43 pages • 1 hour read
Bret Easton EllisLess Than Zero
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Film and Cinematography
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses rape, drug addiction and overdose, sex work, and graphic violence.
Films and cinema culture are a prominent motif of Less Than Zero. The novel is set in star-studded Los Angeles, and Blair’s father is a film director. Kim's mother, too, is involved in the film industry somehow, probably as a writer or producer, and travels widely to scout locations for her films. Finally, several of Clay’s acquaintances, mostly drug dealers and Southern California college students, are film students. For example, the film student at Blair’s father’s party talks about the “aesthetic indifference” in American movies (119). This industry serves as the backdrop for many of the novel’s vapid conversations.
Apart from this film student, few characters exhibit this level of engagement in films. Clay and Trent, for example, can’t remember the name of the film they’ve just seen when a friend they encounter asks as they are exiting the theater. Rather, the presence of the narrative and its images is significant.
The novel itself represents a series of montages and flashbacks. Its characters are developed through dialogue, actions, and images much more than by descriptions. Thus, the novel’s narrative style is especially cinematic. Also as in film, the novel exhibits facets of reality that are themselves film conventions. When Clay talks to a film student about the movie Beastman, he asks, "Didn't it bother you the way they kept dropping characters out of the film for no reason at all?" The film student admits, "Kind of, but that happens in real life” (120). As this conversation takes place in the second half of the novel, the reader, who has thus far witnessed little emotional investment on Clay’s part in his family and friends, knows this to be true: Characters are expendable.
The way in which this novel is told cinematically, coupled with its replete references to contemporary films, moreover invites the reader to wonder whether life is imitating art rather than art imitating life. Specifically, has the LA cinema culture shaped the lives of Clay and his peers and relatives, influencing their vacuous behavior and superficial relationships with one another?
Drugs and Substance Abuse
The motif of drugs and drug abuse is one of the most salient ones in the novel. Clay and his friends participate in recreational drug use without hesitation. In fact, their lives consist of alternately using and searching for drugs. Marijuana, cocaine, and even heroin figure in the novel at various points. Julian, who becomes a central character at the end of the novel, is introduced to the reader as Clay’s childhood friend as well as his drug dealer. When Trent cannot find Julian, Rip becomes his dealer. In fact, most of the characters’ preoccupation with Julian stems not from personal affinities for him but from his ability to furnish drugs. Clay and his friends’ detached relationships are occluded by their obsession with procuring drugs, and their inability to follow conversations is, in part, a consequence of this drug use.
The novel’s more vulnerable characters include Muriel, a teenage anorexic who fainted in her film class due to malnutrition. After she is released from the hospital, she injects heroin in the bathroom during one of Kim’s parties, and her friends film the incident, finding it amusing. Julian is, of course, a highly vulnerable character; the end of the novel reveals him to have been forced into prostitution as a result of his heroin addiction. An especially poignant moment toward the novel’s close finds Julian’s pimp forcing heroin into his arm in the restroom of a club, as though to maintain his addiction, and, thus, his prostitution. Together, Muriel and Julian represent the more destructive consequences of drug use.
Voyeurism
Voyeurism is a frequent motif within the novel. Not limited to environments of sex, voyeurism refers to the practice of taking gratification in either the nudity, sexual behaviors, or simply pain and distress of others. As to the latter, voyeurism is discernible in Clay’s and his acquaintances’ consumption of horror movies. For example, when Clay is at the movies with Kim and Blair, he remarks, “I don’t watch a lot of the movie, just the gory parts” (87).
Sexual voyeurism is most obviously manifest in Clay’s being forced to witness his childhood friend’s sodomization by an older man. Although it seems that Julian’s pimp, Finn, forces Clay to participate by serving as a witness, Clay fully realizes that he does not need the money promised by Finn, so he could leave at any time. However, he goes along because he admits that, “I want to see the worst” (160).
Finally, the 12-year-old girl tied to the bed at Rip’s apartment is a victim of the voyeurism of Rip and his friends. The novel describes her in a graphic way, forcing the reader to “see” the violating and dehumanizing ways in which her body has been framed for the men to watch and abuse her. In the most extreme case of voyeurism in the novel, the child is brutalized and raped by a group of young men who take turns violating her and watching others do the same as their quest for gratification subsumes any sense of morality or empathy.
Related Titles
By Bret Easton Ellis
