The Informers

The things that writer Bret Easton Ellis is comfortable with are not the things that most people are comfortable with: hard drugs, greed, outré sexuality, pop music, homicide, the name “Christie”—the 1980s. His novels have returned to these subjects again and again, beginning in “Less Than Zero,” continuing through his seminal work, “American Psycho,” and into a follow-up collection of short stories, “The Informers”—lately made into a somewhat uncomfortable film.

Simon & Schuster, the New York publishing house, gave Ellis a huge advance on “American Psycho” after the 21-year-old author launched with “Zero” while still an undergraduate at Bennington College, and then gave him another almost as big when “Attraction” came out two years later. They balked at the finished novel, though, which sends protagonist Patrick Bateman—a 1984 graduate of Harvard College and a 1986 grad of the Business School—on a slasher rampage up and down yuppie Manhattan.

Bateman is a true psychotic for sure, but he’s a guy-next-door, red-blooded-American psychotic. His mania is success, his bloodlust is greed, and his pathology is passing. There was a Patrick Bateman—levered back in his chair, feet up on the desk, Walkman blaring—in every office of every building in Lower Manhattan.

Vintage eventually picked up the novel, and the rest is history. These days it’s better known for its 2000 film adaptation, starring Christian Bale as Bateman. That film spared very little in the name of delicacy; in one scene, Bateman dives under the sheets with a woman and reemerges with his maw covered in gore. In another, he axes his colleague full in the face.

The film version of “The Informers” is by no means bashful, even next to “American Psycho.” A rock star chokes a whore and punches her in the face. Christie (Amber Heard) rarely wears a top. Or a bra. In just about every other area, though, there is no comparing the two.

For one thing, “The Informers,” a loosely connected series of short stories, doesn’t lend itself nearly as easily to screen adaptation as “American Psycho” did. “Informers” is a four-part swansong, a requiem to that free-love-meets-free-spending materialistic innocence that represented life in early-80s L.A. as sung by a film producer, his estranged wife and mistress, a doorman and his depraved uncle, and a rock star and his addictions. The movie is bound together—as was the era—by the young, blonde, tan, wealthy children of the Zeitgeist.

A fifth storyline, about a literal nightclub vampire, was excised from the film after shooting had already wrapped, an apt illustration of what makes the finished film so (forgive the pun) toothless. Ellis’s novels and the films they spawned have always stood on their psychopathology. Bateman murders his colleagues not just because he’s jealous of them, but because he actually is a homicidal maniac; the joke is that nobody notices. He’s the analog of Wall Street’s own psychosis.

What better metaphor than a vampire for the Patrick Batemans of the opposite coast, literally sucking the marrow of life? Lusty consumption drives and sustains the film’s central group, led by a sensitive if shallow performance from Jon Foster as Graham, son of the producer, dealer to the rock star, and resident of the doorman’s building. Without that metaphorical structure, the film sags under its own weight. It was hard enough to take the 80s seriously while they were happening—or so I understand.

The film has its technical flaws, as well. Flat camera work, underdeveloped supporting characters, and trite dialogue take the film from merely uninspired to downright unpleasant. Still, the film has its moments of insight, most of them due to its surprisingly thoughtful score of 80s pop hits. Brad Renfro, who died early last year, also delivers an affectingly damaged final performance as the doorman who manages an ultimate act of defiance against the uncle who has menaced him his entire life.

A sequel to “Less Than Zero” should hit bookstores in 2010, and production has already begun on the film version of Ellis’s latest novel, the twistedly autobiographical “Lunar Park.” Neither the literary nor the Hollywood establishment is afraid of him anymore. The one has developed a taste for Ellis’s blood type, and the other has figured out how to slash his work into compliance—which is a shame. Ellis works best when he’s shocking. When he’s not, he’s as obsolete as Bateman’s Walkman. Sure, he still works, but he’s not worth it.

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.