Abstract
The paper argues that Imperial bedrooms, Bret Easton Ellis’s latest novel to date engages, among other things, with the author’s own fiction on manifold levels: it does not only mark his return to the minimalist mode of writing, but effectively reclaims narrative authority from cinematic adaptations of Ellis’s oeuvre, negotiates the terms of the fictional autobiographical pact set up by his previous novels, most notably Less than zero and Lunar park, and, finally, reinterprets and exposes, within the generic boundaries of the California noir teemed with existential(ist) issues, what Baudrillard called "the perfect crime” committed by contemporary media.
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Notes
As I am referring to the e-book edition of Ellis’s Imperial bedrooms, numbers in this case refer to the sequence of sentences, not that of pages.
Ellis himself was so enraged by the apparent dissimilarities between novel and film that he refused to make an appearance at the official premier. Thus, Clay of Imperial bedrooms is not only to renegotiate the distance between his earlier self and Ellis, but, in this case, voices the author’s contemporaneous anxieties about the adaptation that proved to be a blunder.
The way in which Clay’s complicity to the crime is expressed here, again, reflects Ellis’s anxieties as well as Clay’s position of being a scriptwriter. It is “Ellis” who puts Julian into the position described above and into the film made of his murder later seen by Clay, who is being blackmailed, supposedly by Rip Millar. While “Ellis” is exercising his authorial power in the act of rewriting Julian’s death, throughout Imperial bedrooms Clay is desperate to use his as a scriptwriter to “put people into films”, and enjoy favors in return. This sadistic pattern seems to characterize Clay, as Rip mentions at one point that “You have a history of this, don’t you?” (Ellis 2010, 1284) What is more, Rain, Clay’s ultimate target of abuse in Imperial bedrooms resists his advances “’Because you’re just the writer” (Ellis 2010, 2593). All these would suggest an “anxiety of authorship”, but not in relationship to one’s literary predecessors, but, as I will argue, of control over one’s textual production in an intermedial cultural landscape.
At the time of the publication of Imperial bedrooms, Julian’s character (originally played by Robert Downey Jr. in Kanievska’s film) generated some media interest as news of a possible film adaptation emerged. Of course, it proved to be rumors, not the least because of Ellis’s remarks on 20th Century Fox in the novel, and the way in which continuity, an important cinematic requirement, could not have been impossible to maintain between the original Less than zero and the would-be Imperial bedrooms film versions, exactly because of Julian’s resurrection and second death.
As Ellis himself explains, it is this quality of the text that he admires in the fiction of Raymond Chandler, the major representative of the California noir, an important precursor to Imperial bedrooms. Ellis mentions that he never remembered the destination of the whodunit narrative, but brought with himself the general mood of Chandler’s text (Baker 2010).
Another possible autobiographical reference appears here, as at the time of writing Imperial bedrooms, Ellis was also being involved in making the film version of The informers (Ellis 1994; Jordan 2009). After Imperial bedrooms, he worked, as writer and scriptwriter on two independent film projects, The canyons (Schrader 2013) and The curse of Downers Grove (Martine 2014).
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Sári, L.B. Transgression in the works of Bret Easton Ellis: the case of Imperial bedrooms . Neohelicon 42, 481–490 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0314-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0314-9