Bret Easton Ellis made the most of the pandemic, writing his masterpiece The Shards from April 2020 to August 2021, but he wasted 2024 working on an adaptation for HBO with Kristoffer Borgli that’ll never be made; now, Ryan Murphy has taken over the show. Besides a few early episodes of Nip/Tuck around its premiere nearly 20 years ago, I’ve never seen anything by Murphy. Everyone I know who has tells me this is very bad news for The Shards, which I never expected to be handled properly even with, or especially with, Ellis involved; now, like Ellis, I don’t have to worry about waiting for a lousy show based on a book that I love, the best American novel published in the last decade.
Ellis serialized The Shards on his podcast from September 2020 to September 2021, but its early-2023 publication was revelatory: the book was both a quantum leap and a culmination of his entire career and public life, more vivid than anything else he’d written and, from page to page, the feeling of a man’s life coming to a head. The only other recent American work to deal with the passage of time in the same harrowing and haunting way is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.
Murphy isn’t going to make The Return. He’ll take key scenes from the book—Bret follows Robert Mallory to the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Bret smokes pot and has sex with Matt Kellner, Bret’s girlfriend Debbie tries to have sex with him, Bret and all of his friends go to a country club and find a bum—and turn them into trashy standalone episodes that’ll probably be more faithful to the book than whatever Ellis was working on (apparently he wanted to do three seasons with 10 episodes each; I don’t think even the Bröntes get that kind of legroom on TV). He wanted subplots that weren’t in the book, so maybe Murphy will just “do the book,” however gaudy, cheap, and “trashy” it ends up being. That’s better than a bloated or butchered attempt by the original author, which can only shed light on the seams in the source material.
The way to adapt The Shards is the way The Great Gatsby should be adapted: as if from half a mile away, all long lenses, with frequent, bordering on constant narration by Ellis himself. What makes The Shards so hard to adapt isn’t its length or set pieces, it’s the reader’s relationship with both Ellis as a public figure, Ellis as the author of all those books you’ve read before, and “Bret Ellis” the narrator of the book. The scariest page is the disclaimer at the end. It’s a very subtle and obviously entirely internal effect, but you do put the book down feeling like you’ve read something cursed; even when that leaves, there’s “Vienna” by Ultravox and the uncanny feeling of having been with fictional high school characters who behave, sound, and look like the people you knew back then. I was 30 when I read The Shards, and I saw them as the kids they were, and felt all that time that had passed.
The way to get that onto the screen is compression and alienation: remove most of the dialogue, allow characters to live and work without exposition, use narration as counterpoint rather than exposition, and mix the sound as if the audience is hearing everything from outside, and then bring up a few elements depending on the scene. The sound of the wind, Los Angeles at night, the dread of the surrounding murders and cults and affairs and rapes and drugs and broken bones… all of it has to be muffled, treated as a vision or a daydream. This is dangerous, you say, “dream sequence” and everyone gets scared for good reason, almost NO ONE can produce a proper dream sequence, and the ones who can—David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick—rarely made scenes that were actually dreams; nonetheless, they came close to capturing the ineffable.
What Lynch and Kubrick have in common—for Kubrick, I’m thinking especially of The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut—is a fondness for moving slow, not slow motion: people walk slowly in their movies. They talk slowly and don’t say much. What they do say is highly potent but elusive. This is a quality they share but not something they strove for, just a product of following intuition and accident. The Shards is an intuitive and open work in a way that Ellis’ Glamorama is not; as great as it is, Glamorama is written, while The Shards is told plainly and bluntly. But when you read The Shards, you picture the young man who would soon write Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, and grow up to write American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. It’s a confessional as much as it is an historical novel, one where all of the pre- and misconceptions about Ellis and his work are clarified in stunning detail. As he reorients his own history and tells you who he really is and what really happened to him, he cuts the cord and goes dark; the book’s narrator goes from an inviting, familial tone to something much more distant and frightening.
How do you show what it feels like to feel 40 years passing? I hope Ryan Murphy knows more than me.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith
