Looking Back At Bret Easton Ellis

How Less Than Zero, and the Los Angeles it's set in, are not what they once were

When I was a kid it seemed like Bret Easton Ellis was the most important writer of the age. He was as high as you could get. His was a name borne for the marquees. That first novel, Less Than Zero, which they’d made into a big Hollywood movie, defined the era and the place: 80s LA. I knew it through his books long before I ever got there myself.

But somehow, Ellis disappeared—he faded off for me after college and was never a part of my adult life. I know there was a period when he’d stopped writing books, and even said that they didn't matter anymore. I’d begun to wonder the same, I went back and forth with writing myself, and at some point, I decided to revisit his work. Less Than Zero was still there where I’d left it, on the sanguine shores of youth. I remembered all the characters: Clay, Blair, Julian, Rip—names, all of them just first names, kept alive in the 80s LA of my imagination—but the events in the book had long faded out. I looked forward to going there again.

I still had a little Brat Pack shelf in my library. They’d carefully moved with me from every house and apartment in life, going all the way back to my college dorm—and none of them had been opened since. Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Donna Tartt, a book of Michael Musto essays, and the whole dang Ellis canon as it existed up to Y2K. When I pulled it out, my mass-market paperback of Less Than Zero seemed very old-fashioned and unfamiliar. The inside pages were yellowed as if it’d been left to compost in the cold earth behind a toolshed. And it looked funny—the typesetting brought to mind vague, far-off childhood memories, pinging the era of macrame plant holders, cars with metal bumpers, the Good Housekeeping type magazines my mother had—all in a suburbia that engendered stand-alone B. Dalton bookstores, cable TV, and no Internet. Was it really that old? It was.

So I re-read the book. I even watched the movie again. It turns out, they’re not at all like how I once thought they were. And neither is LA.

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Of course in 1985 when Less Than Zero first arrived to much media hype, I’d missed it completely. I was way too young; when I finally discovered it in the following decade, the book was considered a modern classic, and the big Hollywood adaptation was old news. The film—starring Andrew McCarthy, Jami Gertz, and Robert Downey, Jr.—was horrible. I’d thought they’d absolutely butchered it, sanitized it, and dumbed it all down in a way that only Big Hollywood could do. The only redeeming quality, I thought at the time, was the soundtrack—one of the first CDs I ever bought.

But the book! It spoke to the core of my being. It was exhilarating; I read it over and over. It was a moral tale about the very rich. In that way, I knew, Ellis was another F. Scott Fitzgerald, only updated for the here and now. He documented our world and presented the raw truth that adults got all wrong.

Less Than Zero showed what life was like for the glamorous and jaded in the very faraway land of Los Angeles. Surely, I would never know that place—I would never journey there myself, or walk among those people—but this exotic, high-stakes world was brought to me in its pages. Back home in midwest suburbia, I didn't know anyone like these characters. The preppies described in the book had what seemed like everything: a languid, easy life in the perfect location, with all the flashy cars, the clothes, the money—ah but yes, they really had nothing, after all. They had less than nothing: with no moral grounding they were horrible, empty people, and we should never be like them.

It didn't matter because for me, their world was absolutely unobtanium, a rare element that no part of my life's makeup would ever be composed of. I wouldn’t ever really know them. But I could imagine: round-headed androgynous kids with prickly hair and eyeshadow listening to edgier synthwave than I could ever get the nerve to play, experiencing designer drugs I’d never heard of, and casually indulging in the most extreme taboos of society. They did it in this faraway land of high and curvy pastel-painted concrete walls, holding half moons of shade under the milk-white floodlight of California sun, and sleek glass-shoebox homes framed by eye-popping studies in exquisite tropical foliage and palms—that faraway Los Angeles of my mind was a David Hockney painting come to life. And everyone in it was clean and perfect and rich and beautiful—and damned.

My fascination with all of this was an unlikely love. The 80s were gone and way out of style. And Bret was an 80s guy all the way. He was king of the Brat Pack—that young, stylish, fashionable clique of writers who chronicled the glitz, dazzle, emptiness and decadence of upper class coastal America in that time. That was the era when “writers” went around in jackets and ties, if even with denim. When I was reading him, all of this was way so out of date—we were in the serious throes of grunge, indie rock, electronica, and I was looking back at these confident young adults making the scene in the middle of the Reagan years, the days of synthy new wave, feathered hair, tables at Elaine’s, art by Nagel, fear by AIDS, dudes in Armani, chicks with big hair and glimmery, shoulder-padded dresses. It was all as gross as the music: Elvis Costello, XTC, X, Squeeze. This was all old people stuff, forgotten now, fashion from another age.

Yet it somehow seemed sophisticated to me, and I was convinced that he was the greatest living writer. I ate up all the stories of Brat Pack glamour which I found in old back issues of Esquire and GQ at the library. I fantasized about that era. Why couldn’t I have been older? I wanted so bad to disappear into that world. I wanted to be in that LA, I was obsessed with it, fantasizing of the mores and styles of that world, where ecstasy was legal and all the cool kids had BMW E21s.

One afternoon on campus, at the dinged maple desk in my dorm room, I penned Bret a wildly embarrassing and extremely retarded letter, telling him how when I got to that part in his second book where there’s a brief cameo of Clay, the main protagonist in Less Than Zero, I jumped up in my shorts and t-shirt and ran down out of my dorm for two blocks, and how after that the images in the book lived inside me for a very long time.

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Over the years I’ve come to meet almost all the Brat Pack writers—but I still never met Bret, my old college favorite. The closest I came was a handful of years ago, when I bumped into his best friend at my favorite bar in the valley. The Tonga Hut in North Hollywood, a tiki bar with a kind of sunken-pit lounge centered around a big orange fireplace, it’s an easy spot to hang out in. I love that place. Bret’s best friend was drinking vodka, had way too much of it, didn’t realize he had to wipe his nose, and flashed his Harvard class ring in our faces constantly.

He kept telling me how Bret—who grew up just a few minutes away in Sherman Oaks—would never go out to a place like this. Bret, he said, hates being in public now. The guy proceeded to hit on the girl I was with and then on me before he rolled out the door.

But that encounter got me thinking back to Bret. He seems like the kind of guy that maybe I could be very good friends with—or maybe we’d mutually annoy each other after two minutes. He seems to be thinking independently, and I like that. There is no great culture now worth speaking of, and the world of the novel is an exciting land that fewer people seem to be visiting, or even capable of visiting. Our moment feels like a vast fulcrum in history, and it might be interesting to talk to him about that. We might have something important in common. But then, we might not. I'm so opposite his characters. I might even be opposite him, who knows. But I do love LA.

My teenage self wouldn’t believe it even possible that twenty years later I’d spend so much time in Malibu and Calabasas and the landscape described inside his books. But it happened. I’ve spent enough time out there to get completely sick of it, and then to build a sort of love-hate relationship with it. For a while it was practically a second home. The lazy draws are uncountable, from the long formica counters of Astro, Norm’s, Pann’s, the Apple Pan, to the midnight booths of Cantor’s, day drinks at Musso & Frank’s, winding around in the long carnival lines at Pink’s, slow sunsets in Redondo Beach, Muscle Beach parties after dark, dock bars in Wilmington—I built up a long tapestry of memories there, and they’re lodged inside a world that goes much further back. I’ve walked quiet residential neighborhoods in Northridge, with bird-of-paradise and Mexican fan palms in front of rock-wall frontages, and knew that absolutely yes, a scene from Less Than Zero played out here over thirty years before. So that was when I knew I’d have to re-read the book and even watch the film again.

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When I went back to the film, I was shocked at what was on the screen. The film was actually nothing but a time capsule: LA is the main character, the only character, and the people are just backdrops, props, like the figures in an Utrillo painting. Slick and stylized, it was cinematic perfection. They took the name of the book and the names of its characters, and propped them up around a good, glossy story, structured it like a 40s noir, and proceeded to make the most perfect capture of Los Angeles in the 80s. They captured LA—the real, living, moving LA—and held it there at just a certain moment in time, where it now lives forever on a screen.

Cinematographer Ed Lachman mounted the city on celluloid like a moth on a specimen board, with all its eye-popping colors on display: the red incandescent spotlights and bone-white walls and motionless aquamarine pools all look painted in place, the tiled contours and waving paths of the mid-century modern SoCal exteriors are laid out nicely for the cameras, as if a whole generation of architects had existed soley to design an awesome 80s setpiece. When you watch it, you’re utterly transported there. That’s about the best that film, as a medium, can do: make a read-only time machine for future travelers.

In the book, Clay is as empty and degenerate as everybody else. But in the film, he’s no postmodern antihero. They made a sproutly Andrew McCarthy a good guy in not a preppy outfit, but in what looks like a 3/2 roll, two-button cuff, natural shoulder sack suit, and skinny 60s ties. It’s absolutely commandeering. Hear it from me: if you want to be a hero, this is your look.

Watching it now, you can see that there’s something even wholesome about the film, in a retro and very funny way: the characters are supposed to be debauched and wild young people who are recent high school graduates—kids, basically—and yet they go around in impeccable suits and dresses, speak respectfully to their elders, politely drink champagne in flutes, and carry themselves with more maturity and elan than most adults I know today in real life. Even the villain, James Spader, speaks in the most wonderfully corny 80s lines: he warns Clay, who is home from school on break, that the trouble he’s getting into here isn’t just “recess”!

It turns out that the only flaw—and it’s a pretty big one—is the soundtrack: it’s loud, annoying noise, all of it, and it spoils Lachman's sharp-edged cinematography. The incidental music of the score is excellent, and I’d love to see an alternate version where all the rock and pop is replaced by classical music, like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. That would make the whole thing unstoppably sublime.

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But when I re-read the book, I learned a number of things. Most importantly, I realized that I didn't like it at all. I couldn’t believe that this was the book that once meant so much to me. And then I remembered one of the few good critical pieces about Ellis (there are, unfortunately, very few of these): back in the day, some stodgy old white-haired critic had brushed it off completely as a “young person’s book.”

Well, the guy was right. It’s not the kind of book you should be reading if you’re already out of school. If you’re over thirty, forget it—you might as well try and go back to Winnie the Pooh.

As an adult, the book shocks me speechless. Not by the salacious material, the “transgressive” “nature” of the “text,” but I’m shocked at how different everything seems now from my longheld memory of it. It’s totally different. There is no breathless glamour here, no glitz at all. This book is dark, unhappy, queer as all getout, and brutally violent. And I simply don’t remember any of that as a teen—as if the Less Than Zero that I knew as a kid has been replaced by an impostor.

It’s not the book, of course—it’s me. I just wonder if my teenage brain wasn’t yet capable of recognizing or registering these wavelengths that are so clear to me now, or if I once had some different kind of life-filter that has since rubbed away from me, like how some animals go through changing molts.

Because my old impression of the book, that I’d held on to all my life, was that it described the synth-and-neon world of super rich kids in the trendy 80s, a world of preppies—guys who popped their collars and went around in boat shoes and Brooks Brothers, and girls whose fathers sent them off to east-coast boarding schools with a trunk full of Talbot’s. And the secret was, these nice rich people were actually horrible. In my memory, Ellis was the Scott Fitzgerald of the Biff and Muffy set, his characters the smiling cardboard cutouts from Lisa Birnbach’s The Preppy Handbook—all looks signaling status, with (surprise!) nothing on the inside. All these years, I thought that was the raison d’etre of Bret Easton Ellis, that he was the R-rated chronicler of the John Hughes years.

That indeed sums up the film, but—with the book—such a charge couldn’t be more wrong. If anyone parrots that view, you know they haven’t read it. It turned out that in the actual book, there aren’t any preppies at all. Like, not a one! No preppies! Nobody dresses like them or talks like them and certainly nobody smiles. They’re actually very poorly dressed: they’re all slobs in t-shirts and denim. Clay, the protagonist, does go to an east coast “prep” school, but he’s a California surfer dude all the way: the only time he wears a suit and tie in the book he’s clearly uncomfortable, and probably doesn’t pull it off. There’s no WASPs in polos with their sweaters tied up around their necks, no girls knocking about in all-cotton oxfords and tartan belts. Absolutely no one in the book shops J. Press or The Andover Shop. Blair wears tight jeans and Squeeze t-shirts and seems to go barefoot a lot. Not that the WASPs are anything great to brag about, but these people look horrible.

No, this was not like the movie at all. This LA was dingy and gritty, punk and not preppy, and closer to the tract house grime of Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia than the Lachman film. From the wild dogs and coyotes to the drugs and runaways, it’s a dead-soul world that Ellis inhabits ... a downcast LA wasteland in the very early 80s, in the abandoned shadow of the old counter-culture, where the past was already eaten up and the future taken off the menu. Young punks who were from the lowest of middle-class rungs, or no rungs at all, were the dark people of the book. X-rated and unhappy, this is no John Hughes movie.

Less Than Zero is a dark portrait of the degrading cruelty of early 80s LA youth. In The Rules of Attraction you have the psychological cruelty of rutting college students, in American Psycho you have the cruelty of man against woman, in Glamorama you have the cruelty of culture and organizations—if there were a single word to sum up Ellis’ life-work, “cruel” would be it. The blank wasteland of secular society, and all of its cruelty, is his territory and concern.

I didn’t envy any of these people, I didn’t want to be like them, I didn’t want to dwell on or disappear into their worlds. I held on to mine with newfound gratitude. If anything, I was angry that I lived here, at this time, in this place with these conditions that made people like his characters even possible.

When I finished—and it was a struggle—I thought to myself, “So this was the book that moved me so much? I don’t get it.”

Because I couldn’t even enter the book. I tried, I read it from cover to cover but now it seemed like it was a book with all middle, no entrance, no exit—and in the end when I was done I just tucked it neatly back on my old Brat Pack shelf, where it remains.

It was a very young person talking to a very young person at some point in time that had long passed, and whatever they were saying to each other didn’t matter. It was vapid, idle chatter. When I tried to listen, I was actually annoyed—I was an adult and there were important things to do.