The Lifestyles of Psychotic Americans: Reading Through the Works of Bret Easton Ellis

Ah, satire.  That most misunderstood of creative outlets.  How I love you.  Everyone should love a good satire, or at least I’d like to imagine they should.  Satire is everywhere, in movies and music and literature; usually as a little pinch of sardonic humor thrown into a work for flavor.  Then there comes along a satirist that pushes satire onto a level of absurdity so profuse that virtually no one understands the point of it.  One such as this is usually the type of person to be ignored in his lifetime and lauded as a genius long after his demise.  A person like Bret Easton Ellis, for example.

You might know Bret Easton Ellis indirectly through the movie American Psycho, which is based on his most infamous novel.  That’s the limit of the average person’s knowledge of the author.  It’s understandable, as his books are not for everyone.  And by not for everyone, I mean they aren’t for anyone sane.  For the most part, all of his novels concern violent narcissists and deviants who go through life floating in a drug-induced haze while experiencing the occasional bouts of wanton murder.  You end up hating virtually every character he creates.  So why bother to read any of his stuff at all?

Well, because the man is going to be considered one of the great satirists of the age, and if I know hipsters like I think I do, they will want in on this before everyone else starts to like him and he becomes mainstream.  I recently finished, after picking at them for the past few years, every book in Bret Easton Ellis’ repertoire.  I’m going to take you through the written works of the man and give you a little taste of the whip smart insanity you are sure to encounter.

First up...

Less Than Zero

This should be your first foray into the world of B.E.E.  Less Than Zero concerns the character of Clay, a college kid home in Los Angeles for his Christmas break who rapidly falls back into the high class Hollywood teen lifestyle of the 80s.  If this novel is to be believed, that lifestyle consists of doing cocaine, sleeping with just about every person you come into contact with, and going to some really disturbing parties.  It’s not so much a story as it is an unblinking look at what a glitzy, glamorous life can lead to when there’s nothing else to offer from it.  Expect vivid descriptions of decadence and snuff films to plague your senses.

The Rules of Attraction

This is by far my least favorite of his books, but it’s by no means bad.  Taking place at Camden College, the story follows a group of art students as they work their way from drug deal to one night stand and back again against the backdrop of “Dress To Get Screwed” and “End of the World” parties.  At the forefront are Sean, Paul, and Lauren who form a sordid “love” triangle that has little to do with love and more to do with sexual (and bi-sexual) escapades and more than a little insanity, as by the end almost every narrator the novel offers up turns out to be unreliable, seeing things through personal lenses so warped that we aren’t sure what’s real and what isn’t.

American Psycho

Ah, here’s the big one.  Ellis’ most controversial and infamous work that is still banned in places, which for a book usually means it’s really good.  I can’t in good conscious recommend it, because it is to put it lightly, fucked up.  Here we have Patrick Bateman, New York yuppie and card-carrying materialist who spends his days dining at the finest restaurants and arguing over who has the most beautiful business card and his nights propositioning prostitutes whom he then proceeds to rape, torture, murder, and in some cases, eat.  Maybe.  It’s an incredibly violent book, told through the eyes of a man so lost in the emptiness of his lifestyle that he describes his wardrobe and love for Huey Lewis with the same deadpan voice that he describes his unspeakable acts of violence that we aren’t sure even really happened by the end.  Nothing will prepare you for what you will find in this book, so just be ready to be shocked if you’re going to go through with reading it.  But go into it with an open mind, as the point is lost on a number of people, who see it as a misogynistic manifesto of horror, rather than the skewering of the insanity of materialism that it’s meant to be.

The Informers

Ellis switched formats for his next release in the form of a collection of interconnected short stories set during the time of Less Than Zero.  (I should pause to note something here:  each of these books is set in the same screwy universe and often characters from earlier novels drift in and out of others.  I dig it.)  Anyhow, the collection of stories find a group of individuals trying to live their drugged up, vapid lives in Los Angeles.  The characters include rock stars, pretty boys, aging starlets, international rock stars, and vampires.  Yes, vampires.  It isn’t the greatest on this list, probably because most of these were written when Ellis was still in college and hadn’t yet formed the authorly clout he would later posses.  

Glamorama

I will put forward that not only is Glamorama the best on this list, but it has become one of my all time favorite books.  Which might say something terrible about my personality, but I’m not ashamed.  For now.  Victor Ward, first introduced as a minor character in Rules of Attraction, is spending the late 90s as a rising star in the New York modeling world.  He’s opening clubs and doing photo shoots for the covers of teen magazines and dating actresses.  He’s also completely idiotic, barely noticing what goes on around him if it doesn’t concern a celebrity he can name drop.  And speaking of celebrity name dropping, the first half of the books is made up of almost entirely that, with a few lengthy bouts of fashion and movie industry buzzwords that string together to paint an accurate picture of the glam obsessed culture Victor wallows in.  As the story progresses, Victor finds himself drawn into a weird conspiracy that lands him in London as part of a group of ultra-violent terrorists who are all models and actors under the tutelage of a mad former supermodel named Bobby Hughes.  Unlike most of Ellis’ other novels, Glamorama has a full story arc and a mystery for a reader to get hooked by, and I think it works much better than most of his other novels.  In talking of this book, it would be criminal not to at least mention the fact that the movie Zoolander ripped this story off hard, and a settlement with Ben Stiller was made out of court.  Which totally means that Focker was guilty, am I right?

Lunar Park

Lunar Park was a drastic change for the author, as it removes itself from his normal written universe to become a sort of faux autobiography.  The protagonist this time around is Bret Easton Ellis himself, who satirizes his own rise to stardom in the 80s and his fall from grace after writing Glamorama that led to him reconnecting with an old flame, getting married, and raising a family in suburbia.  Just when you think the story is set, murders linked to the novel American Psycho start happening in the neighborhood, and very weird things begin to take place in Ellis’ McMansion.  Things like possessed toys, monsters, ghosts, and a blending of the “real” world and the “fictional” world in his novels.  Not unlike his other novels, there’s the usual satirizing of a lifestyle at work, here being the life of a strung out suburbanite and unwarranted family man.  Where the book really shines is in the dissecting of Ellis’ relationship with his father and his son, which takes up the core of the story.

Imperial Bedrooms

Just last summer, Ellis’ most recent books was released.  It was a sequel to Less Than Zero, picking up with the characters from that novel in their particularly disturbing midlife crisis.  Clay is now a screenwriter struggling to help cast a movie he wrote that is a thinly veiled mockery of the poor adaptation of Ellis’ own The Informers.  Just as vapid and hollow as ever, Clay reconnects with people he knew in youth and finds Hollywood an even more decrepit and violent place than before.  As the lifestyle consumes him again, he descends into the depths of his own depraved obsessions and the reader follows.  The novel doesn’t work as well as most of his other ones, and is stripped down even by the standards of the usual Ellis fair, but it’s a manageable take on being middle aged (and possibly insane).

There you have it.  It’s very difficult to describe a book by Bret Easton Ellis and then follow it up with a sincere plea to read his stuff.  The books are hard to get through, to be sure.  The style, while fascinating to me, can turn a lot of people off with it’s deadpan delivery and dry humor.  That’s to say nothing for the vivid descriptions of violence and sex that border on anthropological in the attention to detail offered.  And American Psycho is best read on a dare or for money or something.  The point is not to miss the point.  Used as a cross section of the process of satirization, Bret Easton Ellis’ body of work is top notch.  His books even have a weirdly moral leaning when viewed objectively.  If only for one hell of an experience, I suggest giving him a try.

I’m sorry I used the word “satire” so much.  I didn’t have my thesaurus with me.  Or maybe I was satirizing the satire of satirists.  We’ll go with that, because it means I’m secretly a genius.

Yep, genius.  Pure genius.

Just... just watch it.

Sometimes an invention comes along that just seems right, like maybe the mad scientist behind it was drinking his Wheatie Shakes when he was stirring the ol’ brain juices.  Definitely one of the top three inventions of the last 50 years, trailing right behind g-strings and Totino’s Pizza Rolls, is that wonderful little treasure that is the Netflix instant streaming option.  

I’m going to be honest here, and tell you I sort of hate tv.  Not the medium itself, mind you, but the whole process of watching television.  I hate commercials of course, and most of what’s on these days is just absolute garbage.  Much of this nation is more concerned with what a man-child who calls himself The Situation (I can’t believe I just made that a proper noun.  I feel so dirty.) had for breakfast than any sort of real plot, and that’s just a shame.  It’s even worse considering the sort of shows that don’t make it due to poor ratings or lack of interest.  In recent history we’ve cancelled shows like Freaks and Geeks and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip while letting a show about Donald Trump playing games with assholes too lazy to get their own business degree make it to... (looking up the answer on wikipedia)... ELEVEN SEASONS?!  Holy Lord, take me now.  I weep for humanity.

Anyway, shows these days are getting better for the most part.  The best of the best still always seem to be cancelled early (I miss The Tick), but there are always going to be diamonds in the rough.  Since I hate watching television and currently don’t receive cable, I have chosen to turn to my old friend Netflix to get them secondhand.  One of the great things about Netflix is that after awhile it starts deciding what I’d like and what I wouldn’t like.  Now, normally I’d be wary of letting a computer steer my tastes, and not just because according to most 1980s sci-fi movies we should have been at war with the machines ages ago.  I mean, just the other day Monster.com told me I’d make a great theoretical physicist when it knows damned well that as soon as letters are introduced to mathematics my eyes begin to bleed.  But I digress, Netflix is pretty nifty in this regard.  I’ve found some good stuff to feast my eyes on lately by it’s recommendation.

However, they should add a little warning next to some of their choices.  A warning that would have said something like “You will become more addicted to this show than Rosie O’donnel is to Oreos and muffdiving”.  The show in question is called Psych and I watched about 80 hours of it in the past two weeks.

I’d heard of Psych before, from a few people and the ads that sometimes popped up during reruns of Burn Notice, but had never given it much thought.  I’m not huge on police procedurals.  Law and Order never did anything for me, and I only ever watched NYPD Blue to see bare butts on network television.  Lately there’s been an explosion of these weird off-topic police dramas that seem to always center around one super smart person with a weird schtick who is smarmy and sarcastic and helps solve crimes by figuring out if someone is lying or by accurately predicting the Numb3rs.  For the most part these are shows that my aged parents enjoy, and I’ve learned to steer clear of such tripe.

Psych is different.  Or maybe it isn’t, I don’t know.  I don’t watch any of that other nonsense.  All I know is that Psych is good.  Psych gets me.  I’d have Psych’s babies if given half the chance.  Perhaps I should stop trying to be funny and actually talk about the show?  Okay, I read you loud and clear.

Plot-wise, we have this twenty-something slacker named Shawn Spencer who’s detective daddy trained him from a young age to be hyper-observant.  After calling in enough tips about ongoing criminal investigations to be labeled a suspect, Spencer convinces the Santa Barbara PD that his talents come from psychic abilities in order to get out of trouble.  Why he couldn’t just tell them he was intelligent and observant, I don’t know and I don’t care, because then no shenaniganery would have ensued.  Basically, he ends up opening his own psychic detective agency with his best friend Gus, butting heads with hard nosed “real” detectives, and wooing ladycops all while solving whatever crime is most wacky that week.

I admit, this shouldn’t work as well as it does.  It’s not a story that can go a whole lot of places and it’s structure is so cookie cutter I crave milk after every episode, but damned if they don’t make it entertaining, schtick or no.  The dialogue is what really makes it work.  Constant pop culture references, in jokes, and back-and-forth ribbing won me over by the end of the first episode.  By the third or fourth episode I loved the characters so much I’d crossed the “I want to have a barbecue with these people” threshold and entered superfandom.  Psych has humor I didn’t expect, and towards the end of season two it really ramped up some of the drama and emotion, without sacrificing what made me love it in the first place.  It’s not a jaw dropping experience like say, Breaking Bad or Boardwalk Empire, but it is a part of a certain set of shows that are just really enjoyable and fun to watch without requiring such a stern commitment.  Go watch it.

Penis Jokes and Parallel Universes

A Review

After debating for awhile exactly how I should make my grande Lost Snark debut, I decided to go the literary route.  That’s right, I’m going to make this blog classy from the outset, because I’m an intellectual, dammit.  And I’m going to do so by telling you about a book that has more cock jokes per chapter than a Stephanie Meyer novel has mentions of the word “adonis” per page.  I’m telling you... This is going to be classy.

The novel in question is John Dies at the End, a work that began as an internet phenomenon a few years back and grew in popularity at a near exponential rate through word of mouth alone.  It got so popular, in fact, that now it’s going to be a movie directed by Don Coscarelli and starring Paul Giamatti.  It’s written by David Wong (not his real name), the current editor of the superior Mad Magazine alternative Cracked.com and anyone who’s enjoyed one of Wong’s articles over at Cracked might think they have some small idea of the sort of things they might come across in JD@tE.  Make no mistake, however; they are dead wrong.  But let’s get a small plot summary out of the way before we go any further.

Our narrator, David Wong, finds himself in quite the hellish situation when his slacker buddy John Cheese gets high on an iffy-at-best drug called “Soy Sauce” at a party.  It isn’t long before David accidentally pricks himself on the same needle John used to dope up with and then things start getting really weird.  For one, the drug seems to be made of a sentient black tar.  So that can’t be good.  For another, the side effects are more intense than one would expect from a run of the mill opiate.  Such as being able to read minds, say.  Or look down at the KFC chicken you’re chomping on and suddenly know how this particular bird lived it’s life from birth to feces-covered, PETA offending death.  Or maybe, like, being able to see demons and ghosts and a variety of other mind altering shit.

As one might expect, this is just the beginning.  There’s a few hundred pages to go after the Sauce is introduced, and in those pages can be found homemade flame-throwers, exploding dogs, alien abductions, demonic possessions, car chases, parallel universes, and baby-headed scorpion monsters wearing wigs.  Oh and there’s this one demon guy made of bratwurst and venison, too.

Now, the thing to understand is that this book is weird.  Hella weird.  Almost off-puttingly weird at times.  After the 14th time our heroes round a corner and come face to face with yet another crazy ass penis-monster from some other world, we’re a little bored with it.  What saves us from totally giving up on believability is the fact that Wong is completely aware of the fact that he’s running into an disproportionately high number of penis-monsters from another world and comments on this just about every time the reader starts thinking it.  But is JD@tE worth reading, even knowing all that?  The answer is a resounding YES.

You see, the thing is that it’s not just goofy and sardonic and filled with potty humor and weird creatures.  It’s also truly creepy as hell.  One moment you’ll be snickering like an 8th grader because there’s been a dick joke or three on the page, and the next moment Wong hits you with a concept or a scene that is so utterly disturbing that it stops you cold and you suddenly want to turn on a light and make damned sure you didn’t see a shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye.  And the humor isn’t all juvenile or scatological in nature.  There are moments of true laugh-out-loud satire, and anyone who enjoys movies like Evil Dead 2 or Bubba Ho-tep will be right at home with the odd brand of humor on display throughout.  At times the book reads as a sort of hodgepodge of Douglas Adams, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ren & Stimpy.

Of course, it isn’t for everyone.  The story is hacked up into four or five “books” and feels a bit stretched thin in places.  You can tell quite clearly that it started out as a webserial that was published in tiny chunks, and the narrative begins to suffer as new characters are introduced and then abandoned fifty pages later.  At the end of the day, though, it proved to be one of the more entertaining books that I’ve read in the last decade or so, and if you’re at all like me, you won’t be disappointed.

I’ll give it 4 Penis Monsters From Another World out of 5.