Interview with Bret Easton Ellis
by Jaime Clarke
Part Three
JC: This is the first book you've written that relies heavily on plot. Was your approach in writing this book different than books you've written previously?
BEE: I wanted to write a book that took place in Europe. I also wanted to write a book through the voice of Victor Johnson who was a character in THE RULES OF ATTRACTION. Those two things came together. And lastly I wanted to write a novel about a conspiracy. Then I asked myself "What does Victor do now?" I thought maybe he'd be involved in the fashion world. He might even be a model. But models are so annoying and it's horrible how obsessed our culture is over them that I made a connection between models and…terrorists. The models in this book were going to be terrorists. And I started to back down and have second thoughts because that's a pretty loopy theory and I knew I had to be very careful in order to pull it off. I had to ask myself, "Are you sure you want to invest this much time in writing a book about this?" And in the end I did. And I when I made the decision to actually write the book, a story just unfolded itself to me.
The outline I did for GLAMORAMA wasn't necessarily more detailed than the outlines I did for previous novels. Mostly because the story dictated where the book was going to end up. With a non-narrative book like AMERICAN PSYCHO or LESS THAN ZERO I felt I had to be very careful with the scenes I chose to write about because there was no story progression. What you're hoping will happen with a book like that is that a series of carefully chosen scenes will accumulate into something bigger and you'll feel something because of those scenes. This time around it was pretty easy to follow the outline, even though it changed a little bit as I wrote. The main thing that changed was the conspiracy theory at the heart of the novel. I had to put the brakes on it because it was getting out of hand--which is what naturally happens with a conspiracy; that's the nature of a conspiracy, they never end. So I was implicating everybody in this massive conspiracy and it was just getting too complicated. I was the one writing it and even I couldn't follow it anymore. So I had to draw a border around it--literally. The conspiracy and all its major players and sub-players were on a chart I had drawn up on a giant white piece of construction paper. It started in the center and kept spreading out. So I took a black marker and drew a box in the middle of that paper and I decided I was only going to deal with what was in that box and ignore whatever was outside of it and if there were loose ends and stuff wasn't answered, well, that's what a conspiracy's about. That's how I approached it.
The outline for this book might have been shorter than other outlines I did even though it's by far the longest book I've written. With AMERICAN PSYCHO for instance, the outline for a simple scene where Patrick Bateman gets a massage might be longer than the scene itself because of all the reasons I wrote down in my notes why I think that scene should be there. What does it tell us about this man? What does it tell us about this world? Etc., etc. I really didn't have that dialogue with myself while writing GLAMORAMA because each scene basically progresses to the next, like a chain. The most detailed outlining was for the first section which takes place in New York. But because the time-frame for that section is about thirty-six hours it became very apparent to me what was essential and what was not. Plus that time-frame helped because I was afraid that section was getting too long anyway and the time-frame really helped me focus.
JC: How did you approach the action sequences? it's one thing to say that a book is written cinematically but it's another to make a book do what cinema does so well.
BEE: When I look back at the book I don't really remember writing "action" scenes. Writing can be such a slow, laborious process that when you're writing a sequence that could be termed an action sequence--it could easily take you a week. It doesn't zoom by you. So the writing of that sequence doesn't really feel like an action sequence, meaning it doesn't write itself as quickly as it takes to read it. And I didn't approach them any differently than, say, writing a scene that takes place between two people in a restaurant. The same rules apply. I think you just hope it doesn't sound silly. Keep the language as simple as possible, don't fall into hyperbole, don't use exclamation points, don't use capital letters when someone's yelling. Also, there's this notion in GLAMORAMA that perhaps what you're reading might in-fact be a movie and that freed me up a bit. Toying with that idea--is this real? is this a movie?--let me take chances. It enabled me to write very cinematically without worrying if anyone thinks it's too movie-ish.
JC: How did you come up with the frame of the narrative?
BEE: When I first started writing the book, the idea of a film crew entered my mind. I began incorporating them into the outline, asking myself questions like "When should they appear?" and "How often should I show them?" and then "Is there a second film crew?" and then it progressed to "Is there a third film crew?" and then it progressed into "Well, are they part of the conspiracy?" and dealing with this just became overwhelming. So I decided then to just play it straight and tell the story without the film crews. But I couldn't get around the fact that Victor isn't an aware narrator--and I didn't want to corrupt the purity of his character by making him know more than he would. So I brought the film crews back in, which seemed to solve some technical problems, at least in terms of relaying information. But it also seemed very suggestive to me--the fact that we basically perform all the time in our daily lives and just taking that idea one step further. There's so much surveillance in the world: in airports, banks, malls and this alters the way we move and talk and interact with each other. It's very subtle but there's a degree of acting going on in society. So I wanted to capture that and that performance idea meshed with how dramatic the characters in the book act.
JC: The narrator in GLAMORAMA is a minor character from THE RULES OF ATTRACTION. And often characters from one of your books makes an appearance in another book, or they run into each other or know each other. Do you think of your characters as sort of a fictional family?
BEE: I suppose it's to remind me that all these books are similar in a way; it reminds me that the books are all connected somehow. There's no grand plan--it just makes sense to me as a writer. Often it can be for very cheap reasons. I couldn't get a sentence that I thought Patrick Bateman would say to a woman out of my head--"I like to keep abreast"--and I kept resisting the impulse to drag him into GLAMORAMA but I couldn't help it; I caved in, not really caring if people thought it was gimmicky. But once I did it I liked the idea that Patrick Bateman had moved into this fashiony world and by extension that he could probably inhabit any world. There are also a lot of signifiers that refer to my earlier work. Near the end of GLAMORAMA, Victor comes across the words "Disappear Here" painted on a bedroom wall. My point being that the worlds or LESS THAN ZERO and GLAMORAMA aren't really that much different. After fourteen years I've changed in some ways but the fictive universe I'm creating really hasn't. The concerns are the same, the themes are the same, the tonality of the writing is the same.
JC: At a certain point in GLAMORAMA a character is asked about his modeling career and the character says "I've completed that part of my life." Do you imagine, as a writer, only having a certain number of stories to tell? Can your life as a writer ever be "completed" in that sense?
BEE: You're asking this question to a person who has never actually told a story before and is now telling one in a novel for the first time. I never liked a novel because of its story. A story was not the reason why I would respond to a book. That was never a criteria for me. I would respond to a book because there was an attitude or a sensibility or a way of writing that I thought was cool. And I've come across books that have great stories or interesting plots that are just plain flat-out boring. You need more than that. You need a vision. And I want to feel the pulse of a writer who is so excited by what he's feeling that he has to put it on paper. Now that's interesting to me. But I do know that at 34 I don't think I'll write a book again that doesn't have a story or some kind of narrative. And I think that just has to do with aging, really. I don't think it's that my aesthetic has changed. It has more to do with the fact that when you're young you really haven't experienced enough to know that lives actually do have narratives, that there is an overall narrative arc to a person's life. (Reading a lot of biographies can help you realize this as well.) There is a first act and a second act and third act to people's lives. But when you're in your first act in your early 20's, you just haven't experienced enough to realize this. You simply don't know enough. And that's why I think the books I wrote in my 20's were really more about behavior and attitude and hopelessness.
JC: And things seem to happen randomly.
BEE: You see the world as a disconnected place. Well, not to sound simplistic--but because you haven't connected with it.
JC: GLAMORAMA is imbued with the same detailed descriptions of clothes, food, products, etc. as AMERICAN PSYCHO was--though not as obsessively described. Is this technique assimilated forever into your fiction?
BEE: I really don't see GLAMORAMA that way at all. The uninitiated might come to this book and feel that way but as the writer I feel it's very different from AMERICAN PSYCHO in that respect. But then Victor Ward is a fashion zombie and though he would know the designers that people are wearing, he wouldn't describe those clothes with the same maniacal attention to detail that Patrick Bateman would. And it's really just about staying true to your narrator. When I write a piece of journalism or a profile of someone or a travel piece of something in my journal--I don't think I ever comment on the way people are dressed. But because of the world I describe in my fiction and because of who the narrators are--it seems apt.
JC: You also continue with the technique of pornographically described sex scenes. Do you feel that the approach to writing a sex scene is dependent on what emotion the writer is trying to evoke with respect to the scene. In other words, is your use of graphic detail specific to the characters you're writing about?
BEE: Those scenes are often the most technically complicated to write. My reasons for having that long sex scene in GLAMORAMA are probably too complicated to verbalize but, well…because the world I was describing is such a fantasy in a way--everyone's a model, everyone's beautiful, everyone's living this jet-set life--I assumed as a reader (I know I felt it as a writer) you'd find something definitely alluring and sexy about it and so it seemed logical to complete this portrait of showing these people having sex and just go all out. Really fulfill the fantasy. A sex scene poses the following problem: it can be so distracting that it can make it difficult for a reader to concentrate on anything happening after it. But I thought enough was going on in this book so that it really wouldn't be a problem. Also, I'm interested in how pornography affects a reader. It's such a consumer item. It does what it's supposed to do. Like toothpaste or coffee or clothing. It's cold you, you wanna stay warm, you put on a sweater. You're tired, you need to wake up, you have a cup of coffee. You want to be aroused and climax, you purchase pornography. Since it's such a consumer good and because the book is so full of consumer goods, why not throw in some porn amidst all the clothes and all that useless hipness.
But there's also a lot of technical difficulties that you need to overcome if you're to write a successful sex scene. In terms of the prose--it should be very simple, almost scientific, totally unadorned. Metaphor in a sex scene--I think--tends to destroy it. It's best just to state the facts. Maybe if I hadn't been so clinical, people would not be as scandalized or think the scene is as "filthy" as they seem to. It's always interesting to me when people--and this was true for AMERICAN PSYCHO as well--are far more bothered by a sex scene than they are by descriptions of violence. The sex scene in GLAMORAMA might be the last one I write--the sex scene to end all sex scenes--just because it becomes kind of unbecoming after you reach a certain age to write scenes like that. You run the risk of sounding like a dirty old man.
JC: In GLAMORAMA confetti is everywhere. It's in the streets, at parties, in hotel rooms, and tracked into apartments. It's also strewn across murder scenes, disaster areas and sites of complete holocaust. Can you talk a little bit about your use of confetti as a metaphor in this novel?
BEE: Writing a book is an intuitive, impulsive process and so many of the motifs that pop up every now and then come from within that process, so as much as I would love to be able to tell you what they mean--I can't, because there really wasn't an intellectual approach to that metaphor. Confetti is a frivolous, useless invention and using it as an element in scenes of torture just felt right. I really don't know why every room in this book is freezing and why steam is constantly coming out of people's mouths. Where did that come from? I don't know. You could make a facile connection and read into it that since it's such a "cold" world, it makes sense, but that's not what I was thinking. It was more that that image seemed suggestive to me. That's it. Plus it's always so much more interesting when a reader gives his own interpretation.
JC: In AMERICAN PSYCHO you make the analogy that a stockbroker has the proclivities to become a serial killer. With GLAMORAMA you make a connection between models and terrorism. One of the characters explains that models are perfect terrorists because "as a model all you do all day is stand around and do what other people tell you to do." These analogies may seem exaggerated to the point of distortion to most people. Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration for this idea in GLAMORAMA?
BEE: Why did I see models as terrorists and the fashion world as a form of terrorism? Well, there's a tyranny to the fashion world in the way it extols an ideal beauty above all else that I think damages us. That has been a form of torture for women for decades and now it's increasingly happening to men. This obsession with looks that the fashion and photography worlds have taken to an extreme, psychically damages the culture. Period. That's a fact. I know we're not talking about actual violence--which is the terrorists goal--but emotional violence. Both worlds want you to be emotionally violated in the end. When I began planning GLAMORAMA the culture's fascination with models had reached a fever pitch and at the same time there was this terrible reckoning with terrorism and the connection I made seemed plausible.
JC: The terrorists in GLAMORAMA only recruit famous people because "celebrities have instant cover." Do you think the cult of personality is such in our current culture of fame worship that the average person can't believe a celebrity would behave badly, or that people are quick to forgive famous people for their transgressions?
BEE: Well, if you're whole basis for being is just as an image, or as a surface, then you're not flesh-and-blood to people--and that's what celebrity does to people: it flattens them out and we never know what they're really like because it's not their job to tell us. So we do a lot of guess work and we project a lot of our own fantasies onto them. So in a way we invent them. And if they do something bad or behave recklessly often we'll forgive them because it comes ricocheting back at us. I think we absolve ourselves when we forgive a celebrity.
JC: Victor has been recruited and told he's perfect as an accomplice in international terrorism because he's unaware or politics. Do you think ignorance of politics makes people more complicit in what goes on in government than people who actively participate in the political process?
BEE: I think the point of the book is: just be aware in general. The book is criticizing being obsessed with the wrong things. It's saying: be careful. It's saying: hey--don't be an asshole. I don't think that if Victor was more politically aware this whole terrible thing wouldn't have happened to him. His flaw is that he's so focused on the things that are really useless (hipness, coolness, trendiness, cuteness) that he doesn't realize it when dark forces swirl around him and prey on that weakness. After all, it's much easier to get a dumb person to do something than a smart person.
JC: Previous to GLAMORAMA your books have ended with a sense that the characters are trapped or that situations can't be resolved and will only continue to spiral downward with no clear sense of the future or even that there is a future. But in GLAMORAMA the book seems to end on a note of optimism. The word "future" is even used in the last sentence. Which is maybe odd considering where Victor is at the end of the book. Is this by way of suggesting that things aren't always so hopeless, that the world isn't aggressively nihilistic?
BEE: This is the most emotionally felt of the books I've written. And for all its post-modern touches, it seems to me to be the one that's most about real people. No matter how beautiful they are or how outlandish the situations they find themselves in. Of all my narrators, Victor is the only one that really changes in the end, or comes to a realization that change him. Even if it might be too late. When I started writing this book I knew that the first word was going to be "specks" and that the last word was going to be "mountain" and I felt the book was a progression from one to the other. Emotionally, Victor learns a lot more about the worlds and himself and I think this corresponds to the fact that maybe I'm a little bit more optimistic about my life than I was previously. Maybe not an optimism but a sense of acceptance that I don't think I had before. Because I have a lot more knowledge about the way the world works. I seem to be able to maneuver through it with more ease than I did when I was in my 20's. And this, I think, is reflected in my writing.
JC: It's been more than ten years since Less Than Zero. Have you reread it recently? What is your relationship to that book now?
BEE: The last time I reread it, I remember thinking, you were too young to write this book and then I was also thinking, you shouldn't have listened to a lot of the advice you received from the editors who edited the book. It was a book that when I first wrote it was very, very long and a lot of melodramatic things happened within this very long book. But that was sort of the point. These melodramatic things drifted in and out of the action and the power of what happened to certain people in certain incidences was completely diminished because of all the fluff that's surrounding their lives. So someone could be murdered, someone could be raped but there is all this other garbage floating around them and that garbage mutes the power of horrifying things happening to people. This is something that interested me a lot when I worked on the book. When the book became pared down--and it was pared down a lot--after it went through the editing process at Simon & Schuster, there exists a thirty page sequence near the end of the book that I can't read, that I just think is way too melodramatic, way too over-the-top. I'm pretty much with the book up until then, but then I just found it to be a little embarrassing. I think the character of Julian, in my initial draft, was much more of a periphery figure who was sort of just wandering around and wasn't a major character. He wasn't the focus of the book but in the end he sort of becomes a symbol for the downfall of everybody else: he gets raped, he gets shot up by his dealer. None of that was my intention at first. Everything pretty much reads as how it originally did, but since a lot of stuff was cut out of it and it's all slammed together in the last thirty or forty pages, it bothers me, or did bother me when I last reread it. I also think that probably helped make it a more noticeable book and it helped make it a more successful book than it perhaps would've been if I'd gone my way with it. It seems very far away from me now. It seems like a book that I definitely would not have any interest in writing now and I do think out of everything I've written, it's the least of the books.
JC: If you had to rank your books according to how successfully you completed what you started out to do, how would that list go?
BEE: You have an idea for a book and you're really lucky if you get fifty or sixty percent of that idea down. In your head, you have this grandiose idea of a great, awesome book where you're going to write about this, or this, or this and when you start writing, reality sets in and you kind of get to the point where you think, "Okay, if I can just get through this, if I can just move it on to here, I'll have done some work and it will have worked out." Sometimes writing a novel can be so overwhelming and so exhausting emotionally that you're really lucky if you can get fifty or sixty percent of what you really wanted to initially do on paper. I think, for example, The Informers by far is probably sentence by sentence the best writing I've done. I don't know if it's the best book, but I do think that the writing is, let's just say, very unembarrassing to me. I still think The Rules of Attraction is the one book that I really got down everything that I wanted to do. I wrote a book that really threatened to annoy a great many people. At the same time, I just really have a soft spot in my heart for Rules. That might be because Less Than Zero and American Psycho were these big bullies that could take care of themselves. The Rules of Attraction was so slammed because it was about these really annoying, atrocious kids nattering on and on about their lives at college and "oh, he doesn't love me, or she doesn't love me or whatever." It got a tremendous amount of flak that I thought really wasn't due the book. So I sort of have a soft spot for it. GLAMORAMA took so long to write and it was dictated by its narrative that I probably don't give myself that much credit for the actual writing or it because it was this marathon and it took eight years to complete. A lot of what I had to write was dictated by the plot, the conspiracy and so I don't know if I really give myself credit for doing it. I don't think it's a book that's as abstract or stylized as the earlier books, certainly not as much as AMERICAN PSYCHO or THE RULES OF ATTRACTION or LESS THAN ZERO to that degree. I think the language in GLAMORAMA has a much more easy vibe to it and it's not so constricted probably because there's so much motion going on, people are running around, etc. and that freed up what could've been at times in the earlier books me being too conscious of language. In the new book I really concentrate on movement, momentum seemed very important to me. And in the end because I'm 34 now and I'm a lot older and I know more about writing now, I can't necessarily say this is the best book I've written but I can say it's the most careful book that I've written and the book that I gave the most thought to.
I really can't reread the books, it doesn't really interest me that much. They define a certain time of my life and what was going on during that time of my life and I don't know, to me they're not that interesting to reread again. They were interesting to write, but to reread them...I don't know if I'd get that much pleasure out of that. Or if it would be particularly instructive.
JC: Did you write a draft of the screenplay for Less Than Zero? Were you involved with that process?
BEE: I was still in college when I found out they were going to turn it into a movie. I was sent a script by someone, I saw a couple of more scripts, but I was not involved in the process. I didn't want to be involved.
JC: From the beginning? You didn't think you might want to be involved?
BEE: When I was first asked if I wanted to be involved, I realistically didn't think I could do it because I was finishing up school and then I did go back a week later to my agent and said, "Well, maybe I do want to do this." She said, "It's too late, I already told them you don't, and you should finish school anyway." But you know what? I would've done the first draft and it would've been very close to the book and there's no way they would've made it. This was a movie that should never have been made by a big studio, and it should never have been a big, glossy Hollywood movie filled with a lot of stars, directed by a very slick video director. It just shouldn't have been done. It probably would have been much more successful if it had stayed true to the book and was made on a very low budget. There was no way that a big Hollywood studio run by the parents of the children in the book were going to make an honest movie out of that book. So it was hopeless anyway. I could've written a draft but it wouldn't have mattered.
JC: What do you think is the most untrue thing said about you?
BEE: (Laughs) I think everything that's been said about me is pretty much right. I don't think there's been anything said about me that I really have to disagree with. I'd have to say that when I do read articles about myself where I've talked to the reporter and hung out with the reporter and I finally see the article, I definitely don't know that person. I have no idea where this person came from. What happens, I guess, is that the writer's version of you and how they see you comes across and that really isn't who you are. The most shocked I was by seeing how someone else sees me was an article in Vanity Fair about two years ago. This was just definitely not me. I hung out with this guy who wrote it for three days and I thought we talked about everything, we covered everything. Hours everyday. We talked about every possible thing you could talk about. And what he took from it was just really shocking to me. This person--Bret Easton Ellis--was completely unrecognizable. I also can't say there's anything untrue in it. There was just sort of this general lack of truth about who I was. But there wasn't anything patently false or lies. I really don't think there's anything that's been written about me that isn't true. What might not be true is that people assumed I wrote American Psycho for reasons other than the one that I just wanted to write this book. That seemed to me false. Other than that, everything has been pretty much right. There really has not been a lot of rumors or innuendo. People just sort of write about my work and how sullen I am.
Part Four
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