Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, as audiences catch up with The Shards, based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, let’s revisit another screen adaptation of the author’s works, 1987’s Less Than Zero.
Last week, the long awaited television adaptation of The Shards finally premiered on FX. Produced by Ryan Murphy and based on Bret Easton Ellis’ best-selling autofiction novel, the story follows a wealthy high school student in 1980s Los Angeles, and the obsession he develops with a new student that he believes to be a serial killer.
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The novel quickly became a sensation upon his release in 2023, and marked the first published work by Ellis in more than a decade. To celebrate a TV series that will undoubtedly keep the gays talking for months (and, judging from has the many GIFs of the barely-clothed stars making the rounds online, it’s already well on its way!), this week we’ll take a look at another semi-autobiographical Bret Easton Ellis adaptation; one that, unlike The Shards, decidedly toned down its controversial contents to mixed reception.
The Set-Up
Bret Easton Ellis published his debut novel Less Than Zero in 1985 when he was only a 21-year-old college student. Loosely based on his own experiences in the drug-filled, elite scene of Los Angeles, the story follows a young man that returns home for the holidays the fall after graduating high school, and is lured back into a cycle of partying with his ex-girlfriend and best friend that begins to threaten their lives.
The novel was received with shock for its frank portrayal of rich young people behaving badly (in retrospect, some people credit it with first portraying the archetypes that birthed real-life celebrities like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians), and a film adaptation was optioned even before it was published. It went through various versions at the hands of various producers, eventually landing with British director Marek Kanievska, who had previously directed the drama Another Country (previously covered in this column!), another movie starring young prep students in sexually ambiguous circles.
The adaptation, however, became somewhat infamous for completely toning down the heightened and explicit contents of the novel, and turning its display of young excess and indulgence into a cautionary tale with neutered characters.
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A Not-So-Novel Adaptation
Andrew McCarthy stars as the strait-laced Clay, an overachieving and ambitious high school graduate who moves to the East Coast for college and returns over Christmas vacation to the same circle of hard-partying friends he left behind. These include his ex-girlfriend Blair (Jami Gertz, who you might recognize as the iconic Dr. Melissa Reeves from Twister) and his best friend Julian (Robert Downey, Jr.) the epitome of the party boy who has spent all of his father’s money and investments up his nose.
Clay discovers Blair and Julian having sex while he was gone, and the once-tight trio ruptures emotionally. While Blair tries to have the two boys make amends, Julian is busier trying to pay off the many debts to his dealer Rip (James Spade), who has started to escalate his threats. Alienated from all his friends and family, Julian spirals further down his addiction, with Clay and Blair struggling (and ultimately failing) to pull him out of it.
On its own, the film is a well-executed but rather tame depiction of a young man trying to make something out of his life and seeing how he can’t pull those closest to him out of vicious cycles. As a portrayal of teenage debauchery, it lacks the shock factor and stylization that we’ve grown accustomed to in media with similar themes and characters, with everything from Thirteen and Spring Breakers to HBO’sEuphoria. But it’s a well-structured drama with strong performances at its center.
Robert Downey Jr., in particular, is able to create an equally sympathetic and antagonizing figure in Julian. He embodies the natural charisma and magnetism that makes you want to party all night with him (a trait he has thoroughly mined throughout his career, particularly with the Marvel Cinematic Universe), but also the desperation and pitifulness of an addict that knows he’s destroying his own life yet cannot stop himself from it. It’s ironic that, in a way, this role predicted Downey Jr.’s own spiral into addiction in the late ’90s.
Did They Forget To Make It Gay?
However, when held against the novel that it is based on, Less Than Zero feels like a watered down drama that has more in common with an after-school special than the thorny material it’s based on. Easton Ellis himself disowned the adaptation and swore he never watched for years (he has softened his opinions on it since).
The film turns the protagonist into a moral compass determined to save his friends from the claws of addiction, when in the text he’s just as much of a user and deep into that spiral along with Julian. Within the book, he’s portrayed as openly bisexual or sexually fluid, engaging in relationships and sexual encounters with both men and women. The only hint of queerness in the film adaptation is when Julian is forced to perform oral sex on a man to pay for drugs, an old trope that equates gay sex with rock bottom.
There’s also the implicit homoeroticism that exists between Clay and Julian, and the jealousy that comes up when their relationship fractures over Blair. But that element is implied at best and nothing really comes out of it.
Less Than The Sum Of Its Parts
In an age where teenagers behaving poorly has been done so many times in media to the point that it’s become a genre unto itself with its own tropes and clichés, Less Than Zero does comes off as a sterile, sexless depiction of a time where drugs and hard partying were culturally at a peak. It contains some interesting character work, but unfortunately dismisses the more risqué elements that made it stand out at its time.
It serves as a great comparison point to see the ways in which explicit sexuality and queer content in many areas has gone from something that must be eradicated and toned down, to an element that can feasibly become a selling point for a project.
Less Than Zero is currently available for digital rental or purchase via Amazon Prime Video.
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