Imperial Bedrooms

This excellent cover was designed by Chip Kidd.

 

Imperial Bedrooms begins with a display of pyrotechnic postmodernism. Ellis conflates several layers of artifice: the novel Less Than Zero, the film of the same name, the current novel, and the faux-reality, the artifice, in which these exist. I found it hugely satisfying, even goose-bump raising.

But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.) When the scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. "I died," he whispered. "They killed me off." I waited a beat before sighing, "But you're still here." Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later, his body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he had been tortured to death at another location. -- pp 8-9

How Julian's body winds up behind that apartment building, stabbed 159 times, is one of the chief concerns of Imperial Bedrooms, a L.A. noir as byzantine and inscrutable as Howard Hawks' screen adaptation of  Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And just as pleasurable. I thought I was done with Bret Easton Ellis. I'd read Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and American Psycho, in my early 20s, and thought I'd gone as far with him as I was willing to go, that I got "it." But then a Facebook friend (I can't recall who) posted that after reading Imperial Bedrooms she felt the need to "scrub my brain." Well, that is for me a strong recommendation. One of the things I've learned as a consumer of art is that there are artists who essentially mine the same vein over and over again, and if the results are entertaining, stimulating, thought-provoking, than it's a fine, good thing. Ellis is, I think, this kind of artist. But I can understand why some folks don't want to go where he wants to take them. The world he renders is a dark, dreary, violent, casually cruel place. One that I don't doubt for a minute actually exists. I find his characters utterly convincing. And the dialogue sharp and perfect. I read a few of the reviews of Imperial Bedrooms and I was struck by how unforgiving they were, and obtuse. Both Denis Johnson and Thomas Pynchon have produced noirs as their most recent efforts, but they didn't get shit about it. And, while Johnson's Nobody Move is hugely entertaining it's a very slight novel in comparison to Imperial Bedrooms.  Anyways, thank you anonymous Facebook friend for the unintended recommendation.


Robert Downey, Jr. as Julian in the film Less Than Zero