Bret Easton Ellis claims he got the idea for The Shards, his 2023 novel and now a series streaming on Hulu, while looking up old high school classmates online and listening to music from his senior year.
Nonsense. Ellis got the idea from the Brett Kavanaugh circus of 2018. The milieu of that episode, with its intersections of prep schools, partying, sex, teenagers, violence and the 1980s, was like a distillation of every Ellis motif going back to Ellis’ first book Less Than Zero (1985). Ellis started the podcast of The Shards in September 2020, two years after the Kavanaugh hearing. Two years is about the right amount of time to put together the outline of a novel.
Kavanaugh inspired The Shards. Ellis needs to admit this.
The Shards is directed by Ryan Murphy and stars Igby Rigney as Bret, a 17-year-old senior at an elite prep school in Los Angeles. Bret meets a new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), whose arrival coincides with murders by a serial killer known as the Trawler. As Bret begins to see connections between the Trawler and Robert, he’s overwhelmed by paranoia and fear. Yet Bret’s an unreliable narrator—we never know what’s real or imagined. Robert tells Bret, “You hear things that aren’t really there.” Bret has a girlfriend, Debbie, but he’s gay and dulls his pain with drugs and alcohol. His parents are absent, on vacation and leaving him in a gorgeous house with a swimming pool in Los Angeles.
As with every other Ellis property there’s sex, drugs, synth-heavy 1980s tracks, misogyny, violence and sun-drenched ennui. At the end, some of the kids reunite and debate over what was true and what was false and what they remember—just like the Kavanaugh case.
The Shards is a blown opportunity for Ellis. In transferring the Kavanaugh hearing, in which the future Supreme Court justice was falsely accused of sexual assault, to the sleek and emotionless Los Angeles of the 1980s, Ellis has reverted to form and missed a chance to tell a grittier and far more interesting story. Ellis could’ve told the true story of extortion, witness tampering, honey traps, 1980s flashbacks and colorful personalities that formed the story that unfolded in the fall of 2018.
He’s not the first one. After Kavanaugh was confirmed, A-List Hollywood director Doug Liman began work on Justice, a documentary about the Kavanaugh nomination. Justice was spiked when my book The Devil’s Triangle was published in 2022. Liman didn’t anticipate my book, and began texting me in an attempt to get me to appear in his movie (I had been accused of witnessing Kavanaugh sexually assault a girl in 1982). I said no, telling Liman he had to answer all the facts in my book first. Instead, he killed his own film.
Bret Easton Ellis could’ve made his own documentary. He’s shown a powerful aversion to wokeness. In 2019 Ellis was interviewed by The New Yorker, whose writer couldn’t comprehend that Ellis wasn’t losing his mind over Donald Trump. “When did people start identifying so relentlessly with victims, and when did the victim’s world view become the lens through which we began to look at everything?” Ellis said. The New Yorker called White, Ellis’ 2019 non-fiction work, “a sustained howl of displeasure aimed at liberal hand-wringers, people obsessively concerned with racism, and everyone who is not over Donald Trump’s election. His targets range from the media to Michelle Obama to millennials (including his boyfriend). Ellis also defends less popular people, from Roseanne Barr to Kanye West, whom he perceives as having been given a raw deal by the mob.”
Badgered by The New Yorker to express more outrage over Trump, Ellis called for sanity: “I just think that there is a man that got elected President. He is in the White House. He has vast support from his base. He was elected fairly and legally. And I think what happened is that the left is so hurt by this that they have overreacted to the Presidency. Now, look, I live with a Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial. I hear it every day.”
Ellis should’ve written a non-fiction investigation into the Kavanaugh hit. Rather than having shiny LA teens in central-casting school uniforms, he could’ve mined richer material in the funnier, earthier kids on the East Coast and at places like Georgetown Prep, where Kavanaugh and I went to school together. This year is the 75th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye. It’s a book Kavanaugh and I were assigned to read in 1982, the same year the events in The Shards take place, and Salinger’s novel much more accurately reflects the prep school atmosphere of the East Coast than does the world of Ellis. Writing in The New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs calls Catcher “the purest of the Great American Novels” but “also one of the dirtiest: ruffling parents and school boards with its fingernail clippings, shaving stubble, blood, flatulence, drunkenness, voyeurism, vulgarity, prostitution, profligacy and slang. Oh so much delectable lost slang.” At Georgetown Prep we also had plenty of slang.
The worst thing that ever happened to Bret Easton Ellis was the huge success of Less Than Zero, his 1985 debut novel. Elis was 21 when the book became a sensation, hitting the bestseller list and becoming a film with Robert Downey Jr and Andrew McCarthy. Because Ellis went supernova his first time out, it gave him permission to spend the next 40 years covering the same territory—the ennui of rich, bored young people, primarily in Los Angeles, whose lives are numb from cocaine, too much sun and no sense of direction. The drugs, boredom, pop songs, depression and occasional explosions of violence go on for 600 pages in The Shards. Brad Simpson, the producer of The Shards TV series, says Ellis and director Ryan Murphy are “obsessed with moments in their youth of hidden identities.” Also, both came of age in the time of AIDS. “That’s affected gay artists more than most people think. This story is about a group of young, beautiful people who are about to embark on the world, and there is a killer that hunts them. There’s an obvious metaphor to AIDS in the 1980s for that.”
That may be, but in focusing on Los Angeles, teens with names like Blair and Clay instead of Holden, Megan and Betsy, and diving yet again into AIDS, Ellis and Hollywood missed a bigger, more dramatic and interesting story. The Kavanaugh fiasco was a hit. It involved criminal activity and provided plenty of drama and interesting personalities. There’s a great movie to be made about it.