page last updated 3.29.05
Less Than Zero (1985)
The Rules of Attraction (1987)
American Psycho (1991)
The Informers (1994)
Glamorama (1999)
By Bret Easton Ellis
From Gear Jan/Feb 1999
Thanks to Trevor Laclair for the transcription.
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of American Psycho, currently being made into a movie, and two other novels, Less than Zero and Glamorama, which has just been published by Knopf. A writer known for his dissection of popular culture trends, Ellis has chosen to examine The Teletubbies, those strangely psychedelic cuddly being which have been imported from Britain to our TV screens. They are, he warns, pure evil.
There is a children's TV program that takes place under gray English skies where a sun with the face of a baby so adorable he must be computer-generated rises as a tinny march plays on the soundtrack. And then the Teletubbies appear--four blobs, performers in costumes, each a different color of pale frosting with defining antennae flopping on top of their heads--cavorting and frolicking in an astroturfed wasteland, a barren miniature golf course. They take karate stances for no apparent reason. They carry purses. They have names like Dipsy and Tinky-Winky. They have smooth, ageless, simian faces. They speak in sentence fragments and clipped phrases, sounding vaguely like giddy Japanese waitresses who work at the sushi bar in Hell. Sometimes they interact with a narrator who asks urgent questions along the lines of, "What's in the bag, Tinky-Winky?"
Like toddlers, the Teletubbies are amazed by balls, pieces of felt and plastic food. Holding balls, pieces of felt and plastic food. Holding hand while dancing around a plant is an especially popular pastime. Toys are put in bags and then pulled out of bags with great fanfare and encouragement. Minutes go by as the Teletubbies fall over while the sun looks down on them and squeals with delight. Sober, straining to pay attention you have no idea what's going on. Imagining the performers in those suits making "tubby custard," tasting "tubby toast" and trying on hats can move you to make yourself a very large drink.
Teletubbies share this space with giant, motley rabbits that are real and lumber toward plastic flower beds (one insider tells me the rabbits are as large as "small lambs" and are "bred especially" for this show). Farting noises commence, periscopes pop out of astroturf, a pinwheel dispenses sparkly rays causing the Teletubbies to huddle and spaz out, and that's when the gray squares on their bellies start glowing.
These Oompa Loompas on acid are actually living televisions--all proudly baring a screen embedded in their stomachs, which flash to life, showing short films of real children acting disconcertingly like Teletubbies--attempting gymnastics, zipping up bags, closing and opening drawers, deciding what to wear, singing mindlessly, hiding from each other (actually what any number of my friends in Manhattan do on a daily basis). This documentary footage reminds you of the thin line between the speech patterns of children and total drunks.
Though it lacks the forced, noxious gaiety
of Barny, Teletubbies seems like a wicked satirist's idea of a horrible children's program watched in a
future concocted by Huxley or Orwell or Gibson.
They are reminiscent of the mutants in David Cronenberg's The
Brood, and you can only stare and think:
well they must have been designed to upset us. It's a dare. Marilyn
Manson's calculated shock tactics seem phony compared
to these psychedelic teddy bears (a warning:
do not play The Dope Show over Teletubbies with the volume off).
I would actually rather have my kids watch
Taxi Cab Confessions or Deliverance.
The soothing tones, the eerie quiet, the New Agey vibe, the immaculate surfaces, everything so anal and controlled and antiseptic, a world where even the spontaneous seems rehearsed, the sheer humorlessness of it all--is what makes Teletubbies so creepy and emlematic of the new mothers and fathers of my generation.
Part of my resentment stems from the fact that I'm at an age where the majority of these friends are having children and settling down and this intrudes upon my bachelor lifestyle: dinner reservations are now made at seven, wilder invitations are bypassed, casual indignation about drugs and movie violence (these from former addicts, dealers, nymphos). But part of it stems from the hypocrisy of adults--the creators of Teletubbies and the scared, thoughtful parents plopping their kids in front of the tube--who over-identify with children and want the world baby-proofed. Adults who want the world to conform to their own notion of safety.
There was a mad, anarchic quality to Sesame
Street--wit and sass were in abundance--in the late
60's and early 70's. The puppets were boisterous and often confused
and fed up with the
adults (authority figures) surrounding them. There
were skits, rock songs, a general air of messiness
that is conspicuously absent from Teletubbies and which makes
it such odious time when cultural artifacts
are stripped down to such an essential dumbness that people can
locate a purity and familiarity they find
soothing. Comfort abounds. Get Zen! Zone out! Sshhh.
One gets the feeling that if the Cookie Monster
or Oscar the Grouch entered Teletubby land, their
uncontrollable natures would compel the Teletubbies to club the
living shit out of them
and have the giant pinwheel make their muppet
corpses disappear.
LINKS
All's not gold that glitters: Bret Easton Ellis and celebrity culture
INTERVIEW BY CHRISTOPHER LAWRENCE
"Ohhhhh, 'the Big Book.' I wish I'd never said it and that it had never been published." Bret Easton Ellis is wincing as we sit at the writing desk of his East Village apartment. While he'll cheerfully revisit the critical controversies surrounding American Psycho and Less Than Zero, a flippant remark made to Vanity Fair four years ago has him fretting a bit. "The Big Book" concept was picked up and used in virtually every piece that's appeared since. In a string-and-can game of telephone journalism, the ironic spirit disappeared, and Ellis was understood to mean that he fancied the forthcoming work his magnum opus -- one by a writer still in his mid-thirties. "I never wanted to create the expectation of 'the big book' because I thought it was going to take three or four years to write and would come out after American Psycho, and it didn't. It became the big book only because of how long it took to write and all the garbage that went on in the intervening years."
The book in question is this month's Glamorama, and if Ellis doesn't consider it the career-defining statement (he's too smart for that), it remains in almost every other way a very big book. Seven years in the works, the novel is 482 pages of conceptually ambitious social satire; a scathing look at the society of the spectacle. As we talk, it is apparent that no matter the reception awaiting it, the book's greatest impact is being felt in this large apartment and in its author's life. The birthing process has been so long and has spanned such difficult seasons that the sense of relief on publication is now palpable. For Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama is indeed a big book -- the one that is now off his shoulders.
"I changed a lot because I wrote this book and because I finished this book," Ellis says exhaling smoke from a Marlboro Light. "A lot of things changed for me -- certain fears, certain insecurities were alleviated, not necessarily by the book's subject matter, but just because I wrote the book I never thought I would finish. There was a sense of accomplishment thatfixed me in some way." Indeed, there is an openness and a sense of peace about the man that is surprising. The dark-suited, scowling figure from the dust jackets and the magazine profiles, the tormented bad boy of New York letters, is nowhere in evidence as we chat in his spartan apartment. I'd been warned by a friend that Ellis likes to make a show of his awkwardness and inaccessibility, and revel in it.
As we sit, however, he is nothing if not eager to please. Bret Easton Ellis looks healthy and handsome in khakis and a polo shirt. He serves me cranberry juice and he laughs readily -- never more so than at himself and the dramas that have been such a part of his public persona.
It's not surprising that Glamorama's wicked skewering of celebrity culture has proved cathartic for its author. When Less Than Zero hit the bestseller lists in 1985, Ellis was still a junior at Bennington. The book surfed the zeitgeist in a way that earned its author money, popular acknowledgment, and no small amount of critical suspicion. The attention lavished on his chemical, sexual, social, not to mention literary, lives was exceptional for such a young writer.
"Spy magazine made a living out of making fun of me and Jay McInerney during [the '80s]," he says chuckling.
These days, Madonna has a daughter and practices yoga; Bret Easton Ellis, fellow 1980s survivor, writes books and avoids the Hamptons.
1991's American Psycho was a daring book, one that its admirers insisted was exceptionally black and brave satire. But what Ellis himself describes as the "flat, pornographic tone" of the narrator's account of the torture and killing of young women earned him death threats and made him a literary pariah.
When we venture to the difficult period after
Psycho's publication, Ellis smiles before doing a laundry list
of personal
problems that coincided with "the initial
horror about the book." Though he can be disarmingly earnest,
he plays with the hoary old myths of the tormented, self-destructive
writer: the death of a father with whom he'd failed to make peace,
"relationships falling apart, maybe . . . I can't believe
that I'm so blase about this -- problems with drugs and alcohol.
Of course, there's that little part of me that loves to say that
. . . but at the time it was not funny."
Unfunny enough, in fact, that the battle with Glamorama's initial stages threatened to drive him out of the business: "It really got to the point where I thought it took too much work to write a book, and I thought it wasn't worth it. I thought I'd find another way of making a living."
The good news is that seven years later, Ellis remains very much a writer, and Glamorama features the same mix of seriousness and mockery as its author. The book is less a character study than his previous work. As a critique of the numbing superficiality of an age in which "beauty is an accomplishment," it comes smartly packaged as an espionage thriller.
Characters have been drawn from that patented Ellis stock of the materially overindulged and spiritually malnourished. (Narrator Victor Ward returns from The Rules of Attraction as do other minor figures from the past.) In turn, they thrust into a world in which virtually anything is possible and the indolence of the rich and beautiful is interrupted by shocking acts of violence. Ellis has written for those of us who have long harbored suspicions that Christy and Kate and Cindy are up to no good; that behind the photo shoots and runways, there lurks real evil. The author manages to play his game for a mixture of outrage and farce that connects the jet set to terrorist acts and which feels strangely authentic. As Ellis puts it, "the celebrity culture is so surreal, so that's a big part of the book." In the end, Glamorama works because it is only marginally more surreal than the evening news featuring Barbara Streisand whispering in the president's ear or Ginger Spice retiring from pop music to become a UN envoy. It's when the book is most tempting to dismiss that it is most eerily familiar.
But throughout the book and over the afternoon as we talk, even the weighty themes anchoring the work won't drag the new Bret Easton Ellis down. Amid the moral outrage driving the work, there is always a keen sense of the absurd: "It's something that I'm really interested in as a writer -- finding the comedy in the horror and the chaos of it all, drawing that out."
He talks about being older and clearing the emotional minefield of his twenties and about the perspective that it has given him. A novel set in Washington and "tangentially related to politics" is in the planning stages, but it is a memoir addressing his late adolescence and the (sort of) halcyon days at Bennington that seems to most interest him right now. Ellis continues to vent his angst onto the page: "people think it's this grand notion -- of writing as a form of therapy, but it's really not. It's just helpful." He's grinning as he says it, pleased with the thought and tossing back some grapefruit juice for emphasis.
Glamorama, sprawling ambitious thing that it is, may not be the "Big Book," but it's done. These days, for its author, that's enough.
Christopher Lawrence is a freelance writer based in New York City.
