sexual diversion
Throughout Bret Easton Ellis’s (1964) novel Less Than Zero (1985), the protagonist Clay drifts through the narrative slowly transforming into one of the legions of interchangeable zombies populating the LA landscape. During his four week, winter break descent, Clay passes from one incident to the next as if a diversion lurking around the next corner might break the momentum of his lethargy. Clay’s primary diversion is sex, the repetition and evolution of which become milestones in his metamorphosis into a blond, tanned zombie.
To say Clay sleeps with Griffin (37-38) and later Blair (58) is inaccurate. Clay has sex with each and then dresses and leaves with a minimal of interaction with his partners. It is as though Clay hopes the act of sex will have some saving effect on him, but knows the physical intimacy is a lie. He is propositioned by each of his partners, but the sexual act pushes him further away from any real connection he might foster.
His third sexual excursion compounds the social and emotional separation Clay experiences with a double physical separation that he resists in a nearly out of character fashion. Clay leaves the club After Hours (120-122) with an unnamed sixteen year old girl. The girl’s lack of name reinforces her interchangeable zombie status. In her room, the girl gives Clay a pair of sunglasses to wear and produces a bottle of shampoo or conditioner for lubricant. Though both Clay and the girl are naked on her bed, she refuses to allow Clay to interrupt her physical space.
The sunglasses are instances of any number of screens Clay uses to mediate his existence in LA. Though he normally separates himself from the world through the mechanism of windows, television, and sunglasses, Clay tries to repeatedly remove the sunglasses he has been given. The scene suggests Risky Business (1983) in an inverted simulation of the film. Rather than indulge in and enjoy the physical act of sex, both Clay and the girl elect to climax within arm’s reach, physically separate, in the simulacrum of a fantasy.
Further, this incident is a repetition of Clay’s attempt to get a tan at the beach which results in an uncomfortable sunburn (74). Bain du Soleil is literally “bath of the sun” which burns Clay again as he climaxes. Clay is out of sync with both the natural world and the LA zombie simulation. Clay suspects both his mortality and that the trajectory of his current downward spiral is death. His sexual encounters are examinations of death, in that the loss of conscious control at the moment of climax is the little death (la petite morte).
From this point forward, Clay is fascinated by the dying and the dead and he seeks further examinations of death in the eyes of those leaving mortality behind. When Blair hits the coyote (142-143), Clay gets out of her car and hunkers down to watch as its life drains away. Later, en route to Rip’s apartment he stops and stares at length at an open eyed corpse in an alley (185-7). However, the mediation of the snuff film (152-4) is beyond Clay because the simulation of the film provides no eyes into which he can gaze and because film is fiction and therefore cannot hold the insight Clay seeks.