There is another route that Bale could go with a Twitter account, were he to have one. He can take the same approach that American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis has taken, who I believe is the only celebrity to operate his own fictional Twitter account.
Many people are offended by Ellis’s tweets on a regular basis, as he has used Twitter as a vehicle for celebrating the death of JD Salinger, responding to the Dan Savage “It Gets Better” campaign by saying it actually gets worse, praising Weiner’s sexting behavior as “post-Empire,” praising Charlie Sheen, and saying some pretty shocking, tabloid-ready things about Glee.
Quite a few people have responded that Ellis acts like one of his characters on Twitter. What most (but not all) fail to realize is that Ellis isn’t acting like one of his characters: he is being one of his characters, and not for the first time. In his novel Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis is the main character, who insists that Keanu Reeves actually fathered his girlfriend’s child and gradually slips into a world of terror, disappearances, and murder.
Ellis’s Twitter account is not him being a total asshole or just trying to shock people – it’s him creating a new fictional narrative, yet another reflection on our materialistic society through the lens of an angry, disillusioned narcissist’s first person perspective, obsessed with using his own imagined slang (which boils down to labeling everything as either Empire or post-Empire.) And to boot, the only recurring supporting character in this narrative is the unnamed, gender-unspecified “24-year-old” with whom he is apparently involved. He has also played a fictional version of himself, for laughs, on Funny or Die.
Where does Bale come in? Bale could easily do the same thing. Christian Bale already portrayed an Ellis character in American Psycho. Were he to authorize Bret Easton Ellis to author his tweets, we could have an incredible narrative along the same lines as the one Ellis does on himself, including self-parody of such pivotal moments as his Terminator fit of rage and his ensuing apologies – I imagine that Ellis would write Bale to undermine his apologies, in the manner that Ellis praised Tracey Morgan’s apologies as the funniest thing Morgan has ever done.
This also would not be an entirely new concept, as Bale has appeared as a very minor character in Glamorama, and additionally a character known only as “the Christian Bale guy” appears throughout the rest of the novel.
This would be perhaps be a better – and more confusing, to the tabloids – approach than either trying to create his own daily tweets or having a publicist do it for him. This would also perhaps be easier for audiences to grasp, as actors frequently play fictional versions of themselves on shows such as Entourage and Extras. Whether Bale could become another of the many self-parodying actors out there is yet to be seen.
Click here to see the earlier post on the possibilities of a Bale Twitter account.
(UPDATE 9/18/11: The 24 year-old is now a 25 year-old. There was either a birthday or a replacement.)
(UPDATE 9/8/12: The 25-year-old is now a 26-year-old. Once again, no mention of any birthday or replacing, but the age has changed. As it is roughly one year since the last age change, it may or may not be safe to assume that the character has had a birthday recently.)
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