Last week, Bret Easton Ellis turned 60 and “woke up laughing” according to his podcast. How did I get to be 60 fucking years old? Well, it does happen. Ellis spent the last half of his 20s and the first half of his 30s writing Glamorama, a 477-page novel about the same length as the masterpiece he released last year, The Shards. That book was written in a year and a half: April 2020 to September 2021, and serialized on his podcast (with sound effects arranged by producer Adam Thompson). Like everything Ellis has done in the last 15 years—writing a grim and slim sequel to Less Than Zero, writing The Canyons for Paul Schrader to direct and Lindsay Lohan and James Deen to star, excoriating hypocritical and hyperbolic liberals during the late-Obama years through Trump’s presidency and 2019’s essay collection White, which earned him his latest cancellation (rescinded post-Shards)—the book and the podcast show a rare American artist completely free and constantly innovating while working within a society and a culture that he despises.
Glamorama was a product of another time, “Empire” as Ellis says, when 1990s Manhattan was the center of the universe. I was there. The book follows a vapid male model named Victor Ward who becomes lost in the world of spies and international killers. Even after he’s left New York, even after he’s lost everything and seen the horrors of Hell, Ward’s followed by confetti. Everywhere in the book, confetti is raining down from the sky, gathered in large piles, scattered pieces on lapels, in hair. It shows up from beginning to end, even after the smell of shit becomes a constant presence. Glamorama was sold as Ellis’ “first novel with a plot,” and it was promptly stolen by Ben Stiller, Drake Sather, and John Hamburg for the screenplay of their film, the 2001 classic Zoolander.
No wonder I loved it so much as a kid. Zoolander was the first movie I saw after September 11—the first news coverage in the world of the attack interrupted a commercial for Zoolander—but the terrorist organization looked nothing like Al Qaeda, without any prominent members from the Middle East. This is the opening scene of the movie, and it never occurred to me until writing this paragraph that I never once made a connection between the terrorists in the movie and those on TV, but then again the criminals in Zoolander aren’t trying to blow up a fashion show, just assassinate the Prime Minister of Micronesia. Stiller’s movie was released without delay, and with only minor digital edits to remove the Twin Towers.
I always wondered why Hollywood did that. A couple of films kept the towers in, but mostly they were erased. Why? They were a staple of any movie shot in New York. These were the last films they appeared in, their last performances—wouldn’t it have been better to see them standing than watch them burn and fall over and over again?
Ellis “tried” to sue Stiller immediately, and by the time of the book tour for 2005’s Lunar Park, he said that they’d settled out of court. That leaves a major motion picture of his actual book unlikely, despite Roger Avary’s unending enthusiasm. In the book, Ward’s filmed and followed by a film crew, and then two, without much comment or explanation from Ellis, sort of presaging the warehouses of Synecdoche, New York. In the movie being made of his life, he’s constantly scored by the most emotional and intimate acoustic songs by the Smashing Pumpkins: “Disarm,” “Stumbleine.” The confetti falls as the bodies pile up, and Ward’s left stranded alone in an Italian hotel, drinking water and finally sober, right after waking up from the movie’s final dream, a memory of college, with the constant refrain of “Sinead O’Connor was singing ‘The Last Day of Our Acquaintance.’”
Ward realizes that “The stars are real. The future is that mountain.” The book ends. If Avary ever got to make his movie, he would’ve had two film crews following Ward around and visible on screen. Ellis tweeted several times in the early-2010s about adaptations about to happen that never did, big-budget and “lo-fi” versions. After Zoolander and its abominable sequel, this book will never become a movie, even if it already is one.
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