Politics & Power Quote by Shannyn Sossamon

There is a particular kind of cultural literacy in admitting you don’t like what an artist is serving, but you understand why it’s on the table. Shannyn Sossamon’s reaction to Bret Easton Ellis lands in that in-between space: not endorsement, not dismissal, but recognition of a project. She clocks the tonal range between Less Than Zero’s numbed-out drift and American Psycho’s Grand Guignol brutality, then lands on a blunt diagnosis: this guy “doesn’t have anything pleasant to say.” That’s not a critique of craft so much as a critique of worldview, the sense that Ellis isn’t merely depicting ugliness but insisting it’s the truest register of American life.

The casual, conversational phrasing (“I was just like, Okay… you know?”) matters. It signals a pop-cultural encounter rather than a seminar-room judgment, which makes the concession “But I get it” feel earned. Sossamon is articulating how bleak art recruits you: it doesn’t ask to be liked, it asks to be recognized. The subtext is a soft defense of difficulty itself. Ellis’s books are “really different,” yet they share a refusal to comfort the reader, and she reads that as intention rather than accident.

Contextually, it’s also a snapshot of post-90s media fatigue: the suspicion that cynicism is a pose, alongside the uneasy awareness that it can also be reportage. Sossamon is naming the paradox that keeps Ellis relevant: the work repels, but it explains.