Re-reading Bret Easton Ellis's 'Less Than Zero' As an Adult (1 Dec 2010)

Prompted by editing this essay about the Less Than Zero film and by fortuitously coming across a copy of the novel in a thrift store, I decided to re-read Bret Easton Ellis's debut book, Less Than Zero, which was published in 1985. I first read it as a teenager in high school, and it sort of blew my mind. I was working at Waldenbooks in the mall then, and the novel seemed to come out of nowhere; it just appeared on the shelving cart one shift as if it were my destiny to read it. It played to all of my aesthetic proclivities then, all the bad ideas I ever had as an aspiring fiction writer: Write about apathetic teens doing lots of drugs and having sex indiscriminately; dump in a lot of inscrutably allusive pop-culture references; strip the prose of all lyricism and substitute a brutalist stream of consciousness, with the trick that the consciousness you're streaming is so devoid of reflexive insight that it comes across as aleatory and affectless. This would best capture the existential reality of youth boredom, which of course, as all teenagers knew, was the most significant problem confronting society in the Reagan years.

Even as a 15-year-old, though, I had a hard time imagining any adults reading the book or taking it seriously. It seems very much a young-adult novel, dependent on the reader's fascination with and general lack of perspective on the world of haute dissipation it depicts. Lots of vicarious thrills and chills for a teen: it depicts a world in which parents are always absent, money is never an issue, drugs are always plentiful, and everyone is down for sex with everyone else. People o.d. and parents have abdicated all responsibility, but that just sets an appropriate backdrop of extremity; they don't constitute real problems. The only real problems revolve around whether or not you can really open up to a friend. For adults, it's all a bit silly. You don't envy the characters, certainly, and you don't even pity them. At best, it has the junk appeal of MTV's nano-soap-opera Undressed, which was clearly inspired by Ellis's vision.

The plot of Less Than Zero follows Clay, the narrator, a college freshman who has come home to Los Angeles for his winter break from college back east. Though it isn't spelled out, he seems to be the son of wealthy entertainment-industry figures, and his friends are drawn from the same milieu. Though cognizant of no agency of his own, Clay finds himself involved in scenes of what the author apparently regards as steadily increasing shockingness, starting with a casual homosexual tryst, moving on to heroin shooting-gallery parties, a snuff-film viewing session, some gay prostitution, and finally a kidnapping and rape of a prepubescent girl. In between these meant-to-titillate scenes are some maudlin accounts of childhood memories (including the obligatory undergrad-workshop dead grandmother) and some slice-of-ennui observational passages of teens hanging out at pool parties, snorting fat rails and club hopping, hoping to spot members of X or the Go-Go's. (My favorite is a scene in which Clay, hanging out with several of his interchangeable friends at a sushi restaurant, is told that rockabilly will be the next big thing -- "and not those limp-wristed Stray Cats either" -- and that anyone who's anyone has to read The Face. As a teenager, I took that last injunction literally and struggled to track down copies of it -- Waldenbooks did not carry it, alas.)

Though it certainly succeeds in conveying a paradoxical mood of angsty apathy, the book's writing at the sentence level is fairly uneven -- not all that surprising considering Ellis's age when he wrote it, and the eagerness to rush the novel out as some sort of unexpurgated view on youth decadence. Its frequent badness was likely regarded as a badge of its authenticity. Less Than Zero's shocking incidents are generally unconvincing, and melodramatic despite the faux detachment. They read like exploitation-fiction cliches, only told in an approximation of the style of Raymond Carver or, more obviously, Joan Didion circa Play It as It Lays. And even though all sorts of unconscionably horrible events take place, the main conflicts structuring the novel are surprisingly mundane: the narrator's mixed feelings about losing touch with his best friend and breaking up with his high school girlfriend. These are expected to carry significant emotional freight for readers even in the midst of snuff films and raped 12-year-olds. It seems extremely bizarre to say the least for Clay to walk out of a room in which his high school buddies are raping someone, snort a quarter-gram of cocaine, and then pout earnestly about his girlfriend dumping him. It makes it seem as though the depravity might be all in his head or something, weird scenes inside the gold mine that serve as projections of Clay's alienation. But such a reading seems extremely speculative, counter to the explicit intent that we take all the action literally and lament the moral turpitude.

The incongruous tonal juxtapositions foretell the way in which Ellis's later novel American Psycho shifts from gory murder scenes to dementedly positive reviews of Genesis records, but they also betoken a lack of control, or perhaps an editorial hedging against making the novel's characters repellent to the core as they were probably intended to be. I suspect Ellis's ploy was not at all different from American Psycho, whose narrator, I think, is supposed to be Clay's brother: choose a monstrous, contemptible personality type (the spoiled film brat, the Wall Street banker) and have them narrate their own vapidity while having them participate in cartoonishly evil scenarios with no sense of their own moral culpability. But it seems like he was told to leaven Less Than Zero with mawkish passages (often set entirely in italics) that imply Clay has feelings we are supposed to empathize with. It would have been a much more successful book, I think, if Clay had no redeeming interiority, if there really was no there there, especially after all of Ellis's hamfisted repetitions of slogans from billboards and snatches of conversation: "Disappear here", "People are afraid to merge", etc. In a better book, he would endorse these slogans unthinkingly rather than be unnerved by them. Or better still, he would register them without noting how appropriate they were to his condition, and then the reader would have something to do. As it stands, Ellis explicates too much, and much too implausibly.

Part-time smokers (12 Jan 2010)

The Awl noted a WSJ article by Melinda Beck about "part-time smokers" -- "a growing group of intermittent and secret smokers who seem to smoke as much for psychological and emotional reasons as nicotine addiction." That's sort of weird, defensive way of phrasing it -- "psychological and emotional reasons". Why not put forward the possibility that people choose to smoke every so often because they like it? I haven't been the subject of any studies, but I am guessing that I have "psychological and emotional reasons" for everything I do voluntarily. Later Beck notes that "some intermittent smokers can go for days without a fix" -- the idea that smoking can be anything other than a drug addiction seems impossible for her to imagine. But we may now be reaching a point at which smoking can be regarded generally as something other than a habit. It might return to being seen as a pastime, a social activity.

This all could be rationalization, I suppose. I am one of these part-time smokers nowadays; generally I'll smoke when I am on vacation or our drinking. I used to smoke a half a pack or so a day when in my 20s, but then I quit altogether for about seven years. In that period, smoking bans and restrictions came into force that paradoxically made it easier for me to resume smoking without the danger of becoming a habitual smoker again. There were too many barriers; it's worth the trouble to smoke only when the rest of my routine is already disrupted. And there tends to be a social payoff: the built-in pauses and rhythms of smoking rituals help facilitate conversation.

The emergence of part-time smoking suggests how the social infrastructure can shape how we use things, how we conceive of their place in our lives. With our culture's obsession with personal responsibility and addiction, norms and mores tend to get short shrift when it comes to explaining behavior. Not that smoking isn't addictive, but the way we use cigarettes isn't simply a matter of how addicted we've become to them. And as beneficial as it is to quit smoking entirely, partaking every now and then in tobacco is probably not the worst social practice in the world, and it wouldn't seem to mandate the sort of zealotry on display in the article, which treats part-time smoking as some insidious disease rather than as a re-emergence of a small pleasure in proper perspective.

Thoughts on Papa John (25 Nov 2008)

I've been reading Papa John, the autobiography of Mamas and the Papas founder John Phillips. I never thought much of him growing up, and would have thought reading his memoir would be tantamount to reading one by a guy from Three Dog Night or something. Now, with the benefit of having his solo albums readily available, I realize how grossly misinformed I was. For one thing, I stopped taking well-arranged harmonies for granted and came to see what a rare thing the Mamas and Papas were. And not only are their records unexpectedly deep, but even the hits have a surprising emotional ambivalence (not to mention a Sticky Fingers-like level of drug references). And Phillips's first solo record, John, Wolf King of L.A., has become one of my favorite rock albums; on the surface it's saturated in narcissism with lyrics confronting unnecessary failure in the midst of decadent excess, but beyond that it's about a very recognizable kind of depression, of being able to recognize high expectations and even the means with oneself to meet them but balking at the effort and instead withdrawing into various fantasies and feints. I think I identify with that to an altogether unwholesome degree.

Anyway, I expected his autobiography would shed more light on that aspect of Phillips' complex character, but instead it mostly reads like just another symptom of his peculiar malady, an at times appallingly unreflective memory dump that seems a dodge, a cop out. His music clearly reflects how acutely he is aware of the limitations of hedonism, but in recounting his decisions to indulge in it with no regard for his companions or his own health, he is generally powerless to do anything but register his own selfishness as if it were an inevitable fact. He habitually flees responsibility and rather than figure out what makes causes his flight, he instead evinces a pathological expectation of total forgiveness for all his transgressions. The only excuse he can muster is a kind of cretinous hippie hedonism, typified by such passages as this: "The France was as elegant as you could get. We had our own wine stewards and did our best to consume as much of the dope as possible. We Swam, read, sunbathed, drank, and I stayed high the whole time." Sometimes there's a dash of philosophy: "The dope was out on the tables, in vases and bowls, and money never seemed to change hands. That's how I wanted it in my house. We were there to share and party. And the partying never let up." Probably an interest in making the book commercial led to to an emphasis on such scenes, and Phillips offers all sorts of sensationalistic details -- he claims to have had a threesome of some sort with Warren Beatty and Jane Fonda, and he says he turned down an invitation to go party at 10050 Cielo Drive the night the Manson family showed up and murdered everyone on the premises.

In running through the inventory of outrageous parties and famous fucked-up friends and sexual partners, it's weird how Phillips seems like a spectator to his own memories; he sounds like he's trying to convince himself of what a great righteous time it was even though he seems to have been somewhat passive in the face of everything that overwhelmed him. Unexpected success on an unfathomable scale seems to have permanently disoriented him, made all his choices seem arbitrary or choreographed by some mysterious outside force. Throughout the book, it's clear that he had no special aspiration to express the ideals of the 1960s, yet he ends up claiming them even as the zeitgeist co-opted his songwriting skills. After all, one of his signal achievements was to turn the youth movement into a jingle by writing "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)". And lost in the hype he generates for his past, Phillips seems to forget that the money had to come from somewhere. The square record-buying public's funds were ultimately fueling this drug-consumption spree, and they didn't really get to share in the piles of pills at the Bel Air party. The best we get is the vicarious appreciation of his lifestyle as it filters out in gossip magazines, self-referential songs and biographies like the one I'm reading.

This brings me to something I often wonder about, which is the degree to which people like Phillips are aware of the vicarious potential of their own decadence -- if they feel driven to it as a kind of marketing program, particularly since selling pop music is as much about lifestyles as it is hooks and choruses. His memoir offers few clues. That's probably inevitable since any sign of self-consciousness on this front would render the whole edifice inauthentic. But I suspect that the fantasy demands of a mass audience impose themselves on celebrities without their knowing quite what they are facing. They end up violating all these bourgeois norms (fidelity, prudence, thriftiness, hard work, punctuality, etc.) out of compulsion more than pleasure. (A lyric from Phillips's "Someone's Sleeping" captures this: "From a second-story window I caught a glimpse of someone's life and it was mine, and my face was dark and dirty and I cried.")

Stars' boundless notoriety makes the illusion of their absolute autonomy all the more intoxicating, while in truth they have no more control than the rest of us. They merely confront a different set of limits. They seem forced to adopt decadence or peculiarity as a kind of defense, an escape from the mania that inadvertently fuels it further. The more remote they become from ordinary life, the more intriguing they become and the force that pushes them further out into inexplicableness becomes more and more powerful. If they give in to it, they achieve a kind of pure celebrity that has no pretense of a connection to any sort of achievement. Just look at what happened to Michael Jackson and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, et. al. This happened to John Phillips as well, though as he faded to obscurity, he was left with the far more conventional fate of being a straight-up dope fiend.

Screw hedge funds -- smoke weed (17 Oct 2008)

It's easy to think of financial industry honchos as a bunch of arrogant, entitled creeps, but maybe they aren't all bad. Hedge fund manager Andrew Lahde recently quit running his fund, and his letter to investors is a must-read. Apparently he's a champion of building a meritocracy, having a new Constitutional Congress, and letting everyone get high.

Smoking crack (24 Oct 2007)

Crack seems like it's in serious need of rebranding. As sociologist Craig Reinarman points out in this Washington Post op-ed, crack is just a pejorative term for freebase cocaine, which could have been glamorous as the snortable version of the drug if only so many celebrities didn't set themselves on fire trying it. In the 1980s crack became a byword for ghetto blight, and the crack "epidemic" was a convenient way of depicting miserable inner city conditions as somehow the fault of those drug fiends who lived there. Now, crack is so firmly associated with poverty that getting caught using or dealing it is punished more harshly: "At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. You have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only five grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years." So the same substance brings upon people different punishments depending on what the police decide to call it.

Smoking crack has faded from the news (though as Reinarman notes, the practice is as prevalent as ever), so you'd expect it would take on a kind of nostalgic kitsch value; that self-consciously cool people would spot an opportunity to freebase coke ironically and be all retro. Ordinarily, I would argue that this kind of hipster appropriation runs the danger of deauthenticating crack smoking for everyone, making it impossible to smoke crack sincerely like a true devotee and enjoy the high for its own sake. Freebasing should be its own reward, damn it, not a posture! But in this case, I suspect that for aficionados, nothing can tarnish the pristine allure of the crack pipe.