fake news!

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America sets the pace. As is well known, this applies to security policy, the economy and – as the Credit Suisse drama once again reminds us – certainly to the financial center. But so is culture.

The most important literary event of the still young year took place on the other side of the Atlantic. Cult writer Bret Easton Ellis (59) wrote ‘The Shards’ (German shards), a novel that violently takes everyone who deals with it.

The fictionalized autobiography is set in Los Angeles in 1981, where 17-year-old Bret attends an elite private school. The children of the Haute Volée drive expensive sports cars and enjoy a luxurious life under the California sun between school, parties and their mansions with maids and swimming pool.

“Incitement to Hate” before the Internet

Until a mysterious boy enters the classroom. His name is Robert Mallory and he pours the protagonist a cocktail of suspicion, fear and homosexual attraction: «A man my age, so stunningly handsome that at first I thought he was a movie star or a GQ model who had become the object of my sexual fantasies were.”

For all the youthful horniness, the narrator becomes more and more convinced that the newcomer must be the serial killer nicknamed “The Trawler,” who was terrifying LA at the time.

At the same time, the suspect slowly but surely penetrates Bret’s circle of friends. The description of this impotence in the face of an unwanted approach to a person – and before the inevitable collision with him – is great psychology. The omnipotence of Eros is broken only by the hatred the characters develop. Hate speech existed before the internet.

The end of all certainties

Between Mulholland Drive and Ventura Boulevard, the story of an obsessed man who wants to make it with the beau, condemn him and get rid of him at the same time – and with his obsession mutates into a kind of modern Captain Ahab.

Although “The Shards” is set in the early Reagan years, when people still had dial phones and the movie theaters were filling up, the story is of a shocking topicality, especially as the author anticipates a phenomenon that has unfolded since the political rise to power. occurs. of Donald Trump (76) and the career of the term ‘fake news’ has become a ubiquitous topic: the end of all certainties, the blurring line between truth and delusion.

The ‘post-factual era’, as it is called in intellectual German, is noticeable, for example, in the fact that Trump concocts a monumental vote theft after his deselection as US president – and millions of people believe him. Now he has to answer to a court in New York for a relatively trivial case: alleged hush money payments to a porn actress. Which he uses for a big performance where he can repeat his lie about electoral fraud.

Drone through the world

Against this background, Ellis has presented perhaps his most American novel – deceit and untruth permeate the entire plot: the protagonist is gay and rides off with a permanently stoned fellow student, but hides this from his girlfriend Debby, the daughter of a very wealthy Hollywood producer . He too actually tends towards men, but outwardly he lives a glamorous marriage with his wife, who in turn hides an alcoholism.

The teenager embellishes the world with tranquilizers because he can’t bear them otherwise, Debby creates a little synthetic euphoria with cocaine, her best friend Susan cheats on her husband with Robert. The figures are very young and already extremely broken – a reference to today’s destructive childhood madness.

And the reader is in the dark: how dangerous is this beautiful Robert really? Is he actually the killer? There are indications. Or are you being tricked by a paranoid narrator? Who is the madman in this tragedy? The characters in “The Shards” take refuge in a false life; Reality becomes a matter of opinion, it fades into a picture puzzle.

motherland of fake news on the couch

In this way, Bret Easton Ellis bridges to our present with fine accuracy. She is fascinated by artificial intelligence (AI), the development of which is currently continuing at breakneck speed. Last week, fake photos of Pope Francis in a rapper look in a shiny white down jacket circulated and even caught the attention of well-known news agencies. Tech giants such as Elon Musk (51) are calling for an AI moratorium out of impotence.

And isn’t everyone trying to show off false facades? The lack of transparency has become a daily plague in social media. The economy and politics are also infected: the fact that “Suisse” in the name of CS was a farce for a long time is now an open secret. And are the climate seniors suing Switzerland in Strasbourg (F) actually a grassroots movement of concerned citizens, as they would have us believe, or rather the product of a highly professional Greenpeace PR machine? Cheating, camouflaging, cheating everywhere.

After his bestseller “American Psycho” from 1991, Ellis masterfully puts the motherland of fake news on the couch again with his new thriller. The patient appears to be in urgent need of therapy.

Source: Blick