From Book to Screen: Bret Easton Ellis
A common thread that runs through all of Bret Easton Ellis’ books is the exploration of hollow persons. People who are generally well-off financially yet dead on the inside, so numb to the world around them that even acts of horrific violence and depravity can’t faze them more than momentarily. Ellis has populated his stories with these characters, often set in the 1980s to satirize the excessiveness of the time period. While reading all the books back-to-back is probably not recommended, the author manages to find enough variety and different themes to explore to make them all have some value. If he seems one-note, one does not look closely enough.
There have been four film adaptations of his books so far – with Glamorama currently in production set to become the fifth. Interestingly enough, the four current movies have all had different directors and writers on board, leading to four quite different films. Some have managed to capture the essence and voice of Ellis’ writing. Others have strayed from it and made something quite different. The end results have been of varying degrees of quality to say the least.
Less Than Zero
Year: 1987
Director: Marek Kanievska
Writer: Harley Peyton
Currently ranked #3072 on the global rankings and #1192/1245 on my personal Flickchart.
Ellis’ first novel Less Than Zero – published in 1985 when he was only 21 years old – became a big success and instantly catapulted the author into stardom. Plans for an adaptation to the big screen were soon put into motion. While the novel is hardly the author’s strongest work – it was mostly written while he was still a teen – it’s nonetheless a hard-hitting debut where the seeds of his future works are evident. The story centers around college freshman Clay who returns home to Los Angeles for Christmas and New Year. What follows is an endless stream of parties, drugs, alcohol, and sex as he tries to reconnect with his old friends – mostly in vain. A joyful reunion this ain’t, with Clay watching on helplessly as the people he once knew have all succumbed to vice and he realizes that he’s no better himself.
The movie tries for a more cohesive narrative than the novel’s somewhat fractured structure. Andrew McCarthy plays Clay, and while he’s arguably the protagonist and viewpoint character, the plot here is firmly fixed on his friend Julian (Robert Downey Jr.), a young man who has fallen hard into drug addiction and has reluctantly turned to prostitution to fund it. Julian was also in the book, but there he was just one old acquaintance among many. Other characters figure into the film as well, but not to the same degree as in the source. Whereas the book paints up a more overarching picture of Clay’s old world having vanished and a critique on society as a whole, the film becomes a more conventional tale of Julian’s attempt at salvaging his life. While this is not inherently a bad thing, the problem is that we are given little reason to care or sympathize with Julian. I know that Clay cares, but his worrying doesn’t transfer effectively to me. Julian isn’t shown to be worthy of redemption, and if there are redeeming factors in his possibly tragic past, they’re not shown to us. The same goes for the other characters in the film. Clay himself is more of a blank emotionless slate, allowing the viewer to put themself in his shoes as an observer but not yielding any valuable insights.
The film isn’t all bad, though. While the script puts up stumbling blocks for him, Robert Downey Jr. still puts in an effective performance as Julian, showing both the numbness and the anguish he’s going through. He far outshines the rest of the cast. Less Than Zero is also the only one of the 1980s-set Ellis adaptations to actually have been made in the 1980s, and so it more effortlessly captures the fashion, the music, and the atmosphere of the time. The zeitgeist, if you will. Melancholy masked by exuberance, and dark secrets hiding behind neon lights. The setting intrigues more than the characters do, and as the characters – or at least Julian – is what the film is mostly concerned with, this isn’t an ideal result. Less Than Zero misses the mark.
American Psycho
Year: 2000
Director: Mary Harron
Writers: Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner
Currently ranked #237 on the global rankings and #565/1245 on my personal Flickchart.
Easily the most well-known both of Ellis’ books and of the adaptations thereof. Whereas Less Than Zero concerned itself with the party culture among youths in L.A., American Psycho sets its sight on the yuppies of New York City. Patrick Bateman is the main character, a wealthy man with a nice cushy office job – though his field of work is never specified. His life is a material one, where countless hours are spent on perfecting his looks, where making dinner reservations at the fanciest restaurants is of utmost importance, and where reasonable ground for a panic attack is when a colleague has a better-looking business card than him. Patrick needs to be perfect so that he’s ahead of everyone else. So do the people he knows. As a result, they are all the same. A paradoxical folly of a game that nobody can get out of. But Patrick is suffering from other demons too. He’s a recreational murderer, see. Or maybe he’s just delusional. The novel – like all of Ellis’ books – is told in first person, and Patrick is as unreliable a narrator as they come.
Christian Bale plays the protagonist in the film, and his performance is the highlight here. Everything about the way Patrick talks, moves and acts evokes a mass of conflicting emotions: superiority, entitlement, insecurity, blood lust and more. The tone of the film is one of black comedy, and Bale seizes the right opportunities to crack the audience up even when we may not want to. The humor is pretty much in line with that in the book: a blend of absurdity and confusion. In particular, the scenes of Patrick musing about pop music he loves play really well on the screen. It should be said that the novel is funnier at its peaks, however.
As for the violence, the film is understandably neutered. Yeah, sure, there are bloody axe murders and chainsaw killings in the movie, but even the most fervent pursuer of torture porn flicks might find some sequences in the novel hard to stomach. In one way, this change is for the better, as there is no way you could show everything that happens in the book on film, and nobody should in their right mind want to see it. On the other hand, what makes the novel so effective is that stark contrast between the gruesome killings and the foolishness of the yuppies. It’s hard to imagine a way to make this fully come alive on film, so maybe director/writer Mary Harron made the right choice here. More problematic is the ambiguity aspect. Neither the novel nor the film make it clear whether Patrick actually commits any of his deeds or not. As we’re always in Patrick’s mind in the book, it’s easier to understand how this could all be delusions. In the film, there’s little to go on to determine anything. Scenes play out like all the rest, yet they contradict one another, and the film rarely pulls us into the Patrick Bateman being. He’s a third-party character like any other in the film, so it seems strange that what we see happen to him isn’t actually taking place.
The Rules of Attraction
Year: 2002
Director: Roger Avary
Writer: Roger Avary
Currently ranked #1780 on the global rankings and #72/1245 on my personal Flickchart.
In Less Than Zero, Clay was on holiday away from Camden College, a fictional school in New Hampshire. The Rules of Attraction is set at that very place of learning, though you’d be hard-pressed to find any actual education going on. You might even say that The Rules of Attraction puts Less Than Zero in a new light, because if this is what Clay went through during terms, he shouldn’t be too surprised at the things that happen in L.A.. Camden is a place of debauchery, but the sense of detachment the students go through makes it seem unlikely that they’re deriving much pleasure from it all.
Both the book and the film versions of The Rules of Attraction are somewhat more playful than the other tales in Ellis’ oeuvre. The novel employs stream-of-consciousness to a bigger degree, heightening the sense of the characters drifting along in a storm with no control, barely having time to register what is happening in their lives. There are a number of different narrators, and they often contradict one another when retelling various events. Three persons get more time and space than the others: Lauren Hynde, Paul Denton, and Sean Bateman – brother of American Psycho‘s Patrick. Other characters have only a single chapter devoted to them; a noteworthy one by a foreign exchange student is written entirely in French.
Director/writer Roger Avary also utilizes interesting techniques for the movie version. The opening scene shows a from the points of view of the three main characters, rewinding time in-between to show everything backwards. The first meeting between Sean and Lauren – played by James Van Der Beek and Shannyn Sossamon – has the screen split in two to show their respective morning routines simultaneously and their way to school, only for the two halves to meld into one as they encounter one another in a hallway. The sequence that tends to leave the biggest mark on viewers, however, is a retelling of a Europe vacation by Lauren’s prince charming Victor (Kip Pardue): a highly frantic montage that tosses us from one location to the next, with Pardue offering motor-mouth narration of the drug-fuelled trip. It’s like an entire Ellis’ novel condensed into four minutes, and it hits you like a wrecking ball.
More than any of the other adaptations, The Rules of Attraction takes liberties with the novel it’s based on. It keeps the characters fundamentally the same but alters the events. For example, Lauren and Sean become an item for a significant portion of the book; in the film, Sean wants her but doesn’t get very far. A more drastic change is in tone, as the movie features more straight-forward comedy and vivid characters. At times, it assumes the guise of a typical post-American Pie sex comedy, only to then subvert it with a heavy dose of darkly despairing humor. Thus another layer is added to the story that the novel doesn’t provide; Avary presents the flip side to the fun partying found in many college films.
The Rules of Attraction is my favorite of the adaptations. It doesn’t feel a whole lot like an Ellis story, but rather carves out its own identity in a big way. The characters are far from likeable, but we’re allowed to laugh at the absurdities of their lives more than in Less Than Zero. It’s a very funny movie, but one that doesn’t hesitate to punch you in the gut emotionally just as you’re starting to relax. And let’s not forget the actors, with Van Der Beek showing some great comedic timing, Sossamon bringing more depth to Lauren than what’s at first apparent, and Clifton Collins Jr. as a high-string drug dealer from hell.
The Informers
Year: 2008
Director: Gregor Jordan
Writers: Bret Easton Ellis & Nicholas Jarecki
Currently ranked #9013 on the global rankings and #1228/1245 on my personal Flickchart.
The other Ellis books that have been discussed here have all been of the standard novel format. The Informers on the other hand is a collection of short stories, all their own entities even if some characters show up or are mentioned in multiple parts. It’s familiar subject matter to those who have read Ellis’ debut novel; much like that one, the stories of The Informers take place in the decadence of 1980s Los Angeles. Rather than homing in on college kids, these tales concern people of more varied age groups: teenagers, young adults, middle-aged and more. Sex and drugs and rock n roll are familiar ingredients at this point, and while Ellis’ writing here is sharper, The Informers still comes off as a bit of a retread of Less Than Zero. The main difference is the multitude of different viewpoint characters, all suffering from the same indifference but each with their own particular quirks.
Unlike Less Than Zero, American Psycho, and The Rules of Attraction, Ellis himself co-wrote the screenplay for the film version of The Informers. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in the most faithful of the adaptations. Large chunks of dialogue have been lifted straight from the book, and few events have been changed. The most significant alteration comes at the climax of the movie, where one character who in the book commits a horrific deed instead becomes actually heroic – a rarity in Ellis’ work. A couple of the stories from the book have been left out entirely, including a memorable one about a group of vampires who prey on the party crowds. None of these exclusions affect the overall experience much, however. There is no clear narrative that runs through the film; rather, it just jumps from one subplot to the next. The connection between the various sections is more thematic than anything.
The film’s fairly strict adherence to the book doesn’t do it any favors. None of Ellis’ books have seemed very filmable to me, and so it’s no surprise that the previous three movies have made changes to make things work better for the big screen. Less Than Zero created a more clear-cut dramatic narrative, while American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction offered more comedy. The film version of The Informers has neither drama nor comedy. It’s just a bunch of miserable people with empty lives drifting around and occasionally bumping into one another. There is no humor to be had here, yet the subject matter cries out for it. This doesn’t make for an entertaining experience, and there’s nothing interesting thematically to make up for it. Even the setting is a wasted opportunity, as the only thing that hints at the movie taking place in the 1980s is the occasional music video playing on a TV screen. It’s hard to fault the actors assembled as they have all shown great skills in the past; there simply isn’t much to work with here. I don’t think there has ever been a film less worthy of featuring four former Oscar nominees – Kim Basinger, Winona Ryder, Billy Bob Thornton, and Mickey Rourke are all part of the ensemble. Of them, only Ryder manages to impress occasionally. Overall, it’s hard to call The Informers anything other than a dreary mess.
First of all, Emil: Kudos for thinking to make note of the screenwriters for each adaptation! That’s a nice touch.
I’ve seen and read American Psycho but none of the others. I’m reminded of Jon Ronson’s recent work of non-fiction, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. In it, Ronson informs us that his research has revealed that psychopathy is a tremendous advantage in the corporate world, where human lives are reduced to statistics and dollar signs. It is entirely fitting, then, that Patrick Bateman would be in that world.
It’s less clear in the film, but Bateman’s very insecure over how he measures up to his colleagues. The business card scene does a nice job showing us how competitive his world is. I think we’ve all had someone make us feel small for the very thing we thought had been a feather in our proverbial cap. I’m not saying that justifies anything that Patrick Bateman does or anything like that, but it is one of those rare instances where I think the rest of us can kind of identify with his insecurities and resentments.
One thing I’ve wondered is just how much disparity there is between Patrick and his colleagues. In the novel, especially, there’s a pervasive sense that he’s putting on airs to attempt to fit into their jet-setting ways. I wonder, though, if it’s not a matter of his mental health imbalance telling him that he’s inadequate, rather than him actually being any kind of lower-rate One Percenter. It’s also fascinating to revisit Bateman’s world in light of the last few years and what we’ve seen done to the global economy by the very group he represents.I look forward to the forthcoming second adaptation of American Psycho chiefly because I feel there’s still quite a lot of material left on the page that could make for a fascinating film. I have a sneaking suspicion that what we’ll find is that there’s room for a second adaptation that bears little resemblance to the Harron adaptation, yet is quite faithful to Ellis’s source material. It’s not often that one work can yield two disparate adaptations, and it’s a sign of the depth and complexity of his novel that this is quite likely.
Mentioning the screenwriters seemed relevant, as the screenplay is the middleground between the books and the finished films. Plus, since Ellis himself helped write one of the scripts, there was further need to point it out.
Good point about Patrick’s insecurity. That’s one aspect of him that the movie doesn’t really focus on as much. It’s been a few years since I read the novel, so maybe this was adressed and I’ve just forgotten it, but the whole murder thing might just be Patrick’s subconscious way of standing out from his peers. He realizes that despite all his efforts to be perfect, he’s just like everyone else. So the killings is his way of doing something nobody else would. He becomes perfect AND one-of-a-kind.
I get the feeling that Patrick doesn’t quite measure up to his colleagues professionally. It’s hard to tell since we’re never in the shoes of any of them, and they’re just as materialistic and unable to tell each other apart as Patrick, but he is certainly shown to never be doing any work or having any real grasp of what he even does for a living. True, there doesn’t seem to be any real confusion about the aftermath of Paul Allen’s death – you would think an important businessman dying would create some mass panic about who’s to take over his accounts and stuff – which could imply that Allen isn’t very capable either. But then again, we don’t know if he really died or not. Could go either way, I suppose.
I am curious to see what the new adaptation will be like, though I remain somewhat skeptical for now. There are certainly interesting directions to take things, though. I would like some kind of focus on the repetitiveness found in the novel – the endless analyzing and description of outfits, the increasingly bizarre talk shows on Patrick’s TV, etc.. Really hammer it home not just what an empty life Patrick leads, but also what a boring one it is to him.
Ellis went on a Twitter-binge a while ago where he tossed around ideas for a sequel novel that would be set in the present. He imagined Patrick being a hedge funder in L.A.. He would hate Obama, love the Kardashians. The Help would be his favorite movie, and he’d be a fan of The Celebrity Apprentice. And he’d have a lot to say about social networking sites, which he’d hate on principle yet use to keep track of his peers and find murder victims. Ellis seemed to be really considering writing it, though whether anything happens remains to be seen. I’d certainly read it.
I imagine Patrick Bateman would be absolutely obsessed with his Klout score.
Well I haven’t seen Less Than Zero or The Informers and I’ve read none of the books except American Psycho. I’m glad they toned down the violence in the film as at one point I nearly threw the book away, it was so bloody disgusting. Might have to read Rules of Attraction as I really liked the film version though a lot of that is down to the style. Great post!
If you enjoyed the movie version of The Rules of Attraction, the book is well worth checking out just to see what has been changed and how. It’s rather interesting.
Wow. Ellis is my favorite author, so this article is a
Godsend for me. First off, very very well done, Emil, there is not one single thing I do not love about this post. Secondly, we’re pretty much in agreement with your thoughts on Ellis’ books and the movies that were spawned from them.
Aside from Downey Jr., I don’t like Less than Zero at all,
but I do love the book.
American Psycho, love the book and movie equally. I’ll be
interested to see if the new American Psycho movie (which Ellis recently gave his seal of approval on) comes to fruition.
I know Rules of Attraction is your favorite Ellis
adaptation, and understandably so. I’m a huge fan of the book, and I adore the movie (especially Victor’s Euro extravaganza).
The Informers is my favorite Ellis book, so when I saw the
movie at Sundance, I was ecstatic. But, like you, I think the flick is a disaster, as does Ellis. A horrible, horrible film treatment.
Bring on Glamorama!
Wow, thanks for the kind words! Looks like we’re on the same page for the most part here.
Words can’t express how much I’m looking forward to Avary’s Glamorama. I thought the novel was brilliant, and knowing what Avary has done with Ellis material in the past, there’s no reason why the film shouldn’t be able to become something special.
Great article! I love American Psycho the most but I did enjoy Rules of Attraction – the film definetly has ambiance and the unique feel to it. The Informers is a disaster, apart from the actors, the script isn’t very good and the director had no idea how to show the story.
Thank you kindly! Most people seem to prefer American Psycho, and it is a fine film indeed. The same certainly can’t be said about The Informers. Just because something works in book-form doesn’t mean it works on the screen, as that one clearly shows. Ellis would probably be better off staying away from screenwriting, at least when it’s based on his own stuff.
Nice article, I like your summation of the problem with Less than Zero, not feeling the connection that Clay and Jullian had, it was hard to relate. Although it did keep me away from crack. I also really liked the look inside that Hollywood when I was 15.
I have not seen that rules of attraction but it sounds like something I would enjoy, going to try and give that a watch.
Ellis went to school with Donna Tartt whose first novel A Secret History was amazing. But the film has been in script limbo forever.
one of my favorite novels
The Rules of Attraction is one of those films that took me by surprise. I borrowed the DVD from a friend, having never heard of it before but expecting something American Pie-ish. What I got was far away and far above my expectations. That was back before I had even heard of Ellis. It still remains a really entertaining movie. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
A Secret History sounds intriguing. I might have to check that one out at some point. Thank you for the tip!