Life Isn’t a Script: Bret Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms Peter Freese When, twenty-five years after Less Than Zero, Ellis revived its teenage characters as middle-aged people in Imperial Bedrooms (2010), this ‗sequel‘ created a big stir. Reviewers either hailed the slim novel by the ‗master of paranoia‘ as timely and significant or panned it as pointless and derivative, and critics pigeonholed it as yet another example of ‗blank fiction‘ full of brand names and commodities or of ‗trangressional‘ literature willfully violating social taboos. A moral evaluation of the pornographic story of a sadistic narcissist performing ―imperial‖ acts of sexual exploitation in his ―bedroom‖ depends on the reader‘s ethical position, and one might doubt whether Ellis is really ―a self-confessed moralist‖ who ―far from offering a celebration of evil and of nihilism, […] is presenting an examination of it‖ (Akbar 2011). But as an innovative narrative, which replaces a traditional plot with a steadily intensifying mood, performs puzzling narratological tricks, combines standard elements of generic fiction with meta-fictional experiments, ingeniously plays with the ontological difference between fact and fiction, achieves the rare juxtaposition of a lingering awareness of the text‘s constructedness with a self-referential lack of critical distance, and creates a unique mixture of mundane items of popular culture with crucial questions about human behavior, Ellis‘ idiosyncratic tale is an accomplishment that certainly deserves critical attention. ―Los Angeles, more than any other city, belongs to the mass media. What is known around the nation as the L.A. scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks.‖ (Thomas Pynchon, ―A Journey into the Mind of Watts‖) AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 42 (2017) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Peter Freese 4 ―Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in …‖ (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho) ―But one of the things that I‘m really interested in is the narrator. I‘m interested in the function of the narrator, the person telling the story. I‘ve never written a novel in the third person. My work is just a series of narrators, and I kind of give the books over to them.‖ (Ellis in Pearson 2010) In 1985, a twenty-year-old Bennington College undergraduate named Bret Easton Ellis published a book about a clique of self-destructive Los Angeles youths in their overprivileged world of drugs, casual sex and random violence. According to a false but highly effective rumor, he had typed this book on his bedroom floor in just a month. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times reviewed it in an often quoted statement as ―one of the most disturbing novels I‘ve read in a long time. It possesses an unnerving air of documentary reality,‖ and then trounced it by saying: ―Unlike [the book‘s narrator], Mr. Ellis clearly possesses talent - and the drive to do something with his gifts. Perhaps in his next novel, he will bring them to real fruition - and write a story that doesn‘t merely depress us with sociological reports, but also moves us with the force of its imaginative transactions.‖ Although most early reviews were negative, the novel and its unknown young author soon got ―an almost unprecedented amount of critical attention from the American highbrow press‖ (Fodor and Varga 2014: 198). Less Than Zero turned into a sensational success, became a must on American campuses, was translated into more than two dozen languages, and was made into a film only two years after its publication. Today, Ellis is the established author of seven extremely controversial books, which have both ―been hailed as timely and significant and dismissed as substanceless and derivative‖ (Mandel 2011: 3), and the nation-wide scandal about his third novel, American Psycho (1991), has firmly established him as the bad boy of American fiction. In 1998, ITV did a celebratory documentation of his life titled This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis, and the ―laureate of paranoia‘s‖ (Lawson) singular influence upon popular culture ranges from the Bloc Party‘s ―Song for Clay (Disappear Here)‖ and an episode of The Simpsons, in which Lisa‘s uncle talks about the Great Books of Western Civilization ―from Beowulf to Less Than Zero,‖ to D12‘s songs ―American Psycho‖ and ―American Psycho 2‖ and assorted video games and action figures. Less Than Zero was not only parodied in Douglas E. Winter‘s horror story ―Less Than Zombie,‖ but Ellis is also the subject of two novels, Caroline Weiss and Margaret Wallace‘s Stalking Bret Easton Ellis: A Novel in Two Parts (2009) and Jaime Clarke‘s Vernon Downs (2014). Meanwhile, Less Than Zero has acquired the status of a literary breakthrough that defines the zeitgeist of a specific generation. In 1999, Jonathan Keats emphatically demanded in the prestigious online magazine Salon that ―it‘s time to add Bret Easton Ellis to the canon.‖ In 2011, Georgina Colby pre- Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 5 sented a reading of Ellis‘ novels as books by ―a more significant writer and cultural commentator than some previous critical accounts of his work have allowed‖ (Colby 2), and in the same year Bernadette Halkert investigated the ongoing process of the canonization of Ellis‘ novels in great detail. When, twenty-five years after Less Than Zero, Ellis announced that he would revive its teenage characters in a new book as by now middle-aged people, expectations were high. The eagerly awaited ‗sequel‘ appeared in June 2010 as Imperial Bedrooms and was accompanied by an audiobook read by Andrew McCarthy, the very actor who had played the earlier book‘s ‗hero‘ in its film version and who now published his comments on the new one on YouTube. The publication was heralded by a lot of promotional hype on twitter and in blogs, Ellis gave several explanatory interviews, and a surprising number of journals and dailies reviewed his new book. Once again, however, the majority of critics were skeptical or outright hostile. Tom Maurstad said in The Dallas Morning News: The first book took us to the dark side of youth culture; the new book takes us to the dark side of celebrity culture. The difference is that the world Ellis is writing about, and to, has changed. When he took the reader to the dark side the first time around, it was a place few had seen or even heard about. This time around, the dark side is a place that, thanks to media and technology, is hard to get away from. Thus what once seemed new and edgy now feels worn out and obvious. […] Just as the first video aired on MTV declared (in 1981) that ―video killed the radio star,‖ a quarter-century later, it seems reality has killed this particular literary star. Alexander Theroux, himself an accomplished writer, concluded in the Wall Street Journal that in its reductive lineaments and endless pages of dialogue, Imperial Bedrooms inevitably suggests a screenplay. Mr. Ellis, of course, does work as a screenwriter, so why should this not be the case? But the cult of spoiled bohemianism that has given him his propers - the almost insolent daring, the excess even - has given way to a dull, stricken, under-medicated nonstory that goes nowhere. Jay Atkinson roundly dismissed the novel as a total failure in The Boston Globe: […] for some infernal reason, Ellis is updating his 1985 cash cow by publishing Imperial Bedrooms, at 192 pages as thin and unconvincing as a chapbook of self-published poems, and so empty and venal and misogynistic it‘s downright insulting. […] Ellis is aiming for noir, for the territory of James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler, but ends up with an XXX-rated episode of ―Melrose Place.‖ What, exactly, is this book? Is it supposed to be some kind of cultural artifact? A time capsule from the era of parachute pants and big hair? It‘s certainly not a novel, in the sense that‘s worthy of that appellation. It‘s like some- Peter Freese 6 thing concocted by a roomful of marketing execs, mad men indeed, possessed of a bone-deep cynicism regarding the merits of actual storytelling. And Erica Wagner concluded in The NewYork Times that ―the resulting novel falls flat. For what starts off neat swiftly becomes pat, lazy and effortful all at once. […] ‗History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,‘ runs one of this novel‘s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn‘t have to: that‘s the point. Let‘s hope Ellis figures that out.‖ But there were also positive voices. Alison Kelly found Imperial Bedrooms ―almost defiantly appalling and sickening,‖ but felt forced to admit that ―it is also brilliantly written and coolly self-aware.‖ Jeff Simon praised Ellis as ―a profoundly talented - occasionally even brilliant - writer,‖ found that ―the book itself has an intricacy and tidal pull that can‘t be dismissed,‖ and commented that ―it isn‘t long before you have to cede that ghastly narcissism or not, Bret Easton Ellis has a fictional territory all his own and, heaven forbid, a mastery there.‖ Mark Lawson explained that ―in terms of American literary inheritance, Easton Ellis adds the playful self-advertisements of Philip Roth to the ambiguously complicit social reportage of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Imperial Bedrooms ranks with his best exercises in the latter register, teeming with sharp details of a narcissistic generation.‖ Matt Thorne maintained that ―Imperial Bedrooms is a wonderfully merciless novel: where once was glamour we now find only horror.‖ J. Robert Lennon maintained that ―Imperial Bedrooms is but another unexpected swerve in a wonderfully weird career,‖ and Arifa Akbar concluded: Ellis, a self-confessed moralist, has suggested that far from offering a celebration of evil and of nihilism, he is presenting an examination of it. The nascent narcissist of Less Than Zero has lost all ability to empathise, switched off his humanity, and is now left in a ―dead end.‖ In that, it is a deeply pessimistic presentation of human nature as assailable, and in Clay‘s case, incapable of transformation; but also, perhaps, an unflinching study of evil. The Demise of the Plot, Loose Ends, and Unsolved Mysteries Ellis‘ controversial new novel begins with its protagonist-narrator‘s return to L.A. and thereby duplicates the action of Less Than Zero. In 1984, Clay had returned to his home town as a troubled undergraduate from the fictional Camden College in the east to spend the Christmas holiday with his dysfunctional family and his friends. In 2009, he returns as a successful screenwriter from a failed relationship in New York to spend the weeks around Christmas overseeing the castings for a movie for which he wrote the screenplay. During his stay in L.A. he becomes entangled in the sinister world of his former friends who are now in their mid-forties and Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 7 lead affluent lives in the status-driven world of Hollywood. Among them are his former girlfriend Blair who is now married to the gay Trent Burroughs; the former drug addict Julian Wells who is now clean and runs a secret high-class escort service; and the nihilistic sociopath Rip Millar, whose ―horrible face‖ (IB 30) is the result of cosmetic surgery and makes him look like a monster, and who is still engaged in criminal activities and rumored to be associated with a dangerous secret cult. Clay, ―an old-looking teenager‖ (IB 60) who no longer belongs to ―the youthful surface‖ (IB 51) of L.A., begins an affair with the talentless actress Denise Tazzarek aka Rain Turner, ―another girl who has gotten by on her looks‖ (IB 38). Since he is a sadistic narcissist keen on performing ―imperial‖ acts of sexual exploitation in the ―bedroom‖ of his condo, he resorts to his tested strategy of gaining control over aspiring actresses by promising them roles in his films in exchange for serving his sexual needs. And that this strategy will work with Rain is cleverly implied in the fact that she, who is selling herself for a career in a world in which ―exposure can ensure fame‖ (IB 42), has ―a hostess job at Reveal‖ (IB 52), whereas Clay, who abuses his position for sexual blackmail, wrote the script for the film Concealed (IB 26, 36, 159). When it turns out that Rain is not only seriously attached to Julian but also has mysterious ties to Rip and to the brutally murdered Kelly Montrose, Clay‘s life spins gradually out of control, and since he is unwilling to give up the role of the powerful master of a dependent damsel, he is drawn ever more deeply into a net of mysterious connections in which everybody seems to double-time everybody else. He is tailed by a blue Jeep, which in turn is followed by a black Mercedes. Someone must have broken into his condo because things are rearranged or missing, and he constantly gets anonymous text messages with vague threats from blocked numbers. The internet is full of anonymous speculations about the ritual murders of a Hispanic actress (IB 25, 42), the film producer Kelly Montrose (IB 57, 58, 59, 63, 66, 72, 95, 109, 111) and Rain‘s roommate Amanda Flew (IB 114ff., 143f.). Julian, about whom Clay discloses at the very beginning that he will be tortured and killed, comes to see him with signs of having been beaten up, and Rip spouts darkly menacing allusions. Although some hints remain unexplained, it becomes gradually clear that Clay is a repeat offender and that his exploitative relation with Rain is not the first affair of that kind. Recurring allusions reveal that his previous affair with an actress named Meghan Reynolds (IB 23, 27, 28, 32, 41, 44, 55, 56, 79, 89, 101, 105, 106, 126, 134, 151, 160) ended disastrously, but Clay‘s memory of ―pacing outside the ER at Cedars-Sinai apologizing to her on the Fourth of July‖ (106) remains irritatingly vague about what really happened. Passing references to Laurie, the woman he left behind in New York (IB 10, 15, 16, 23, 35, 64, 144, 160), show that she, too, is coolly discarded when he no longer needs her. And Clay admits that his sadistic impulses reach back into the Peter Freese 8 past when he muses that he ―can actually control‖ Rain‘s need to get the desired movie role and ―know[s] this because [he‘s] done it before‖ (IB 53). Moreover, all of his acquaintances seem to be aware of his narcissistic habit of bribing attractive young women into sexual servitude. Blair says about his obsession with Rain: ―Jesus, it‘s still all about you, isn‘t it? […] Do you know anything about her except how she makes you feel? ‖ (IB 74). Julian remarks ―that there‘s a larger world out there and it‘s not all about you.‖ (IB 111), accuses Clay of having ―done this so many times before,‖ and complains that ―you really won‘t do anything for anybody, except for yourself‖ (IB 151f.). Rip assumes that Clay‘s fixation on Rain ―isn‘t about her‖ but ―that maybe it‘s about you? ‖ (IB 85), and knowingly adds that ―You have a history of this, don‘t you? ‖ (IB 87) Trent, who blackmails Clay into acquiescence by reminding him of an earlier act of violence with a pregnant girl (IB 143), asks him to give up Rain and disentangle himself for his own safety from her dangerous connections. He observes ―See, there you go again, Clay. It‘s not about you,‖ when Clay petulantly asks ―And what about me? ‖ (IB 137), thereby repeating the very question - ―What about me? ‖ (LTZ 123) - which he had already asked his psychiatrist three times in Less Than Zero. The morbidly jealous Clay, however, is so intent on keeping Rain for himself - ―I Iike her.‖ (IB 113) - that he deliberately betrays his former friend to the scheming Rip, and when Julian‘s mutilated body is found, he knows full well that he has lost Rain for good and that ―in [his] own way, [he] had put Julian there‖ (IB 10). He tries to forget his defeat in a sadistic orgy with two bought youths (IB 156-159) and concludes his blurred tale with a visit to Julian‘s grave and the information that the police suspect him of being an accomplice to the murder of his former friend and that Blair has promised him a false alibi. Although meanwhile several hints have fallen into place and some of the insinuated connections have become clear, the plot still remains somewhat obscure. But despite the loose ends it is obvious that ―this time out,‖ to use Ellis‘s own words, ―the narcissist reaches a dead end‖ (in Kellogg 2010). Imperial Bedrooms, then, intermingles the repugnant case history of an obsessed narcissist with elements of the hard-boiled detective genre and flagrantly pornographic scenes, but since large parts of its action consist of people talking to each other on cross purposes, since situational contexts are often only alluded to instead of being explained, since everyday occurrences are presented in the same flat and affectless tone as matters of life and death, and since readers are at the mercy of an emotionally disturbed and therefore unreliable narrator, the novel‘s different strands, some of which come to nothing, do not really coalesce into a causally unfolding plot. Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 9 Metafictional Shenanigans and the Growth of Paranoia The narrative opacity of Imperial Bedrooms is intentional and might even be called Ellis‘s trademark. He repeatedly admitted that most of his novels have neither logically unfolding plots nor developing characters, and he stressed that his tales are built instead on atmospheric arcs of suspense generated by the steady intensification of a particular mood. The nonnarrative, or least plot-driven, books that I‘ve written, to which I would add Less Than Zero, were actually the most carefully structured. In Less Than Zero, where very little seems to be happening for most of the book, what keeps the reader engaged? Not a riveting plot certainly, since there‘s no plot until the last fifth of the novel. Not depth of character, since these characters seem to have no depth. What keeps the reader engaged is, probably, a gradually intensifying sense of dread. It may seem that you can shake the book up, dump the scenes on the table, and rearrange them any way you want and it wouldn‘t matter much - but that‘s not how it was created. If you took that approach, what you‘d end up with is a dead book, with zero momentum and zero at stake. I was very careful about the placement of each scene, each chapter. […] There are subtle gradations of menace. There‘s a faint hum of horror in the background at the beginning of the book, and as the book progresses the hum becomes, hopefully, deafening. If you looked at the book in diagram, you‘d see that the scenes are all carefully apportioned. (in Goulian 2012) And with regard to Imperial Bedrooms he said: My personal experiences aside, paranoia serves an important technical function in my books. In a novel that isn‘t exactly plot-driven, which you could argue is most of my novels, you need a sense of mystery, tension, menace, whatever it is, to keep it driving forward. What‘s around the corner? What‘s going on in the hills? Who‘s behind the wheel of that black Mercedes with the tinted windows? You‘ve got to have a tight plan for the book, with scenes of mystery and menace carefully placed, to make it work. (in Goulian 2012) The ―gradually intensifying sense of dread‖ and the ―faint hum of horror,‖ which already pervaded Less Than Zero, are even stronger in Imperial Bedrooms, one of whose two epigraphs is a quotation from Raymond Chandler‘s The Long Goodbye: ―There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.‖ Ellis admires Chandler‘s books as masterpieces in which ―the plots really don‘t matter. The solutions to mysteries don‘t matter. […] It‘s just the mood that‘s so enthralling. And it‘s kind of universal, this idea of a man searching for something or moving through this moral landscape and trying to protect himself from it, and yet he‘s still forced to investigate it.‖ (in Pearson 2010) He noted that Imperial Bedrooms was ―vaguely influenced by Chandler‖ and explained: ―I had no desire to write a sequel to Less Than Zero but I became very interested in Clay and this coincided with my interest in Raymond Chandler and then I Peter Freese 10 was involved in a movie that I wrote and produced that wasn't really working out. All these things started coming together and that is what produced the novel.‖ He immediately added, however, that Imperial Bedrooms is ―by no means a full-blown noir,‖ but at best ―a Hollywood novel that has elements of noir,‖ and - more importantly - that although he was interested in ―the tropes of noir,‖ Clay, his narrator, is not because he is only ―interested in being the star of his own movie when in reality he‘s just a supporting player‖ (in Baker 2010). Imperial Bedrooms actually contains a number of noir elements such as mysterious pursuits, menacing messages, shady characters, and ghoulish deaths, and it also presents both a love triangle and a Chandleresque femme fatale. Arifa Akbar even reads the affair of Clay and Rain, a middle-aged screenwriter and a young actress, as a clever reversal of that between an old actress and a young screenwriter in Billy Wilder‘s noir classic Sunset Boulevard (1950). Ellis might well have intended such a parallel, but it is more important to note that his novel reverses the logic of noir. Instead of being the femme fatale who tries to lure the private eye away from his task, Rain turns out to be the victim of Clay, who in turn does not solve a mysterious crime but, on the contrary, commits it. Imperial Bedrooms, then, uses some trappings of Hollywood Noir, but its relation to Chandler‘s novels is rather tenuous. There is, however, one noir aspect that prevails throughout, and that is the atmosphere of growing paranoia caused by mysterious threats which is enhanced by Ellis‘ s unusual narrative strategy. When Mark Amerika and Alexander Laurence in 1994 asked him about the influence of the internet upon young readers and their resulting visual orientation, Ellis explained: In terms of scenes in books I‘m writing, in terms of how words look on a page, in terms of space breaks, in terms of how much white should be on a page: these are all things that I think about constantly. If I see that a paragraph looks - just aesthetically, visually - too long and for some reason interrupts some narrative flow or fluidity, then I will break that paragraph up. Not necessarily because of the language or the words, but purely on a visual basis. With a conversation, you might want to get across the idea that they‘re not connecting, so in a visual way you can string along twenty single lines of dialogue. The visual stimulus that words have on a page is something I think about. I don‘t know if older writers are concerned with that. This awareness contributes to a narrative strategy which Ellis already used in Less Than Zero. In both novels, Clay presents a chronological sequence of events divided into brief narrative sections told in the unusual present tense and consisting mostly of extended dialogues in direct speech. The roughly two-hundred pages of Ellis‘s apprentice novel are divided into 108 chapters with an average length of less than two pages. Each presents a self-sufficient slice-of-life located in space and time, and since these short ‗takes‘ often switch abruptly from one place and time to Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 11 another it is left to the readers to connect them (Freese 1990). Obviously, such a structure is geared to the limited attention span of both the drugimpaired narrator himself and the readers whom he addresses, and it makes allowances for a development which Kurt Vonnegut had noted much earlier when he explained his similar strategy in Cat‟s Cradle (1963) by pointing out that ―we have a much shorter attention span perhaps, because of television and the film. We‘ve been educated to quick cuts and very little exposition.‖ (Bellamy 1974: 204) In 1985, reviewers of Less Than Zero compared its structure to the rapid sequence of video clips as abruptly and unceasingly following upon each other on the then still new Music Television and therefore dubbed Ellis‘s tale an ‗MTV novel‘ (Freese 1991). Meanwhile, the influence of film, TV, and the internet on written texts is taken for granted, and thus no reviewer was any longer surprised by the fact that the 169 pages of Imperial Bedrooms are divided into 122 sections with an average length of 1.4 pages, the longest filling six pages and the shortest just three lines. Although the short-lived notion of an ‗MTV novel‘ has been discarded as untenable, it is significant that Ellis himself characterized Imperial Bedrooms as a novel ―which has a movie-ish feel to it‖ (in Pearson 2010), and described Clay as ―interested in being the star of his own movie when in reality he‘s just a supporting player‖ (in Baker 2010). Thus, it is no accident that he makes him a ―screenwriter‖ (IB 39) who thinks of his own life in cinematic terms. Talking to Julian, Clay asks ―Are we gonna play out another scene? ‖ (IB 22), and questioning Rain about her relation with Kelly Montrose, he ―plan[s] how this scene will play out‖ (IB 118) and then, having forced her to have sex with him, contentedly comments that ―this is the way I always wanted the scene to play out and then it does‖ (IB 119). Referring to what will happen to his former friend, he talks about ―another - and very different - movie‖ (IB 10), reporting on a long party he mentions that ―the night begins sliding into its last act‖ (IB 46), and considering whether Julian went away or was kidnapped he thinks that ―depend[s] on which script you want to follow‖ (IB 161). In all these cases he views reality as if it were a movie. When he is depressed, ―the world becomes a science-fiction movie‖ (IB 62) for him, and when he is threatened by Rip, he asks ―What movie do you think you‘re in? ‖ (IB 125) When Clay wonders about what is ―real,‖ Rain trenchantly points out: ―That‘s because you‘re a writer. That‘s because you make things up for a living‖ (IB 40), thus insinuating that in Clay‘s ‗script‘ of his life the distinction between reality and imagination gets blurred. When he later asks her why they cannot be together, she answers ―Because you‘re just the writer‖ (IB 156). And when he blackmails her into sleeping with him, their exchange defines their roles as those of ―writer‖ and ―actor‖: Peter Freese 12 ―It‘s just a movie that you‘re writing.‖ She‘s crying openly now as she says this. ―But we‘re both writing this movie together, baby.‖ ―No, we‘re not,‖ she cries, her face an anguished mask. ―What do you mean? ‖ ―I‘m only acting in it.‖ (IB 131) There are many more passages in which life is understood as a movie. Thus, Clay explains his absence from the casting by saying ―I had to finish a script‖ (IB 94), thereby referring to both an actual screenplay he is working on and alluding to the ‗scripting‘ of his affair with Rain. This ambiguity is enhanced when he recommends Rain for a casting and lies that ―she just seems like who I had in mind when I was writing the script‖ (IB 95), which can again refer to either the script of the movie or that of his life with Rain. When he describes what happened during his sadistic debauch in Palm Springs, he suddenly relinquishes his perspective as a human observer to that of a camera: ―[…] water bloated, the sound of crickets everywhere, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky‖ (IB 159). And when, at the novel‘s end, he muses about his complicated relation with Blair, he speaks about ―the fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away‖ (IB 169). That he thinks about his life in terms of a movie and that he wrongly assumes that he can ‗script‘ his relationships with others to his own liking, becomes most obvious when he tries to find out from Julian about the mysterious ―conspiracy‖ (IB 167) that threatens to engulf him, and when the latter angrily reminds him that ―this isn‘t a script. It‘s not going to add up. Not everything‘s going to come together in the third act.‖ (IB 112) The absence of a causally unfolding plot, the temporal depthlessness of the first-person present tense narration, the fragmentation of the text into small cinematic ‗takes,‘ the evocation of ever intensifying mysterious threats, and Clay‘s narcissistic concept of life as a movie for which he can write the script to his own liking make Imperial Bedrooms a very unusual narrative. The novel‘s strangeness is further increased by Ellis‘s idiosyncratic play with the relation between fact and fiction. After Truman Capote‘s ―creative reportage‖ In Cold Blood (1966) (Plimpton) and Tom Wolfe‘s ―new social novel‖ Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) (Wolfe), the ‗nonfiction novel‘ has become an established genre, and playful bordercrossings between the ontologically separated realms of fact and fiction have turned into a familiar narrative strategy in many meta-fictional historiographies. Nobody, however, has pushed this strategy further than Ellis, and this is yet another reason why Imperial Bedrooms is not simply a sequel to Less Than Zero. J. Robert Lennon observed: The marketing blurbs for Bret Easton Ellis‘s new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, would have it be a sequel to Less than Zero, the 1985 novel that made him fa- Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 13 mous. It is, after a fashion: all of Ellis‘s books are sequels, prequels, spinoffs and derivatives of each other. They share a universe, or perhaps a multiverse, of interconnected fictional lives and storylines, all of which bear, or are supposed to bear, or are trying to convince you they‘re supposed to bear, some resemblance to Ellis‘s actual life experiences, family members, enemies and friends. But if a sequel is a continuation of a previous storyline, or a recapitulation or recontextualisation of one, then Imperial Bedrooms doesn‘t quite fit the description. It shares a narrator with Less than Zero, along with several other characters, a distinctive and highly self-conscious prose style, a time of year, and a milieu of urban self-abuse and disaffection. But there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between the books. Lennon‘s accurate comment is best illustrated by Ellis‘s fifth novel, Lunar Park (2005), whose protagonist is a certain ‗Bret Easton Ellis,‘ who in some ways is completely identical with, but in others is decidedly different from his creator. The first chapter of this mock memoir is probably the best summary of Ellis‘s early fame, his sudden wealth, his druginduced debaucheries, his world-wide notoriety following American Psycho (1991) and the scandals and humiliations during his promotional global tour for Glamorama (1998), and in it the fictional Bret recalls the reactions to his apprentice novel as follows: The novel was mistaken for autobiography (I had written three autobiographical novels - all unpublished - before Less Than Zero, so it was much more fiction-based and less a roman à clef than most first novels) and its sensational scenes (the snuff film, the gang rape of the twelve-year-old, the decomposing corpse in the alley, the murder at the drive-in) were taken from lurid rumors that whispered through the group I hung with in L.A. and not from anything experienced directly. But the press became extremely preoccupied with the book‘s ―shocking‖ content and especially with its style: very brief scenes written in a kind of controlled, cinematic haiku. The book was short and an easy read [and] became known as ―the novel for the MTV generation‖ (courtesy of USA Today) and I found myself being labeled by just about everyone as the voice of this new generation. (LP 10) The real Ellis, too, repeatedly complained about his novels being misread as autobiographies. Thus, he extended an interviewer‘s statement that ―readers have always assumed that Clay, the narrator, is your alter ego‖ by saying: And when American Psycho came out, people assumed I was Patrick Bateman, and when Glamorama came out, they assumed I was Victor Ward. And when Imperial Bedrooms came out, they assumed I was Clay again. I get, ―Dude, are you Clay? ‖ all the time. Well, I write novels, and though there are autobiographical elements in them, who really cares how much of me is in the book? As it happens, there is very little in Less Than Zero that‘s based on my real life. Yes, like Clay I had two sisters, and my parents were divorced, and many of my friends were wealthy and did drugs and seemed promiscuous—or so I Peter Freese 14 thought at the time. But I was a relatively well-adjusted kid. I mean, I wasn‘t as severely alienated as Clay. (in Goulian 2012) Ellis emphatically repeated this position when he said to Joshua Klein: ―I‘ve never written an autobiographical novel in my life. I‘ve never touched upon my life. I‘ve never written a single scene that I can say took place. I‘ve never written a line of dialogue that I‘ve heard someone say or that I have said.‖ But in a 2014 interview he expressed the very opposite when he said about his œuvre that ―the six or seven books add up as a sort of autobiography. When I look at them I think, Oh, that's where I was in '91. That's where I was in '88. OK, I got it” (in Olah 2014). In his Shortlist interview about American Psycho he stated: That book is intensely autobiographical. I remember the pain and loneliness that I felt when I wrote it. I was 23, I moved to New York, I had some money. I was living a decadent lifestyle and it was not filling my voids. I was falling into what was then yuppiedom but was, in fact, the consumer lifestyle. My lifestyle was like Patrick Bateman‘s and American Psycho was my way of not falling into that. It‘s a novel, so I made him more dramatic and crazier than I am, but I agree with a lot of what Patrick Bateman says about society and I thought he was kind of funny. I really identify with his rage. Regarding the murders, I was always on the fence about whether they were fantasy or real. I don‘t know and I prefer it that way. (in Anonymous 2010) And to the interviewers of the Harvard Crimson he said: I wrote American Psycho as a book that I really think is in a lot of ways very autobiographical, I mean, not in terms of slaughtering people, but there are elements of that life-style that I was leading at that time that I was not particularly happy with ... I think there's something very honest about criticizing certain elements of your lifestyle and placing them within your fiction. (in Kay 1999) These willfully contradictory statements show that Ellis‘s comments on his own books are intentionally unreliable and demonstrate his love for meta-fictional shenanigans with the ontological distinction between fact and fiction. In the retrospective opening section of Imperial Bedrooms, which is the only part told in the past tense, his penchant for narratological prestidigitation not only makes him portray his protagonist-narrator as a person who in crucial aspects is identical with his creator, but he also has his fictional avatar aver that his depiction in Less Than Zero was based on a ‗real‘ person. Clay begins his tale with the abrupt statement ―They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book by someone we knew‖ (IB 3), and then adds that ―for the most part‖ that book was ―an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren‘t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn‘t happened‖ (IB 3). Thus, whereas the real Ellis Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 15 emphatically rejects the widespread assumption that Clay in Less Than Zero was a fictionalized version of himself, the fictional Clay takes the opposite position by confirming that the earlier novel dealt with a group of really existing youngsters. While Clay‘s attempt at verifying the real existence of himself and his peers can of course only be fictitious since it is made by a fictional character, things become more complicated when the Clay of Imperial Bedrooms asserts that he personally knew ―the author‖ (IB 3) of Less Than Zero and when he reveals that the author was a member of his clique and that it was only because of envy on the part of ―the writer‖ (IB 13) that he, Clay, was made ―the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness‖ (IB 3), thereby implying that his portrayal as the protagonist-narrator of Less Than Zero was distorted by the prejudices of the writer and that in Imperial Bedrooms the ‗real‘ Clay will be heard. Having briefly alluded to the unidentified writer‘s second novel, which is of course Ellis‘s The Rules of Attraction (1987), and having charged that novel with veering from the truth, Clay confesses that ―[I wanted] to become a writer as well, and that I had wanted to write that first novel the author had written after I finished reading it - it was my life and he had hijacked it. But I quickly had to accept that I didn‘t have the talent or the drive. I didn‘t have the patience. I just wanted to be able to do it.‖(IB 5) Here, then, Ellis achieves two things at once: retrospectively he makes his fictional projection, the Clay of the later novel, insinuate that the Clay of the earlier novel was not as unsympathetic as a prejudiced writer made him, and prospectively he implies that readers of the later novel will get to know the real Clay and at the same time forestalls potential criticism by having Clay admit that he lacks the talent and patience which a good writer must have. But Ellis is not content with this accomplished play with the ‗reality‘ of his fictions and has Clay comment on the film version of Less Than Zero, starring Andrew McCarthy, Robert Downey Jr. and Jami Gertz. He invents a pre-screening of the really existing film for the fictitious ―book‘s actual cast‖ (IB 8) and flatly - and correctly - states: ―The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. […] The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie.‖ (IB 7) He then explains why the film had to change the novel‘s action in compliance with the Hollywood code which demands, as he has learned as a screenwriter, that everybody ―had to be punished for all of his sins‖ (IB 8), and he adds another plausible explanation by saying: ―The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn‘t give a shit.‖ (IB 8) That Clay here speaks for Ellis is obvious from what the latter said in an interview: Peter Freese 16 With Less Than Zero, I asked myself how in the hell do you make a movie out of this book? They didn‘t. They made a completely different movie. They didn‘t use anything from the book. If you would have asked me how could they turn Less Than Zero into a sentimental, anti-drug, after school movie I would have said there‘s no way, but they did it. I‘ve learned to be cautious about saying oh they‘ll never turn this dark depraved character into any sort of interesting Mulholland Drive David Lynch kind of movie, but I could be totally wrong about that. I don‘t know. (in Baker 2010) Ellis‘s artful meta-fictional play with the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality and the intertextual connections between his two novels dominates the opening section of the later one but is only taken up once in its central part. There Clay makes Less Than Zero a meaningful object in Imperial Bedrooms when during his sadistic debauchery with bought youths in Palm Springs he mentions in passing that ―in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us over twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the glass coffee table until it was found floating in the pool‖ (IB 159). Here, Ellis‘s earlier book fulfils a metaphorical function similar to that of a brief scene in Less Than Zero in which Blair borrows the Cliff Notes on Faulkner‘s As I Lay Dying (LTZ 22) from Trent and the telling replacement of a great text of ‗high‘ culture by its simplified study aids represents what Herbert Marcuse diagnosed as the consumer society‘s capacity for repressive desublimization. It is only towards the later novel‘s end that the intertextual play becomes prominent again. There Clay ponders Blair‘s unexpected behavior and wonders in a strange phrase whether she is ―moving the game as you play it‖ (IB 169). In doing so, he varies one of the epigraphs of Less Than Zero - ―This is the game that moves as you play… - X‖ - which is a line from the 1982 song ―The Have Nots‖ by the Los Angeles punk rock band X about the difficulties lower class members face when they try to move upwards. This textual bracket between the two novels might signal that Clay has changed from the passive observer he was in the earlier book into an active participant in the later one. In the same context, Blair says to Clay ―you‘re so pale‖ (IB 169) and thereby repeats and meaningfully varies at the end of the latter novel what she had said at the beginning of the former when she greeted Clay upon his return to Los Angeles with the observation ―You look pale‖ (LTZ 10). In Less Than Zero, Blair‘s reference to his missing tan implied that his looking pale at the beginning of the action was a passing state that could - and soon would - be remedied, whereas in Imperial Bedrooms his being pale at the end of the action is a lasting state that betrays his deplorable condition. This, however, is not the only repetition plus variation, for Clay‘s confession at the end of Less Than Zero - ―I don‘t want to care. If I care about things, it‘ll just be worse, it‘ll just be another thing to worry about. It‘s less painful if I don‘t care.‖ (LTZ 205) - is varied by Clay‘s concluding confession in Imperial Bedrooms - ―I never liked anyone and I‘m afraid of Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 17 people‖ (IB 169), which is prepared by his earlier admission that he made ―the mistake of starting to care‖ (56) about Rain and by his later correction ―I don‘t really care anymore‖ (IB 119), and which also implicitly varies the observation which opens, and then punctuates Less Than Zero that ―people are afraid to merge‖ (LTZ 9 and ff.). Thus, the conclusions of both novels reveal the extreme narcissism of Clay who has grown from an insensible youthful spectator into a sadistic middle-aged perpetrator. This development is anticipated by the later novel‘s epigraph from Elvis Costello‘s song ―Beyond Belief‖ - ―History repeats the old conceits, / the glib replies, the same defeats‖ - and once more shows that Imperial Bedrooms is not just a traditional sequel to Less Than Zero, but that the two novels not only structurally duplicate each other but are also thematically interrelated by several, sometimes rather subtle brackets. Typically, however, the clearest diagnosis of Clay‘s pathological decline is provided indirectly through an easily overlooked chain of seemingly unrelated details. After the mutilated body of Kelly Montrose is found, a worried Rain suddenly asks Clay ―What‘s the worst thing you‘ve ever done? ‖ (IB 59) and gets no answer. When later Clay accuses her of having something to do with Kelly‘s death, she varies her question into ―What‘s the worst thing that ever happened to you? ‖ Again he does not answer but revealingly thinks ―I know what it is but pretend that I don‘t.‖ (IB 120) Still later, Clay looks through an old audition reel of his film Concealed and finds a dialogue in which an actress asks ―What‘s the worst thing that ever happened to you, Jimmy? ‖ and gets the answer ―Unconditional love.‖ Clay comments that the actor ―was reading the line wrong, giving it the wrong emphases, smirking when he should have been totally serious, turning it into a punch line when it was never supposed to be a joke.‖ (IB 159) Since it was Clay who wrote the script which the actors enact, the implied message of this scene is obvious: for Clay, the pathological narcissist, unconditional love with its mutual responsibilities is the worst thing that could happen. The most obvious bracket between Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms consists of the transfer of a crucial leitmotif from the one book into the other. In Imperial Bedrooms, Clay looks back at Less Than Zero and refers to ―a billboard that read DISAPPEAR HERE [which had] kept distracting‖ him (IB 4; LTZ 38), and he mentions the college in New Hampshire he had ―tried to disappear into‖ (IB 5). Musing about former acquaintances who have died, he thinks ―People just disappeared‖ (IB 15), but when Trent tells him that ―Kelly disappeared‖ (IB 18), the term begins to assume an ominous quality. When he later learns that it was Kelly who recommended Rain for an audition ―a couple days before he disappeared‖ (IB 96), and is informed by Trent that ―Rain was with [Kelly] when he disappeared‖ (IB 135), the implied threat grows. At a party Clay is told ―about a Hispanic girl who disappeared in some desert‖ (IB 25), and Jon, the film director who looks for actresses able to play the roles of Peter Freese 18 girls of the eighties complains that ―these girls are disappearing‖ (IB 36). When for a brief time things go well with Rain, the blue Jeep that has constantly trailed Clay ―disappear[s]‖ (IB 56), but stumbling into his bathroom after a bad dream he is shocked to find that somebody has written on his mirror ―two words: DISAPPEAR HERE‖ (IB 104) in red. When Amanda does not arrive in Palm Springs, Clay asks Rain whether her friend‘s ―disappearance is connected to Rip‖ (IB 118), and a little later Rip informs him that ―Julian‘s disappeared‖ (IB 127). In Less Than Zero, Clay had been lying listlessly on the beach staring ―out at the expanse of sand that meets the water, where the land ends. Disappear here‖ (LTZ 73). In Imperial Bedrooms he talks to Trent on the Santa Monica beach and feels lost because ―the land has disappeared behind‖ (IB 135) them in the mist, and later the man who trails them is ―disappearing into the haze‖ (IB 142). When he brings Julian to Rip, the latter is grabbed by Rip‘s Mexican henchmen and ―disappears so quickly it‘s as if he was never here at all‖ (IB 154). Julian‘s mutilated body is found ―almost a week after he disappeared‖ (IB 161), and Clay is accused of having a hand in the death of his former friend and the police say that he was seen with Julian in ―the night of his disappearance‖ (IB 166). This chain of iterative references takes up and deepens the implications which the motif had in Less Than Zero, and this is yet another indication that Imperial Bedrooms is not simply a sequel to but also a kind of remake of the earlier book. That is further confirmed when the middleaged Clay retrospectively rejects the way he is portrayed in Less Than Zero as the resentful writer‘s distortion of his real character by saying: ―That‘s how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That‘s how I became the boy who wouldn‘t save a friend. That‘s how I became the boy who couldn‘t love the girls.‖ (IB 4) One need only replace ―boy‖ by ―man‖ to recognize that this allegedly faulty portrait of Clay as a youth in the earlier novel is a perfectly correct description of him as a middle-aged man in the later one. In Imperial Bedrooms, Ellis not only plays with the relation between the younger and the older Clay, but also with that between himself and the Clay of the later novel, and the similarities between the real author and his fictional avatar are striking.  Clay moves from New York where he had ―an apartment below Union Square‖ (IB 160) to L.A. - Ellis moved from New York where he lived in ―a small apartment off Union Square‖ (in Goulian 2012) to L.A.  Clay moves into his condo No. 1508 ―on the fifteenth floor of the Doheny Plaza‖ (IB 12) - Ellis moved into his apartment in the Doheny Plaza (Oehmke 2010).  Clay‘s apartment is haunted by the ghost of the previous owner who ―died unexpectedly in his sleep‖ (12) - Ellis answered an interviewer‘s question whether the young man who had owned the condo Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 19 before him died unexpectedly by saying ―Ja. Die Wohnung wurde gerade neu gestaltet, Böden, Küche, alles war nicht fertig. Er lebte ein paar Straßen weiter, eines Nachts starb er‖ (in Kober 2010: 87).  Clay drives a ―BMW‖ (IB 55 and ff.) - Ellis drives a ―BMW‖ (in Goulian 2012).  Clay comes to L.A. to oversee the castings for the movie The Listeners for which he has ―adapt[ed] the complicated novel it was based on‖ (IB 13) - Ellis moved to L.A. to work on the movie version of his story collection The Informers (1994) 1 for which he had written the screenplay.  Clay has left his previous habit of snorting cocaine in New York (IB 16, 61) and likes to drink the expensive tequila Patrón (IB 130) - Ellis told a German interviewer that after moving to L.A. ―Ich habe aufgehört, Drogen zu nehmen [und] zurzeit mag ich Tequila sehr gern.‖ (in Kober 2010: 87) The similarities are so obvious and the border between fiction and reality is so blurred that a German interviewer who talked to Ellis in his L.A. apartment could conclude: Als wäre man hier schon einmal gewesen, so kommt es einem vor in der Artdéco-Eingangshalle des Doheny Plaza, eines Appartement-Hauses an der Grenze zwischen West Hollywood und Beverly Hills. […] Dann fällt es einem ein. Doheny Plaza, von diesem Haus und sogar von der Eingangshalle hatte man doch gerade noch gelesen. Hier wohnt nämlich nicht nur Bret Easton Ellis, der umstrittene, legendäre, immer etwas merkwürdige Schriftsteller. Hier wohnt auch Clay. Clay ist der Held in Ellis‘s neuem Roman Imperial Bedrooms. Und Clay ist auch jene moralisch bankrotte Romanfigur aus Ellis‘s Roman Unter Null, mit dem der Schriftsteller vor 25 Jahren berühmt wurde. […] An diesem Nachmittag im Doheny Plaza präsentiert sich Ellis als ein Schriftsteller, der in der Kulisse seines Romans haust; ein Schriftsteller, der genauso gut seine eigene Romanfigur sein könnte. […] Ellis hat seinen Roman in die Wirklichkeit hinein verlängert. Wenn bisher die Frage an Literatur lautete, wie viel wirklich Erlebtes in der Fiktion steckt, hat Ellis den Datenstrom nun in die andere Richtung geöffnet: Wie viel Fiktion steckt in dieser Welt, die wie hier vor uns sehen? (Oehmke 2010) 1 The Informers (1994) is a collection of 13 interlinked stories about movie makers, rock stars and other rich inhabitants of the L.A. of the 1980s, whose lives are filled with alcohol, drugs, and casual sex. The movie (2008) was directed by Gregor Jordan with a script by Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki. The filming began in October 2007 in L.A. and then moved to Uruguay and Buenos Aires. It was extremely complicated because of quarrels about the extent of sex and violence, the director‘s drastic cut of Ellis‘ script, and disagreements about the inclusion of a vampire subplot. Ellis told Jeff Baker that it was ―a project that seemed to have everything going for it but what started as a slow-motion avalanche ... everything started to going a little bit wrong and then completely combusted. It was an incredibly stressful period.‖ (Baker 2010) Peter Freese 20 Ellis‘s self-referential play with both the intertextual relations of the two novels and the fragile borders between fact and fiction receives its final touch when Imperial Bedrooms is dedicated ―For R. T.,‖ which could stand for Rain Turner and would then puzzlingly imply that not only the fictional Clay but also the real Bret Easton Ellis has come to know and desire the novel‘s femme fatale. Brand Names, Signature Clothes, and Pop Music Not only the ‗real‘ writer and his fictional character show uncanny resemblances, but also all of the novel‘s places of action can be located in the real world. Clay‘s casting sessions take place in Culver City (IB 62), which is the home of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, and he works out with his trainer at the famous Southern California Fitness Club Equinox (IB 14, 68, 98). He attends after-parties or meets people in such fashionable places as The Roosevelt (IB 15), a historic hotel designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style on Hollywood Boulevard, goes to a cocktail party at the Chateau Marmont (IB 42), modeled after a French royal retreat on Sunset Boulevard, meets Blair in the Hotel Bel-Air (IB 71) that has housed numerous Hollywood celebrities, or attends a Golden Globes party at the Sunset Tower (IB 87), a luxury Art Deco hotel on Sunset Strip. He watches the premiere of a movie in the Chinese Theater (IB 15) on the historic Hollywood Walk of Fame, sees a classic French film at the Nuart (IB 41), a landmark theater on Santa Monica Boulevard, or goes to a fund-raising concert at Disney Hall (IB 160), a concert hall at South Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A. Clay meets Julian in one of the premier dining spots in all of L.A., the Polo Lounge (IB 20) in the Beverly Hills Hotel, has lunch with an actress in the famous French restaurant Comme Ça (IB 24) on Melrose Avenue, and takes Rain to dinner at Dan Tana (IB 75), a fashionable Italian restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard. He has a drink at the bar in Barney Greengrass (IB 67), an outlet of the famous New York restaurant in the Beverly Hills branch of the legendary department store, and attends an award party at Spago (IB 104), Wolfgang Puck‘s iconic restaurant in Beverly Hills. He walks through The Grove (IB 31), a shopping and entertainment complex in the Farmer‘s Market, shops with Rain ―at the Bristol Farms on Doheny‖ (IB 55), and nostalgically remembers that ―the market used to be Chasen‘s‖ (IB 55), the famous restaurant in which he dined with his parents in Less Than Zero and which closed in 1995. He meets Rip for an unobserved talk at the Observatory at the top of Griffith Park (IB 79) with its magnificent view of the city, he has a long talk with Trent on the Santa Monica pier (IB 132) with its original wooden carousel from the 1920s, and he attends Julian‘s memorial in the Hollywood Forever cemetery (IB 164) that borders on the Paramount Studios. Thus, the fictional world of the novel consists of ‗real‘ Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 21 places, and it is revealing that soon after the publication of Imperial Bedrooms the Los Angeles magazine published a guide to twenty-two selected locations in L.A. which appear in the novel, together with an article with Ellis‘s comments on them (Arnold 2010). Since most of the novel‘s actors are working in or related to the film industry, movies play an important part, and here again Ellis unfolds his uncanny interplay of fact and fiction in several stages. Clay‘s passing references to Brad Pitt (IB 82), ―the new James Bond movie‖ (IB 89), ―a Michael Bay movie‖ (IB 47), ―a Jim Carrie movie‖ (IB 54), ―CSI Miami‖ (IB 47) or the American television drama series ―Lost‖ (IB 58) make sense for the average reader. When Clay watches Contempt (IB 41), Jean-Luc Godard‘s 1963 masterpiece of world cinema, at the Nuart or refers to ―one of Cindy Sherman‘s untitled film stills‖ (IB 43), the famous series of conceptual portraits by an American photographer and film director, he shows that as a screenwriter he has a more intimate knowledge of the movie world. But when he refers to the critically acclaimed movie L.A. Confidential (IB 48), a 1997 American neo-noir crime film loosely based on James Ellroy‘s 1990 novel of the same name from his L.A. Quartet series, Ellis makes this allusion thematically relevant because that film explores the connection between corruption and celebrity in Hollywood. The same is true of Clay‘s reference to ―the new Friday the 13th‖ (IB 105), his viewing of ―a remake of The Hills Have Eyes‖ (IB 157; 160), and his work on the script for ―a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth‖ (IB 165). The first is part of a successful American horror franchise comprising twelve slasher movies, a TV show, novels, and comic books; the second is a 2006 horror film about a family that is attacked by a group of murderous mutants after their car breaks down in the desert; and the third is a 1976 British science fiction film about an extraterrestrial who crash lands on Earth seeking a way to ship water to his planet. All three movies deal with serial murderers or fearful aliens and thus help to deepen the novel‘s atmosphere of undefined horror and imminent threat. The blurring of fact and fiction becomes even more obvious when Trent tells Clay that ―Daniel Carter‘s interested in doing Adrenaline‖ (IB 142) and when one finds that this is not a film invented by a novelist but that a movie of that name was actually released in 2015 and might have been in preparation when Ellis wrote his novel. The same happens when Clay refers to a film titled Concealed (IB 26, 36) and later reveals that he wrote it (IB 159), and when one discovers that a film of that title actually came out in 2013. The situation becomes even more puzzling when Clay says with regard to the casting for his film The Listener, which is a fictional variant of the real film The Informants, that they are auditioning for ―the part of Kevin Spacey‘s son‖ (IB 36, 97, 98), have a particular actor ―under consideration for Jeff Bridges‘s son‖ (IB 36), and that ―Josh Hartnett […] was going to play one of the sons in The Listeners and then bailed‖ (IB 46). The ontological logic of a fictional tale would demand Peter Freese 22 that these names refer to invented characters, but Kevin Spacey Fowler, Jeffrey Leon ―Jeff‖ Bridges, and Joshua Daniel ―Josh‖ Hartnett are famous American actors. The daily life which unfolds in Imperial Bedrooms is basically similar to that of Less Than Zero, because in 2009 Hollywood is still a world that runs on exploitation and is characterized by consumerist overload, careless affluence, and marketable sexuality, up-to-date fashion, plastic surgery, and aggressive self-aggrandizement. It is a world which tries to ―keep everything young and soft, keep everything on the surface, even with the knowledge that the surface fades and can‘t be held together forever‖ (IB 51), a world where personality becomes commodity, authentic selves are replaced by impressive roles, and ―everyone lies‖ (IB 22) and cultivates an imposing surface because mere ―exposure can ensure fame‖ (IB 42). What has changed, however, is that due to Clay‘s work as a screenwriter the movie business has replaced the youthful subculture of the earlier book and that technology has advanced so that now there are digital billboards and Apple stores, iPhones and internet videos, IMDb pages and Earthlink pics, and everybody is constantly texting everybody else. Ellis referred ironically to the effect of the new technology when he said: […] someone recently noted that if Less Than Zero were written now it would be about twenty pages long because of cell phones and texting. There‘s a long stretch in the book where Clay is driving around looking for Julian, stopping off at friends‘ houses to use their phones. He even stops in at a McDonald‘s to use a pay phone. But people can find each other very easily now. A single text - ―Dude, where the fuck are you? I want my money‖ - would take care of three-fourths of the action in the book. (in Goulian 2012) Since the callous sons and daughters of Less Than Zero have become the jaded parents of Imperial Bedrooms, the middle-aged Clay ruefully observes ―boys barely old enough to drive swimming in the heated pool, girls in string bikinis and high heels lounging by the Jacuzzi, […], a mosaic of youth‖ (IB 17), and realizes that Hollywood has become ―a place you don‘t really belong anymore‖ (IB 17). Although he dyes his hair (IB 51) and takes Viagra (IB 56), he is aware that it will become ever more difficult to keep up with what he recognizes as ―the youthful surface‖ (IB 51) of life. But he and his contemporaries still spend their affluent lives in famous hotels and fashionable bars and still drive trendy cars, wear the latest fashion, guzzle expensive drinks, and listen to current pop songs. Thus, Clay (IB 55 and ff.), Rain (IB 40, 50) and sometimes Rip (IB 30) drive BMWs. Clay‘s psychiatrist (IB 107), a nameless producer (IB 16) and sometimes also Rip (IB 43) drive Porsches. Julian has an Audi (IB 34 and ff.), a film director drives a black Jaguar (IB 16), and Clay is followed by both a blue Jeep (IB 10 and ff.) and a black Mercedes (IB 103 and ff.). When Rip goes out on official business he does so in a chauffeur-driven Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 23 black limousine (IB 86), while his henchmen use the only U.S. car mentioned besides the Jeep, namely black Escalades (IB 153), luxury SUVs made by Cadillac. In his leisure time Clay wears a ―Nike hoodie‖ (IB 11), for a party he puts on a ―James Perse T-shirt‖ (IB 105), and for Julian‘s burial he dons a ―Brioni suit‖ (IB 165) which he might later exchange for the ―Prada suit‖ (IB 67) he considers buying. He listens to music on his ―Bose headphones‖ (IB 144), used to transport his cocaine in a ―Versace bag‖ (IB 61), and has a very refined taste when it comes to alcoholic beverages. His preferred types of vodka are the equally expensive French brand of Grey Goose (IB 13) and the Polish rye vodka Belvedere (IB 20), for gin it must be the Scotch brand of Hendrick‘s (IB 165), and for tequila it has to be Patrón (IB 130). And when he and his ‗friends‘ drink water, it has to be the expensive brand of ―Fiji‖ (IB 20, 111). Rain sports ―Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses‖ (IB 54), Blair carries ―a Michael Kors bag‖ (IB 72), Julian wears a ―Tom Ford suit‖ (IB 9) and ―Ray-Bans‖ (IB 109), and at one of his numerous parties Clay meets men wearing ―Band of Outsiders suits‖ (IB 16). Brand names and signature clothes are major signifiers in all of Ellis‘s novels so far, but even more important in his fictional world are pop songs (Temple). In Imperial Bedrooms one finds references to the music of the season such as ―U2 Christmas songs‖ (IB 16), ―New Age Christmas music‖ (IB 17), or Bob Geldof‘s ―Do They Know It‘s Christmas‖ (IB 55). There is a passing allusion to ―On the Sunny Side of the Street‖ (124), which at a first glance seems curiously out of date. But in Less Than Zero (LTZ 163) this evergreen from 1930 was the favorite song of Clay‘s grandmother and thus in the later novel it conjures up memories of a better time. Most important, however, is the music of the eighties that already reverberated through Less Than Zero. Thus, Clay states that after the early novel came out he could no longer ―listen to the Elvis Costello songs we knew by heart (―You Little Fool,‖ ―Man Out of Time,‖ ―Watch Your Step‖)‖ (IB 4), and he remembers that in the old days Blair had danced with him, significantly ―mouthing Culture Club‘s ‗Do You Really Want to Hurt Me? ‘‖ (IB 4; LTZ 30), a 1982 song by an English band with lead singer Boy George. He recalls that in Less Than Zero he was depicted as ―an inarticulate zombie confused by the irony of Randy Newman‘s ‗I Love L.A.‘‖ (IB 5), a 1983 song about the gap between the promises of the Hollywood dream of fame and the shortcomings of L.A.‘s reality. He dismisses the sentimental end of the Less Than Zero movie at which ―Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away‖ (IB 9), briefly refers to Duran Duran‘s 1982 hit ―Hungry Like the Wolf‖ as ―a song from the past‖ (IB 15; LTZ 127), and mentions in passing their third single ―Girls on Films‖ (IB 165) of 1981. At a party thrown by a British actor he listens to ―Werewolves of London‖ (IB 42), a rock song of the late seventies by Warren Zevon, who is again referred to when Rip has ―an old Warren Zevon song hovering in the air-conditioned darkness‖ (IB 123) of his lim- Peter Freese 24 ousine, and later ―The Boys of Summer,‖ released in 1984 by the Eagles vocalist and drummer Don Henley, keeps ―repeating itself on the stereo‖ (IB 127). When Clay meets Amanda at a party, he sees ―a girl dancing by herself to an old Altered Images song‖ (IB 99), a song by an early 1980s Scottish new wave/ post-punk band. When he listens to the radio in his own car, he hears a ―Eurithmics song‖ (IB 153) from the eighties by a British music duo. When he has a nightmare about the former owner of his condo, he hears ―China Girl‖ (IB 130), a song written in 1977 by David Bowie and Iggy Pop during their years in Berlin. And when he meets Trent on the Santa Monica pier, ―the calliope [is] playing a Doors song‖ (IB 133), a song by the most controversial American rock band of the 1960s. Clay‘s world, however, is not only filled with pop music from the eighties, but also with contemporary hits. At a party ―the Beck song [is] booming throughout the lounge‖ (IB 44), that is, a song by the American singer Beck Hansen who rose to fame in the early 1990. When Rain visits Clay in his apartment, ―Counting Crows‘ ‗A Long December‘ plays softly in the background‖ (IB 51), and this 1996 song by an American alternative rock band, which according to its frontman Adam Duritz is about the hope that things might change for the better, might well signal Clay‘s expectations of a fulfilled future with his new girl. Rain‘s ―favorite band is the Fray‖ (IB 48), and when Clay opens her MySpace page, he hears ―How to Save a Life‖ (IB 48), the Fray‘s most successful song released in 2005 which deals with an adult‘s failed attempt to help a troubled teen. This song might well be applied to Clay and Rain, but later its thematic relevance is cynically subverted when Clay rapes the drugged Rain on the floor of his apartment and ―the Fray [is] blaring from the stereo‖ (IB 131). Another recent song, which Clay plays on his car radio from a CD that his former lover ―Meghan Reynolds burned for [him] last summer‖ (IB 101) is also much more than mere background music, because the English singer and songwriter Natasha Khan‘s aka Bat for Lashes‘ 2006 hit ―What‘s a Girl to Do‖ fittingly deals with a love that has ended. The same is true when Clay waits in his car for his psychiatrist, ―listening to a song with lyric So leave everything you know and carry only what you fear …over and over again‖ (IB 107). These lines come from Bruce Springsteen‘s song ―Magic‖ that was released in September 2007 and ranked number two on Rolling Stones‟ list of that year‘s Top 50 Albums. It is certainly no accident that in his worried state Clay changes feel into fear in what correctly reads ―So leave everything you know / Carry only what you feel.‖ This is not the only time that Ellis makes Clay misquote a song text. Coming back from a boring casting session, he muses: ―Songs constantly floating in the car keep commenting on everything neutral encased within the windshield‘s frame (… one time you were blowing young ruffians … sung over the digital billboard on Sunset advertising the new Pixar movie) and the fear builds into a muted fury‖ (IB 32). The musical Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 25 fragment Clay quotes comes from ―Racing Like a Pro,‖ a 2008 song by The National, an American indie rock band from Cincinnati, and Clay revealingly sexualizes a text that correctly reads ―One time you were a glowing young ruffian.‖ That Ellis had Clay distort this text in order to convey some additional meaning was confirmed when, asked by a German interviewer whether listening habits change with age, he answered: Die von Clay auf jeden Fall. Er ist 25 Jahre älter geworden. Musik spielt dann eine geringere Rolle. Das passiert, wenn man im Beruf erfolgreich ist. Fokussiert zu sein, zu wissen, was man will - schon sinkt die Bedeutung der Musik. Clay will einfach nur mit den Mädchen ficken. Wozu da noch Musik? So, wie ich mit den Erzählern meiner Romane gealtert bin, spielt auch Popmusik später eine geringere Rolle. Bat For Lashes kommt kurz in Imperial Bedrooms vor, weil ein Mädchen, das Clay fickte, ihm eine CD brennt. Bruce Springsteen kommt vor. Später zitiert Clay einen Songtitel von The National falsch, er sexualisiert ihn: Ursprünglich heißt es: ―One time you were a glowing young ruffian.‖ Clay macht daraus: ―One time you were blowing young ruffians.‖ (in Niasseri 2010) A last example which is more than just local color occurs when Clay meets Trent on the Santa Monica pier and the latter tries to convince him to give up Rain. During their talk Clay hears that ―someone faintly sings you‟re still the one from a radio inside a surf shop‖ (IB 142). ―You‘re Still the One‖ was recorded in 1998 by the Canadian country music singer Shania Twain and became her first top ten hit on the Billboard Hot 100. Its defiant statement ―They said, ‗I bet they‘ll never make it.‘ / But just look at us holding on / We‘re still together, still going strong‖ fittingly expresses what Clay would like to happen with him and Rain. The central importance of pop music in Ellis‘s fictional world is of course also signaled by the novel‘s title which once again is taken from an Elvis Costello song. The title of Less Than Zero was an unacknowledged reference to a 1977 song by the British punk and New Wave singer Declan MacManus, who later renamed himself Elvis Costello. 2 His song refers to ―Mr Oswald with his swastika tattoo‖ and connects President Kennedy‘s assassination with general social decay by stating that ―Mr Oswald said he had an understanding with the law / He said he heard about a couple living in the USA / He said they traded in their baby for a Chevrolet.‖ The refrain of the song reads: Turn out the TV, No one of them will suspect it. Then your mother won‘t detect it, So your father won‘t know. 2 Sabine Hedinger, the translator of the German version, obviously did not recognize the source of the novel‘s title and mistakenly translated it as Unter Null, thus distorting the intended meaning which should be ―Weniger als gar nichts‖ into a ‗meteorological‘ statement. Peter Freese 26 They think that I got no respect, But every film means less than zero. Since Costello‘s song evokes the atmosphere of a chaotic world riveted by generational conflict and filled with the ubiquitous noise of the mass media, it conjures up the same atmosphere as Ellis‘s novel and places the latter within the wider context of a youthful punk and rock revolt. With Imperial Bedrooms, however, the connection is much more tenuous. Costello‘s song about ―The imperial bedroom, the regal boudoir / This casual acquaintance led to an intimate bonsoir‖ has hardly any thematic relevance for the novel, and Ellis confirmed that by stating: ―Ich liebte Elvis Costello vor allem wegen des Klanges. Ab und zu gab es dann mal eine Songzeile, die mich zum Nachdenken brachte. Aber viele seiner Texte sind so clever, dass es der Musik nicht gut tut. Sie wird dann kalt. So wie Imperial Bedrooms, das Album, nach dem ich mein Buch benannte.‖ (in Niasseri 2010) But the title might have yet another implication which Ellis suggested when he explained: Es gab Momente, in denen ich intensiv über den Buchtitel Imperial Bedrooms nachdachte, darüber, ob er wirklich passt. Schließlich geht es in dem Roman um sexuelle Ausbeutung. Bedrooms alleine hätte noch keinen großen Anspruch. Aber Imperial Bedrooms, das klingt wirklich gut. Nun kann man nach der buchstäblichen Bedeutung des Titels fragen. Und, ja, mein Buch handelt von Imperialismus: Wir holen uns, was wir wollen! Wir besorgen es uns, wir versauen es, und dann hauen wir ab! Amerikanischer Imperialismus! Unabhängig davon bin ich kein sehr politischer Mensch. Der Titel passt, global gesehen. Aber im Grunde geht es mir um die imperialistische Beziehung auf persönlicher Ebene. (in Niasseri 2010) In several interviews, Ellis alluded to the concept of the American ‗Empire‘ and what he considers its demise, 3 and this is why one reviewer has 3 In an interview with Jeff Gordinier, Ellis answered the question ―Do you miss the eighties? ‖ by saying: ―Oh, well, yeah! The eighties were a lot better. The eighties seem fairly sunny compared to where we are now, don‘t they? I mean, we were in the empire then. The empire‘s over. It‘s gone.‖ - In an interview with Nathalie Olah he explained his use of the empire concept by stating: ―Empire is the US from roughly WWII to a little after 9/ 11. It was at the height of its power, its prestige, and its economic worth. Then it lost a lot of those things. In the face of technology and social media, the mask of pride has been slowly eradicated. That empirical attitude of believing you‘re better than everyone - that you‘re above everything - and trying to give the impression that you have no problems. Post-empire is just about being yourself. It‘s showing the reality rather than obscuring things in reams and reams of meaning.‖ - Asked by Jeff Baker whether the scandal surrounding American Psycho were still possible today, Ellis answered: ―Never. It will never happen again. It‘s over. It‘s part of the empire. That only could have happened in the empire. It never could have happened in the post-empire world. That a novel could have caused that kind of outrage and that kind of collective cultural concern. It‘s just not there anymore. It doesn‘t exist. That world is as far away from us now as the world of xerox machines and typewriters.‖ Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 27 speculated that ―underneath the surface of this novel, something political may be going on. The title Imperial Bedrooms […] could also carry a subtext concerning US neo-imperialism. And the silhouette of a devil on the book cover might - just - be linking the image of America as the Great Satan to the characters‘ diabolical sexual exploits.‖ (Kelly 2010) In the novel, however, only a single sentence relates to the world outside of L.A. and might extend the notion of ‗imperial‘ behavior beyond individual relations, namely Clay‘s statement that ―Rip tells me he‘s lying in bed watching CNN on his laptop, images of a mosque in flames, ravens flying against the scarlet sky‖ (IB 65). There is, however, also the irritating fact that the students who found Julian Wells‘ disfigured body thought it was an American ―flag‖ (IB 9) because his white suit was streaked with red blood and his bled-out head was blue. The mutilated body of Kelly Montrose is found in Júarez with a note in Spanish (IB 58), Rip frequently uses Hispanic terms, and his henchmen who drag away Julian are Mexicans. In the week in which Julian‘s body is found ―three young Mexican men connected to a drug cartel were found shot in the desert, not far from where Amanda Flew was last seen‖ (IB 161), and in CNN‘s memorial to Amanda the music segues from the soundtrack of a film in which she took part ―into the dangers of the drug wars across the border‖ (IB 165). So there are several details that might justify Georgina Colby to maintain that ―sexual relations function in Imperial Bedrooms as objective correlatives of American neoimperial relations‖ (2010: 172). But when she reads the novel as involving ―a confluence of two central concerns: the duplicitous politics surrounding the U.S. intervention in Iraq and the violence and exploitation of Hispanic immigrants in a climate of border enforcement‖ (2010: 166), she burdens it with implications it cannot sustain. And when she asserts that Rip‘s cosmetically redone face ―implies interrelations between the American political elite, the border violence, and tortures and the violence inflicted on foreign communities in places such as Mexico and Iraq as a result of the reconstruction practices of such as Bechtel and Halliburton‖ (2010: 181) or reads Julian‘s comment on the entanglement of Rip, Kelly, Clay and himself with Rain - ―Maybe this wasn‘t thought out enough. Maybe there were too many … I don‘t know … variables … that I didn‘t know about‖ (IB 113) - as ―tacitly commenting on America‘s invasion of Iraq‖ (167), Ellis‘s text does not warrant such connections, her interpretation turns into mere speculation, and Graham J. Matthews rightly complains that her analysis ―focuses on depths the novel does not necessarily possess‖ (2015: 72). Narcissism and the Omnipresence of “the Fear” Because readers experience the world of Imperial Bedrooms only through Clay‘s eyes, the picture they receive is not only limited by his obvious Peter Freese 28 unreliability as narrator, his uncommon choice of the present tense as a narrative medium, which was such a controversial innovation in Less Than Zero, but also by the degree to which his alcoholism, his anxieties, and his bad physical health impair his perception. Whether Clay tries to drown his fear in alcohol or whether his drinking increases his fear, the fact is that he is almost constantly drunk. He already arrives ―drunk‖ (IB 10) in L.A., with his ―gin-soaked breath‖ (IB 10) and the sleeves of his Nike hoodie ―damp from a drink [he] spilled during the flight‖ (IB 11). The first thing he does upon entering his condo is to pour himself ―a tumbler of Grey Goose‖ (IB 13), and then he takes ―an Ambien to get to sleep since there‘s not enough vodka‖ (IB 16). Alone at home, he ―drink[s] a glass of vodka, and then […] another‖ (IB 31) or he is ―drinking from the second bottle of gin‖ (IB 144). When Rain is with him, they are ―buzzed on champagne‖ (IB 53), break ―the seal of a bottle of Patrón‖ (IB 130), or he soothes Rain with ―the tequila and the dope and the Xanax‖ (IB 117), mixing hard liquor and drugs with benzodiazepine used for the treatment of panic and anxiety disorder. At the numerous parties he attends he gets ―drunk enough‖ (IB 17) to stand the people he meets, ―drink[s] vodka from a plastic cup― (IB 98), or ―start[s] with champagne‖ (IB 43) in order to last longer. When he meets with Julian, he orders ―a Belvedere on the rocks‖ (IB 20), when he comes home and finds Rip sitting on his couch with ―an open bottle of tequila,‖ he is ―too drunk to panic‖ (IB 123), when he views the disk with the gory video of Julian‘s ritual murder he must ―drink enough gin to calm down‖ (IB 163), and when he considers whether to go to Julian‘s memorial he contemplates ―the bottle of Hendrick‘s‖ (IB 165) on his desk. Although he observes on a bleak and foggy day that ―it‘s a world where getting stoned is the only option‖ (IB 62) and describes himself during Rain‘s absence as ―stoned‖ (IB 67), he has left his previous habit of regularly snorting cocaine in New York, rejects to take part in ―snorting lines‖ (IB 16) at a party, and refers to his ―Versace bag that had once been filled with packets of cocaine‖ (IB 61) as a thing of the past. Throughout the novel, then, Clay is constantly either lost in ―alcoholic dreaminess‖ (IB 97) or ―hungover‖ (IB 80), and it is this condition that helps explain not only his repugnant behavior but also his blurred and often incoherent narration. Clay‘s perception, however, is not only impaired by his incessant drinking but also by his shaky health, his narcissistic view of the world as a movie he himself can script, and the nagging fear bred by his narcissistic vulnerability. Frequently his hands are shaking uncontrollably (IB 83, 101, 103, 104, 112, 141, 151) and he is close to collapsing (IB 57), sometimes he is racked by sudden weeping fits (IB 79, 101, 145), and having delivered Julian into Rip‘s hands, he discovers that he has wetted himself and his car ―seat is soaked with urine‖ (IB 154). Moreover, he is constantly haunted by an undefined fear that makes him tremble on the brink of panic. Ellis has repeatedly maintained that L.A. is a place of Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 29 alienation and loneliness, and in 2010 he explained to Jesse Katz how the city had affected him when he came back to it after many years in New York: ―The force of the alienation and isolation really hit me full on in a way that it never had. Regardless of if you‘re in a relationship or have a lot of friends or whatever - in L.A., it doesn‘t matter. You‘re still alone a lot of the time. It‘s just a totally different idea of living.‖ This feeling was already pervasive in Less Than Zero, in which comfort and catastrophe, affluence and apocalypse constantly intermingled and Clay collected newspaper cuttings about catastrophes (Freese 1990: 76f.), but in Imperial Bedrooms it becomes even more acute. Whereas Clay‘s film partners calmly state that L.A. is a city with a high ―desperation factor‖ and that its inhabitants are filled with ―so much bitterness‖ (IB 45), for the overwrought Clay this become much more personal because for him ―everything seems imminent with disaster‖ (IB 69), ―even the most innocent figures in the distance seem filled with ominous intent‖ (IB 81), and an unknown actress ―instantly provide[s] a steady hum of menace that left [him] dazed‖ (IB 24f.). Consequently, Clay is continuously haunted by a formless fear. When he sees the Jeep that has trailed him parked in front of his house, ―the fear returns‖ (IB 13). When he looks at the milling people at an after-party, once more ―the fear returns and soon it‘s everywhere and it keeps streaming forward‖ (IB 16), and when the cameras flash, ―the pale fear returns‖ because ―whoever was in that blue Jeep last night is probably in the crowd‖ (IB 16). When Clay talks to Rip, ―the fear is swarming‖ (IB 30), and when he drives home from the casting, ―the fear builds into a muted fury and then has no choice but to melt away into a simple and addictive sadness‖ (IB 32). During his few relaxed days with Rain for a brief period her presence ―helps cause the fear to fade away‖ (IB 56), but her leaving for San Diego ―causes [his] fear to return‖ and makes it more than just ―a faint distraction‖ (IB 64). When he meets Rip on the terrace of the Griffith Park observatory ―the fear, the big black stain of it, is rushing forward‖ (IB 83) and fills the whole world. When he learns that it was the murdered Kelly Montrose who recommended Rain for the casting, he tries in vain to ―submerge the pain‖ (IB 96f.) rushing through his body, and when he later asks Trent about what happened to Kelly, ―the fear begins swirling around [them]‖ (IB 135) again. Even when he just goes shopping, ―the fear [is] returning‖ and mixes with ―the alcoholic dreaminess of everything, the ghosts swarming everywhere whispering You need to be careful who you let into your life‖ (IB 97). And when he brutally rapes Rain, ―the fear [is] vibrating all around her‖ (IB 131). In all these instances, the curious use of the definite article for an amorphous feeling elevates ―the fear‖ into a kind of independent external agent that threatens to attack him. Peter Freese 30 An Accomplished Storyteller with Moral Deficiencies? The mostly hostile reviews of Imperial Bedrooms show that Ellis‘s evocation of a world of immoral exploitation, instant gratification, commodified sexuality and perverted violence is widely dismissed as shallow, trivial, and amoral and that his affectless and unreliable narrator is rejected as a pathologically disturbed narcissist. After the short-lived and mediadriven label of the ‗brat pack‘ went out of fashion, Ellis‘s fiction was frequently pigeonholed - and thus domesticated - as an example of either ‗blank fiction‘ with its ―relentless emphasis on brand names, popular culture and commodities, coupled with its detailed descriptions of consumerism, the reifications of violence, decadence and extreme sexuality‖ (Annesley 1998: 136) or as ‗transgressional‘ literature willfully breaking all social taboos in a disinterested and minimalistic style and in which ―the author is dead and ‗character‘ comes to us in wraiths, projections, pastiche, mutating entities, archetypes, comic cut-outs and intertextual refugees from history, film, fiction and myth‖ (Young 1992: 20). 4 Obviously, any evaluation of the world of Imperial Bedrooms depends on the reader‘s moral and ethical position, but with regard to its idiosyncratic presentation one cannot deny that Ellis masters the craft of story-telling and that his accomplished tale employs highly unusual narrative strategies, presents an ingenious combination of standardized elements of generic fiction with daring meta-fictional experiments, achieves a rare juxtaposition of a lingering awareness of the text‘s constructedness with a selfreferential lack of critical distance, and creates a unique mixture of mundane items of popular culture with crucial questions about human behavior. One might doubt whether Ellis is really ―a self-confessed moralist‖ who ―far from offering a celebration of evil and of nihilism, […] is presenting an examination of it‖ (Akbar 2011), but one will have to concede that in his unmistakable way he presents disturbing narratives that deserve critical attention. Works Cited Akbar, Arifa (2011).―Imperial Bedrooms, By Bret Easton Ellis.‖ The Independent (Lon don), October 23, 2011. [online] www.independent.co.uk/ arts- 4 In his interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung the following exchange occurred: ―SZ: Definiert sich so die so genannte ―Transgressional Fiction,‖ als Genre, das Sie angeblich lanciert haben? - Ellis: Jaja, die Nummer kenne ich. Glauben Sie kein Wort. Das ist ganz alt. Damit habe ich nichts zu tun. - SZ: In einschlägigen Werken findet man Sie aber als wichtigsten Autor dieser ―grenzüberschreitenden Literatur.‖ - Ellis: Das beruht alles auf einem einzigen Essay von Elizabeth Young. Sie hat damals geschrieben, dass es eine neue Autorengeneration gibt, die mehr Grenzen überschreitet und Tabus verletzt als jede andere Generation zuvor. Vor allem was Sex und Gewalt betrifft.‖ entertainment/ - Brent Easton Ellis’ Imperial Bedrooms 31 books/ reviews/ imperial-bedrooms-by-bret-easton-ellis-2021683. html. 5 Amerika, Mark & Alexander Laurence (1994). ―Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.‖ The Write Stuff. [online] www.altx.com/ interviews/ bret.easton.ellis.html. Annesley, James (1998). Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press. Anonymous (n.d.). ―The Bret Easton Ellis Interview.‖ Shortlist. [online] http: / / www.shortlist.com/ entertainment/ the-bret-easton-ellis-interview. Arnold, Shayna Rose (2010). ―My LA to Z: Clay Easton.‖ Los Angeles magazine, June 1, 2010. Atkinson, Jay (2010). ―Less than zero: Bret Easton Ellis‘s sequel misses.‖ The Boston Globe July 4, 2010. [online] http: / / www.boston.com/ ae/ books/ articles/ 2010/ 07/ 04/ less_than_zero_bret_easton_elliss_sequel_misses/ . Baelo-Allué, Sonia (2011). Bret Easton Ellis‟s Controversial Fiction: Writing Between High and Low Culture. London: Continuum. Baker, Jeff (2010). ―Q&A: Bret Easton Ellis talks about writing novels, making movies.‖ The Oregonian, July 7, 2010. [online] http: / / www.oregonlive.com/ books/ index.ssf/ 2010/ 07/ qa_bret_easton_ellis_talks_abo.html. Bellamy, Joe David (1974). The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: U of Illinois P. Colby, Georgina (2011). Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Costello, Elvis (n.d.). ―Less Than Zero‖ [lyrics, online]. www.metrolyrics.com / less-than-zero-lyrics-elvis-costello.html. ----- (n.d.). ―Imperial Bedrooms‖ [lyrics, online]. www.azlyrics.com/ lyrics/ elvis costello/ imperialbedroom.html. Ellis, Bret Easton (1986). Less Than Zero. New York: Penguin. ----- (1991). American Psycho. London: Pan Books. ----- (1994). The Informers. London: Picador. ----- (1998). This Is Not an Exit: The Fictional World of Bret Easton Ellis. Directed by Gerald Fox. Independent Television UK, August 23, 1998; USA April 7, 2000. ----- (2005). Lunar Park. London: Picador. ----- (2011). Imperial Bedrooms. New York: Vintage Books. Fodor, Péter & Péter L. Varga (2014). ―The Disjunction of Event, Recording, and Experience: The Dilemmas of Reading Ellis‘ Oeuvre.‖ In Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó & Csongor Lórincz (Eds.). Signaturen des Geschehens: Ereignisse zwischen Öffentlichkeit und Latenz. Bielefeld: transcript. 197-213. Freese, Peter (1990). ―Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero: Entropy in the ‗MTV Novel‘? ‖ In Reingard M. Nischik & Barbara Korte (Eds.). Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction Presented to Helmut Bonheim. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. 68-87. Rpt. in Peter Freese (2002). Teaching „America‟: Selected Essays. München: Langenscheidt-Longman. 368-390. ----- (1991). ―The MTV Novel,‖ Praxis des Neusprachlichen Unterrichts, 38: 1. 89-91. Gordinier, Jeff (n.d.). ―Bret Easton Ellis: The Eternal Bad Boy.‖ Details. [online] http: / / www.details.com/ story/ author-bret-easton-ellis-less-than-zero-sequelimperial-bedrooms. Goulian, Jon-Jon (2012). ―The Art of Fiction No. 216.‖ Paris Review, 200 (Spring 2012). [online] http: / / www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/ 6127/ the-art-offiction-no-216-bret-easton-ellis. 5 All Internet sources were accessed in January 2017. Peter Freese 32 Halkert, Bernadette (2011). Paradigmen literarischer Wertung und Kanonisierung in der amerikanischen Gesellschaft des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts untersucht am Beispiel von Bret Easton Ellis. Salzhemmendorf: blumenkamp Verlag. „Ich habe dieses Monster mitkreiert: Ein Gespräch mit Bret Easton Ellis über Tränen, Songs, Philip Roth und seinen eigenen Roman Lunar Park.― Süddeutsche Zeitung, 17. 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Kellogg, Carolyn (2010). ―Bret Easton Ellis: Interview Outtakes.‖ Los Angeles Times, June 11, 2010. [online] http: / / latimesblogs. latimes.com/ jacketcopy/ 2010/ 06/ bret-easton-ellis-interview-outtakes.html. Kelly, Alison (2010). ―Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis.‖ The Observer, June 27, 2010. [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2010/ jun/ 27/ imperial-bedrooms-bret-easton-ellis-book-review. Klein, Joshua (1999). ―Bret Easton Ellis.‖ A.V. Club, March 17, 1999. [online] http: / / www.avclub.com/ article/ bret-easton-ellis-13586. Kober, Henning (2010). ―Bret Easton Ellis: ‗Ich bin American Psycho.‘‖ Die Zeit, 29. Juli 2010. [online] http: / / www.zeit.de/ 2010/ 31/ L-B-Bret-Easton-Ellis- Interview/ komplettansicht. Lawson, Mark (2010). ―Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis.‖ The Observer, June 26, 2010. [online] http: / / www.theguardian.com/ books/ 2010/ jun/ 26/ imperial-bedrooms-bret-easton-ellis. Lennon, J. Robert (2010). ―Via ‗Bret‘ via Bret.‖ London Review of Books, vol. 32, No. 12, June 24, 2010. [online] http: / / www.lrb.co.uk/ v32/ n12/ j-robertlennon/ via-bret-via-bret. Mandel, Naomi (2011). ―Introduction: The Value and Values of Bret Easton Ellis.‖ In: Bret Easton Ellis: “American Psycho,” “Glamorama,” “Lunar Park”. London: Continuum. 1-14. Matthews, Graham J. (2015). ―Cynicism and the Cultural Imaginary: Bret Easton Ellis‘s Imperial Bedrooms.‖ College Literature, 42, 1. 62-88. Maurstad, Tom (2010). ―Imperial Bedrooms' by Bret Easton Ellis.‖ The Dallas Morning News, June 13, 2010. [online] http: / / www.dallasnews.com/ entertainment/ headlines/ 20100613-Book-review-Imperial-Bedrooms- 2924.ece. McCarthy, Andrew (n.d.). ―Andrew McCarthy on Imperial Bedrooms.‖ [online] http: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=D5BzbjaA15U. Niasseri, Sassan (2010). ―Genesis zu loben - das war das Schlimmste.‖ musik express, 1. December 2010. 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Peter Freese Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanisitik Universität Paderborn