Ellis has said<\/a> that the appeal of his precocious first novel, Less Than Zero<\/a> (1985) (which he was indeed working on in his senior year, as the series shows) was that it allowed viewers to imagine what it would be like to be a privileged youngster in cool, affluent Beverley Hills.<\/p>\n This TV incarnation of The Shards presents a particularly vivid version of this fantasy. The affluent teenagers pad around beautiful, empty houses, throw endless pool parties, drive through LA in their shiny cars and indulge in as much drugs and sex as they want.<\/p>\n Yet the flip-side of such extraordinary freedom is excessive vulnerability. The story of the Trawler recalls the dark history of late 1970s and 1980s LA. It was a time when over 20 serial killers \u2013 each given similarly foreboding monikers like the Night Stalker or the Hillside Strangler \u2013 were also traversing the city.<\/p>\n Watching the lives of such a privileged group become shattered might be considered just deserts: a secret satisfaction for viewers enamoured by that Beverley Hills fantasy life. This is, after all, the kind of dark morality which propels the slasher movie<\/a> (a genre which has influenced both Ellis and Murphy) where characters, usually girls, die in seemingly direct proportion to how sexually active they are.<\/p>\n But The Shards wants to do more than glamorise and invite critique of the lives of affluent youth in the US. Outwardly its sumptuous rendering of Westside interiors and exteriors tempt viewers to regard it as another example of TV\u2019s current fascination with displaying the indulgent existences of the super-wealthy, such as Big Little Lies (2017) or White Lotus<\/a> (2021-).<\/p>\n The Shards aims at something more profound. At its heart is a comparison between 21st-century existence and the world of the early 1980s. The series reminds us that then there were no helicopter parents, no social media nor smartphones. Factors which explain how these teenagers can do what they wish without adult scrutiny. <\/p>\n Despite the permissive atmosphere \u2013 as Bret\u2019s comparison of Mallory\u2019s arrival to \u201ca virus\u201d signals subtly \u2013 all this sexual decadence was, in only a few years, about to be extinguished by the advent of Aids.<\/p>\n Yet The Shards also insists this era is the gateway to understanding the world we exist in now. This is a core message of the novel, conveyed powerfully through references to songs from the period. <\/p>\n Ellis\u2019s fiction has always used music as a way of summing up character or anchoring its narrative in a particular cultural moment. In The Shards, his observations about emblematic music tracks of the time \u2013 such as Ultravox\u2019s Vienna<\/a> or Kim Wilde\u2019s video for Kids in America \u2013 focus on what he calls a pervasive social \u201cnumbness\u201d. <\/p>\n The novel\u2019s virtual soundtrack is one reason it feels so deeply personal. In literary terms, The Shards is what is known as an autofiction. It\u2019s a mode of writing which differs from straight autobiography. Autofiction conveys personal truth in a way which keeps it unverifiable or obscure, perhaps even to the authors themselves. <\/p>\n Like Ellis\u2019s Lunar Park<\/a> (2006), another magnificent autofiction, The Shards seems an effort to understand which dark parts of his psyche could have summoned up a creation like Patrick Bateman, the psychopathic anti-hero of American Psycho<\/a>.<\/p>\n Murphy\u2019s adaptation of The Shards \u2013 as expected given Ellis\u2019s close involvement as executive producer and co-writer \u2013 preserves much of this personal significance. This helps to elevate it above racy, entertaining but essentially empty, bonkbuster thrillers such as Hunting Wives (2025). It is hard, for example, not to see the casting of newcomer Gere, who plays Robert Mallory with a perfect combination of beauty and menace, in the light of Ellis\u2019s notes<\/a> about the elemental impression the work of his father, Richard Gere, left on his own formative years.<\/p>\n Ellis\u2019s novel is remarkable for how it creates such a deeply immersive blend of image, narrative and soundtrack in prose. The tools available to screen directors ensure they can do this much more easily, as Murphy\u2019s version of The Shards demonstrates. But the pairing of director and writer ensures the series also, just about, avoids the superficial trap TV can fall into \u2013 the lingering on surfaces, the indulgence in sex scenes or gruesome murders. It preserves the powerful elements of autofiction and cultural analysis that drive the original work.<\/p>\n This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.<\/em><\/p>\n Bran Nicol does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ryan Murphy, director of the controversial Netflix true-crime Monster Anthology (2022-), and Bret Easton Ellis, literary provocateur and author of American Psycho (1991), seem the perfect match. Sure enough, Murphy\u2019s new TV adaptation of Ellis\u2019s 2023 novel, The Shards, for Disney+ is an exhilarating mix of teen drama, serial killer nail-biter and homoerotic cat-and-mouse thriller. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Lessons for today<\/h2>\n
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