By admin 
Before the often controversial interview podcast and the many Twitter outbursts, before the precocious splash of “Less Than Zero” and the scandal of “American Psycho,” Bret Ellis—the writerly “Easton” still silent—was a student at the expensive Buckley School in Los Angeles. As a teen-ager, Ellis did drugs, saw R-rated movies, engaged in clandestine sexual affairs, and generally misbehaved, taking full advantage of the autonomy that well-off children were apparently granted in the early nineteen-eighties. That freedom is the backdrop of Ellis’s elegant autofictional 2023 novel “The Shards,” a thrilling reimagining of his adolescence that has now been transformed into a TV show by Ryan Murphy.
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The novel’s drama springs from the arrival of a mysterious new student named Robert Mallory during senior year of high school. A fictionalized Bret Ellis and his friends are the popular kids, atop a social hierarchy that should, at this point, be set in stone; Robert’s addition to the mix makes Bret nervous. At the same time, Bret, who is gay and desperate to keep it secret, is immediately drawn to Robert. “The boy aroused something primal in me,” he recalls of their first encounter, at a screening of “The Shining.” Robert soon becomes an object of fantasy and fixation. Working off a few vague details, Bret begins to imagine a link between Robert and a serial killer known as the Trawler, who has been abducting and torturing young women around Los Angeles. When one of the Buckley seniors (a boy whom Bret has secretly been having sex with) goes missing, and is eventually found beaten and mutilated, Bret suspects that Robert is the killer.
Is he? In the novel, Robert is a shifty, slippery presence. Since we see him only through Bret’s eyes, it’s often unclear what about him is real and what is a projection of Bret’s protean desire. At “The Shining,” Bret lustily describes Robert’s head of blond hair. Later, his hair is brown. Sometimes we get a glimpse of Robert as a normal, affable teen before Bret’s narration once again assures us he’s a dangerous psychopath.
Bret has a girlfriend, Debbie Schaffer, but he also has sexual relationships with at least two of his male classmates. His feelings for these boys are described with a soul-baring softness, especially striking for its divergence from Ellis’s usual ruthless unsentimentality. On the other hand, Bret’s feelings for Robert lead him to take increasingly extreme measures, including stalking and, eventually, catastrophic violence. The intensity of his sexuality warps his mind, while the mandate of secrecy feeds his paranoia. The result, to borrow a phrase from Patrick Bateman, the serial killer in “American Psycho,” is that Bret feels “lethal, on the verge of frenzy.”
Equally lethal are Bret’s writerly aspirations. His ability to spin stories about the Trawler means that he is destabilized by the crimes in a way that his classmates aren’t. The achievement of the book is that Ellis (the real one) encases us in Bret (the character)’s obsessively narrativizing consciousness, so that his feverish pursuit of the “truth” rubs off on us. We, too, become fixated on whether small details might reveal Robert to be a murderer. Like Bret, we are eager to uncover the dark secrets of Robert’s past, but as the book goes on we are also creepingly aware that Bret might be more interested in a good story than he is in reality.
Murphy’s adaptation is a somewhat different product. Preserved from Ellis’s novel, and generally well-rendered, are the basic conceits and settings: a rich, secretly gay high-school senior named Bret Ellis is part of a friend group that integrates (or resists integrating) the newcomer Robert Mallory, all the while circled by news of the Trawler. Bret is played by Igby Rigney, whose distant, sneery monotone recalls the voice of the real-life Ellis. The rest of the cast, which includes Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere (the children of the eighties supermodel Cindy Crawford and the actor Richard Gere, respectively), is serviceable and occasionally great, but Rigney is the standout, and his presence or absence, from scene to scene, is starkly felt. The series is gorgeously shot, full of perfectly appointed eighties interiors, and has a soundtrack—Blondie, Fleetwood Mac, Rick James, and the Beach Boys—that evidently cost a fortune.
Ryan Murphy claims that he’s always “worshipped” Ellis’s work, and, indeed, one can imagine why the creator of “Glee,” a show about the agonies and the ecstasies of high-school drama, might find the adolescent milieu of “The Shards” compelling. But where “Glee” is a sentimental artifice, a snow-globe world in which teen-age angst and melodrama are of planetary importance, Ellis’s vision of teen-agers, as painted in “Less Than Zero,” his icy début, is numb, droll, sadistic, and alienated. In 2011, Ellis tweeted, “I like the idea of ‘Glee’ but why is it that every time I watch an episode I feel like I’ve stepped into a puddle of HIV?” In his own manner, Ellis may have summed up the disparity between his and Murphy’s sensibilities perfectly. As a novel, “The Shards” is an ambitious metafictional thriller-slash-gay-awakening story, and although, unlike “Less Than Zero,” it’s plot-forward and emotionally intense, Murphy’s attempt to adapt it has, to some degree, amounted to a “Glee”-ification.
Maximalist drama is Murphy’s signature style, and, to that end, he makes several stagy alterations to the novel’s subplots. One of Bret’s primary love interests, Ryan Vaughn, with whom he shares a tender weekend in the novel, is condemned, in the show, to a silly B plot involving (straight) porn and implausible blackmail. There’s a televised dance-off host’s short-lived and pointless baby-mama drama, and the addition of a bizarre kidnapping farce that, despite Ivy Wolk’s expressive and funny performance as its victim, morphs into a lame homecoming-queen makeover story before just being dropped. Perhaps most radical is the show’s portrayal of Bret’s relationship with Terry Schaffer, the father of Bret’s girlfriend, Debbie. In both the novel and the show, Terry is a famous movie producer who, though only nominally closeted, is still married to Debbie’s mother. At first, he comes across as a kind of quasi-predator—flirty and a little gross, but basically harmless. Then Terry takes an interest in Bret. From his daughter, he’s heard about Bret’s novel in progress, also called “Less Than Zero.” He wants to buy Bret lunch, to pick his brain, to encourage him to develop the novel into a screenplay. Then, Terry wants quid-pro-quo sex. In the show, Terry, played by Wes Bentley, is a cartoon creep, wearing a villainous grin as he instigates his sexual encounter with Bret. (We don’t see it; instead, much of the explicit passage from the novel is read verbatim by Rigney, in his flat voice-over.) The big departure comes in the show’s depiction of the aftermath: “I didn’t understand adult things, I just thought I did,” Bret reflects. “I’ve learned through time that many young people make the same mistake.”
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This very appropriate, reasonable analysis is quite different from Ellis’s take on the scene in the novel. The business with Terry, Bret says there, “hadn’t bothered me in any substantial way.” In the book’s arc, this lands as a chilling dismissal, and a reminder of the magnitude of Bret’s increasingly psychotic concern over Robert Mallory and the Trawler, and his detachment from his own life. By contrast, Murphy fashions the moment into a statement on trauma, with Bret’s reflections about his youthful naïveté mirroring some of the language of the #MeToo movement. Regardless of the inherent morality of the situation (or if you even believe book-Bret is as unbothered as he claims), the turn is predictable and deflating.
“I didn’t care that Ronald Reagan had been elected president last November,” Bret muses in the novel. “This meant absolutely nothing to me at seventeen and politics have stayed that way for the rest of my life.” This little addendum—that politics mean nothing to the Bret Easton Ellis of 2023—is eminently untrue, as anyone who has listened to his podcast, which often turns to political commentary, will attest. There, Ellis seems, in fact, to have an irresistible negative attraction to politics. Perhaps he does find the whole thing uninteresting—and, on some level, even disgusting—but he can’t stay away. He worries about what he sees as the meddling of left-wing politics in the arts and entertainment (“Ideology trumps aesthetics,” he frequently complains), and the intensity of his claims of neutrality and aloofness belies what are obviously deep, genuine feelings about the political moment. In an interview with the writer Luke Goebel, the subject of the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election came up. Ellis exclaimed, “The right is fucked, the left is fucked,” and went on, “If you live in L.A. and you’re voting for Karen Bass, or anybody else, you’re a nut case!” It’s clear from the rest of the conversation, and from numerous other statements he’s made—and from his 2019 essay collection, “White”—that “or anybody else” was a concession to his left-leaning guest: Ellis preferred the Republican candidate Spencer Pratt, who ultimately lost in the primary.
But “The Shards” is, indeed, something of a political void. There is vanishingly little connecting the novel to the real-life happenings of the eighties. (The most promising candidate for political analysis in the book comes in the form of the Terry Schaffer drama, which might be cast as a denouncement of “victim narratives,” something that Ellis has said that he hates.) This presents a bit of a problem for Murphy, for whom the prepackaged spectacle of political incident has become almost a prerequisite for entertaining television. His dramatizations “The People v. O. J. Simpson” and “Impeachment” (on the Monica Lewinsky scandal) are, arguably, his best works. In both cases, Murphy resists direct commentary, instead using politics as a set piece to make meaning and Shakespearean entertainment out of the players themselves. “The People” leverages the racial tensions surrounding the O.J. case as a dramatic engine, rather than a moral focus. At the heart of “Impeachment” are Lewinsky’s fateful friendship with Linda Tripp, and Bill and Hillary Clinton’s marriage.
With “The Shards,” Murphy doesn’t have as globally significant a set of events to work with. He uses the Trawler and the serial-killer narrative instead. Like the racial fracas of “The People” or the actual impeachment of “Impeachment,” the threat of the Trawler moves the story along, creating gravity and urgency. This is effective enough—we take the Trawler seriously, as a threat—but it also causes a tonal unevenness, and, ultimately, the show is caught in a kind of no man’s land, too schlocky to be menacing and too concerned with the grimness of its events to be a pure excess trip. Unlike in “The People” or “Impeachment,” the character material in “The Shards” doesn’t match the show’s alleged stakes. It’s too campy, too silly, too “Glee.” Ellis’s style isn’t universally beloved, but a character in one of his books probably wouldn’t employ the phrase “spooky season” to refer to October, or—ham-fisting the famous Joan Didion line—proclaim “I was . . . telling myself a story in order to live.”
Murphy obviously wasn’t interested in making a direct adaptation of Ellis’s novel, and most of the time it’s unclear what, exactly, he did want to do with the material. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a show about a teen-ager’s gay awakening, or the fraught management of such a secret; nor is it about the destructive and violent feelings that can accompany creative ambition. (In some ways, “Euphoria” is a better adaptation of “The Shards,” with its competing moral narratives and depictions of the often annihilating power of adolescent sexuality.) At times, Murphy’s show gestures at these themes, but not with any real conviction, and by the end of the series nothing much has been said.
A subject that Ellis likes to discuss on his podcast is how the New Hollywood era of the seventies came to an end with the flop of “Heaven’s Gate,” in early 1981, the same year that “The Shards” takes place. Ellis has an endearing, boyish fondness for the films of the New Hollywood (“Carrie,” “The Deer Hunter,” and “Days of Heaven” are regularly cited), their moral ambiguity and their often gloomy endings. In some sense, “The Shards” is a processing of Ellis’s transition into adulthood, as the cinematic landscape of his childhood died. “It was as if another world was announcing itself, painting the one we had all safely taken for granted into a darker color,” he writes. These lines refer to Robert Mallory’s arrival and the ensuing madness, but they could just as easily refer to the collapse of the Hollywood of Ellis’s youth. In the eighties, cinema would gravitate toward clear messages and sleek blockbusters, many of them action movies. Ellis is at odds with the linear, conformist optimism that defined that era—in 1991, with “American Psycho,” he created a whole serial killer out of his alienation—and in “The Shards” we again find him rejecting those clean, straightforward narratives, constantly hole-poking his own stories and revelling in the unresolved. I can’t help imagining a New Hollywood treatment of “The Shards”—one that incorporates the book’s strange inscrutability, its simultaneous resistance to and obsession with truth, its airy, suspenseful slowness. One that acknowledges the conundrum at the core of the book, and a prevailing force in Ellis’s work: We want to know what really happened. We’ll never know what really happened. ♦
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