Just saw the trailer for the latest Bret Easton Ellis adaptation: The Informers – Check it (if you’re seeing this in a reader, click HERE to see the video).

Ellis is one of my favorite writers. There’s a lot of people out there who enjoy his writing in a disturbingly literal way (particularly the people who like American Psycho the best of his work), but I think he’s one of the most explicit satirists around. He’s like the modern Evelyn Waugh. There’s an irony that’s as sharp as Patrick Bateman‘s  machete cutting through all of Ellis’s books. His condemnation of the modern, over-privileged, narcissistic, instant-gratification obsessed yet terminally insatiable, superficial, alienated, self-destructive, overindulged, psychologically damaged society, is wrought precisely through a celebration of its most hyperblolically psychotic, emotionally anesthetized elements.

And for some reason there’s something inexplicably captivating about these stories about these characters for whom inhumanity comes effortlessly. I’m no psychologist, so I have no clue why THAT’s the case, but that Ellis’s stories–the seminal of which are some 30 years old now–continue to resonate with each new generation, is a testament to the persistence of this pathology.

Watching the Informers trailer I remembered my first introduction to Bret Easton Ellis: renting Less Than Zero back in high school. At the time the story was  already a decade old but its glimmering bleakness was still just as compelling. Looking back on the preview for Less Than Zero, which came out in 1987, it’s kind of a trip:

In contrast to the Informers, Less Than Zero’s version of pretty much the exact same story, told three decades ago, seems so sincere! Almost quaint. And yet Less Than Zero was considered so controversial when it came out. Perhaps in that time we have steadily been moving more and more towards the society Bret Easton Ellis always envisioned as a satirical cautionary tale. After all, the Informers isn’t just an 80’s “period” film. As unimaginatively literal as I thought the film adaptations of American Psycho and The Rules of Attraction were, Informers looks like it might actually deliver on the kind of phenomenally allegoric treatment an Ellis tale deserves! Can’t wait to see it.