a livestream. The hashtag for it all was #winning.
The Sheen meltdown was a tragicomedy that we watched with a mix of horror and a horror movie that wasn’t all that funny. But Charlie Sheen really did win. At the end of the day, he was given a starring role in a new TV show. True, he was downgraded from a network to cable, but networks have downgraded themselves with crueler reality shows than Charlie Sheen’s livestream. I remember also that there was a fair amount of media and cultural criticism regarding the livestream. It was considered important that he now had the ability to become his own media company, to go directly to his fans. New media channels were waging an assault on the old and Charlie Sheen was pointing the way to a future when the mediasphere was completely flat and The New York Times was only as powerful as a website published by Macedonian trolls. But then Sheen got his new sitcom and some people watched it and it got cancelled after a few years. Once everything went back on a normal trajectory, America forgot about Charlie Sheen.
It was mid-February 2016 the next time I thought about Charlie Sheen. Donald Trump was in South Carolina telling us that we were about to get sick of winning. “We’re going to win so much. You’re going to say, ‘Please Mr President, I have a headache. Please, don’t win so much. This is getting terrible.’ And I’m going to say, ‘No, we have to make America great again. You’re going to say, ‘Please,’ I said, ‘Nope, nope. We’re gonna keep winning.’”
Actually, he’d already said it in September of 2015: “We will have so much winning if I get elected, that you may get bored with winning.’”
History unfolds like a series of echos and two voices resonated in my mind when I heard Trump talk about winning. I heard Charlie Sheen: “What’s not to love, it’s my life — winning . . . Keep in mind anytime I roll something out my plan is the best plan in the room. And people are starting to realize that. That their plan is shit and my plan is gold. Walk into my plan and they’re going to win, win, win …”
The other voice that I heard was Bret Easton Ellis. Ellis always understood Trump’s appeal. Donald Trump was Patrick Bateman’s bete noir. “My priorities before Christmas include the following: (1) to get an eight o’clock reservation on a Friday night at Dorsia with Courtney, (2) to get myself invited to the Trump Christmas party aboard their yacht…(4) to saw a hardbody’s head off and Federal Express it to Robin” goes a typical section of American Psycho.
Bateman is obsessed with Trump becomes it was the late-80s and Trump obsession was fashionable. He was the man who built Trump Tower and married Ivana and bought airlines and built casinos and created an empire out of a name. I’m too young to have real memories of Robin Leach, but I remember how much Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous vibrated through the culture. Trump was the personification of the era’s unbridled ambition. His was the shining face that welcomed Kevin McCallister to the Plaza in Home Alone 2. And yet we also knew in the moment that the smile must be masking darkness. The joke of American Psycho is that it reverses “normal” behavior. Culture has taught us to expect Wall Street bankers to be killers at work, leave the office, and lead a humdrum life with their families. Bateman is a bore at business and an actual killer at home.
But the reason I thought about Bret Easton Ellis is far more prosaic. Over the course of several years, Ellis teased out and developed a concept of “post-Empire,” on twitter which reached its fullest articulation in an essay on Charlie Sheen. Ellis isn’t exactly a linear thinker, but the argument goes something like this: The period from 1945-2005 was the period of American Empire. America was at its cultural, technological, political and military zenith, and public life was marked by a kind of enforced morality, exceptionalism, and civility.
In Empire, there are unseen gatekeepers who rigorously protect the borders of acceptable behavior and police celebrity. The wrong words spoken in public would lead to banishment. That all changes in a time of post-Empire: “What Sheen has exemplified and has clarified,” Ellis writes, “is the moment in the culture when not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is what matters most—and what makes the public love you even more.” AND “It’s thrilling watching someone call out the solemnity of the celebrity interview, and Charlie Sheen is loudly calling it out as the sham it is.” It all comes down to this question: what do audiences - do we - want now? “Do they really want manners? Civility? Empire courtesy? No. They want reality, no matter how crazy the celeb who brings it on has become.”
How long has Ellis been thinking about post-empire? He wrote a novel in 2010 called Imperial Bedrooms, a sequel to his debut Less than Zero. Both are named for Elvis Costello, but Imperial Bedrooms also has a literal meaning of “bedrooms of Empire.” And boy are there bedrooms in this novel! There’s the one that the main character owns, which is probably haunted by the ghost of a past resident who hung himself (the unit is listed on haunting websites); and there are bedrooms in desert hotels where striving actors debase themselves for money. If Empire is defined by the gatekeepers, the forces that impose public morality and civility, then these are absolutely the bedrooms of Empire. Clay is now a writer-producer. His power to cast actors and actresses in a role is perverted into the ability to abuse the bodies of the young. Empire gatekeepers protect the public from private horrors - especially when those horrors are their own.
Before reading Imperial Bedrooms, I read Less than Zero for the first time since I was 17. Did I like it when I was 17? At 17 I loved the style of the book. Not the narration and prose — the style. The clothes, the drinks, the clubs, the cars, the city of LA. It was exhilarating. But now, in my thirties, their life just seems tiring. Once you look passed the sensationalist aspects, Less than Zero is a book where beautiful bored people challenge themselves not to be bored.
What struck me this time was the meaninglessness of the style. Blair and Clay and Julian and Kim - these are all New Wave kids. A poster of Elvis Costello’s “Trust” hangs on the wall of Clay’s bedroom staring back at him. References to other New Wave bands dot the book, as do other genres that followed post-punk. A character shows up to sing the praises of Rockabilly. “‘New Wave. Power Pop. Primitive Muzak. It’s all bullshit. Rockabilly is where it’s at. And I don’t mean those limp-wristed Stray Cats, I mean real Rockabilly.’”
1970s post-punk had meaning, and so did New Wave. Elvis Costello is a great songwriter. But once filtered through MTV and nightclubs, the music lost whatever intent it might have had and became an ornament, a style, a background setting for the night to play against. The ’80s punk bands that were actually rebelling against Reagan don’t appear in Less than Zero. Instead we have a New Wave music that has been stripped of its content and repackaged as commodified dissent. These kids are all sullenly rebelling in a way that isn’t really rebelling so they watch MTV and do drugs and go to New Wave shows and they don’t believe in anything. 30 years later they will all become their parents.
The first time I read about “post-Empire,” I misunderstood it. I learned about the Sheen essay in a long essay about Ellis’s movie, The Canyons. (You remember, the one with Lindsay Lohan and James Dean?) The writer tries to describe “post-Empire” this way: “Empire is Madonna. Post-Empire is Lady Gaga... America, as an Empire, is finished, and post-Empire artists make their art out of Empire detritus, i.e., they are the cultural equivalent of Dumpster divers.”
And so this is how I understood post-Empire: the 1980s was the last time when American culture was original and we were now stuck with a pale imitation. It wasn’t just Gaga as a reincarnated Madonna. It was Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. It was Indie Rock’s revival of the College Radio jangle. It was the New Wave keyboard riffs of the first Killers’ album metamorphosing into the Bruce Springsteen stylings of the later Killers’ albums. It’s the seemingly endless stream of 80s TV shows and video games and cartoons and action figures that get turned into movies. Imperial Bedrooms is less a sequel to Less than Zero than a redux. Its most “shocking” scenes are replays of scenes from the first book, except this time the jokes are on us. In Less than Zero, a group watches/is forced to watch a snuff film at a party. In Imperial Bedrooms we have internet videos of beheadings and drug cartel executions and we can’t look away.
For some time, I’ve turned over an idea for a book about ’90s culture. One of the central ideas is that the 1990s marked a dangerous new development in cultural nostalgia. Childhood nostalgia not only became one of the dominant engines of culture, the culture industry positioned cultural nostalgia as something cool that should be emulated. It injected nostalgic yearnings into the bloodstream.
I was 10 when this Budweiser commercial aired. And it taught me that (1) good pop-culture was inherently self-referential; and (2) that it was best to do nostalgic things, like hanging out in a pool hall while wearing 50’s shirts, while waxing nostalgic. (‘Wax’ was a verb we used a lot in the 1990s. Also, 20+ years later and the words “Ginger was a bimbo” are still lodged in my active memory.) In Tarantino, this mode rises to the sublime.
(If you want this book to happen, get in touch. Especially if you are in a position to make it so.)
A disquieting thought presents itself: if the 1990s was the first decade marked by the cultural backwards gaze, then the 1980s must have been an apex - at least an apex of something. It was the period of Empire, the last period when original stars could be made. It gave us Madonna -- post-Empire can only give us Gaga, the shadow of Madonna. It gave us Elvis Costello. Not the cryptic Elvis Costello of the late-70s, but the arch-media-knowing Costello of the 80’s who blended words and music and images. Empire Costello winked in songs like “Everyday I Write the Book”: “Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal/I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel,” he sung, while in the music video, a husband and wife who look like Charles and Diana enjoy a loveless marriage. In Post-Empire Costello is unstuck in time, trapped releasing records that explore different eras of musical history. His best “new” songs are returns to ones he started crafting in the 80s. At least, the end of Empire gave us a movie about whether or not Elvis Costello would come to a New Year’s party.
Oddly, both readings of post-Empire help me make sense of things now. If politics is now celebrity (remember that McCain raised this charge against Obama), and what we want from celebrities is honesty no matter how odious, then yes, Trump. And also the media storyline: Trump weaponizing Twitter, flattening media. And the language! “Keep in mind anytime I roll something out my plan is the best plan in the room. And people are starting to realize that” -- sounds achingly Trumpian. But today also makes more sense if we perceive it through the prism of the eighties, and if we see the election of Trump as partly a belated form of worship of what Trump was. Champagne wishes and caviar dreams and the best steaks sold directly to you the consumer.
I suppose that’s the end. I’m still not sure if #winning means anything more than getting away with the truly objectionable. I’m still not sure if Bret Easton Ellis is a good writer, or if he’s a mediocre fiction writer manipulating the body and mind of a great cultural diagnostician. I’m still not sure what to think about Charlie Sheen and Two and a Half Men and Chuck Lorre/Chaim Levine and Les Moonves. But more than ever I’m convinced that future historians need to recognize the cultural significance of Sheen’s #winning -- just as they need to understand memes and Gamergate -- in order to understand how American politics and life were captured by the paranoid style.
