The new Transformers movie.
VH1's "I Love the '90's."
The Cure as the soundtrack to a car commercial.
What do all of these things have in common? Advertising firms that are making dupes out of us all.
Bret Easton Ellis wrote "Lunar Park" as an autobiographical account of his drugged-up rise to stardom as a hip, sexy new author who was going to set the world on fire. He then has a supernatural encounter with the demons of his past and the self-esteem issues they represent.
His previous works ("American Psycho" and "The Rules of Attraction") are an exercise in id appeasement. Ellis knows how to seduce his readers with the dark, sexually deviant and substance abusive side of popular culture. We get off on the excessive violence and lust for which Ellis has become so renowned.
"Lunar Park" deviates from this commercially foolproof formula with a vague, rambling story about demonic possession.
We all remember in high school and junior high when we bought paperbacks at the grocery store. Too old for "young adult" fiction and fascinated with the weirdness that was so cool in the '90s, we were attracted to all those paperbacks with dark, ominous covers. They usually featured a silhouette of a building or a menacing figure airbrushed onto a black background with titles like "University" or "Phantoms," with quotations on the back claiming that the author was the "sultan of suspense" or "the master of macabre."
These were our parents' attempts at keeping us reading without making us work for it. We developed an enjoyment of reading that causes us to now scoff at these books, calling them trashy and denying that we ever touched the stuff.
In our defense, we are older and wiser and most of us have read Ginsberg, Crane and a smattering of poems by Millay. And we are better people for it.
But people who work at PR firms know that we are slaves to and lovers of our past and that we will do anything to flirt uninhibitedly with the pleasures we experienced as insecure youths.
Ellis knows this. He's written a book that is trying to appeal to our newfound intellectualism while at the same time satisfying our appetite for dull-razor suspense.
"Lunar Park" closely resembles the last third of Kerouac's "On the Road" rubber-banded to a Dean Koontz novel. The beginning is horrifying enough to get our attention while playing heavily on the reader's desire to live the life of a responsibility-free, cracked-out genius. It harkens back to all those authors who used drugs, wrote about drugs, got off the drugs and got into our textbooks. It scares me when I try to think of five authors I've studied who were even reasonably sober.
Ellis flounders when he stops talking about all the girls and guys he did on book tours and tries distractedly to weave together a supernatural mystery involving his dad, monsters he invented in his youth and even a non-fictional Patrick Bateman. It is all too reminiscent of how recycling was so popular in the '90s.
Since Christian "Patrick Bateman" Bale is now busy with worthwhile projects, it's going to be many a blue moon before "Lunar Park" gets all movie-ed up. Ellis fans should instead watch a "Saved by the Bell" rerun, drink some Jolt cola and fall asleep while reading "Insomnia."
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