Less Than Zero
It’s kind of hard to explain why I love Less Than Zero, and what it means to me. Bret Easton Ellis wrote the novel as a teenager, it was published when he was still in college and immediately became a critical success, considered a generation’s Catcher In The Rye (which itself was a manufactured classic), but in a way that the literati were like Clement Greenberg discussing Abstract Expressionism; their attempt to intellectualize it, to rationalize it for outsiders is the antithesis of what it’s about and shows a complete misunderstanding of the work.
Ellis didn’t use minimalism or nihilism as literary techniques, he was writing fast and hard like a 19-year-old because he was nineteen, it was that fire and ego in a kid that you never get back, the way Flea played bass as a teenager, the way Larry Clark shot Tulsa… Henry Rollins said something like, “punk didn’t die, we just learned to play our instruments,” and that’s valid, young artists develop and grow and can go on to create amazing work, but you can never really regain the speed and ignorance of adolescence, so it’s incredible when that can be filtered into something like Less Than Zero.
I love it for that reason, because it’s raw and unapologetic, because it doesn’t make allowances for “tourists,” it’s not injected with morality or regret (the film does and is, but it’s still a classic), it doesn’t attempt to hold the reader’s hand and guide them through a seedy, exotic world like so many other verbose books filled with clichés of ‘Bolivian soldiers marching through your nasal passage’ and ‘the emptiness you feel waking blah blah blah.’ You either get it or you don’t, if you know the feelings those words are attempting to describe you also know how remarkably they fail, you can choose your own adventure, and maybe the goal of great literature is to immerse you in a vivid world that you would otherwise never experience, but this world within Less Than Zero, the life is so fleeting and chaotic and angsty and visceral than an attempt to internalize it through an author’s adjectives and metaphor would be contradictory.
So it’s strange, reading the book or watching the movie… it’s a life I never sought out, never imagined for myself growing up, becoming part of a fantastical world of lascivious, filthy, wild, vacant excess - sometimes as a spectator, sometimes as a participant, but always aware. When I look at this photo I see different faces, when I flip through the sparse pages of the novel, I see different names but it’s real, it’s the Hollywood I know and love and hate… the life I live and the people I love.
