Less Than Zero: A Very Gen X Christmas Movie
Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? Does anyone really care?
What defines the “Christmas movie”? Does it have to be a feel good story like It’s a Wonderful Life, or can it just take place during the holiday season like Die Hard. Does it have to represent the holiday cheer featured in Hallmark commercials, or can it expose the cold, distant reality of authentic families during less-than-warm Christmas parties?
Thirty years ago, Clay came back to LA for Christmas, and the holiday movie was never the same. For Generation X, a group of people raised on disappointment, the cinematic version of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel Less Than Zero is a true Christmas movie exposing the hollow superficial excess of the holiday season and specifically the 1980s. A visually stunning film from cinematographer Edward Lachman, the movie captures and spotlights all the glitz of the holiday season, especially in Beverly Hills, while not looking away from the vacuous lack of substance behind the style, the holiday, and the state of the American family. Director Marek Kanievska created a haunting music video of a Christmas movie with film noir elements amidst the bright lights of holiday decorations.
Coming of age in the 1980s, Generation X learned to both embrace and ridicule the excesses of style and crass commercialism growing exponentially around it. Thus, many conceits in the film speak to nuanced contradictions of an audience both captivated and repulsed by consumer culture. From the moment Clay arrives in Los Angeles the excess surrounds him, and it’s nowhere more ostentatious than at that first Christmas party where the technology-infused art in the form of TVs stacked on top of each other greet Clay, projecting his image. It seems Gen X saw its own celebrity long before the Millennial age of social media. That emerging reality was summed up with Clay’s crass bemused question, “Do you girls know you have television sets between your legs?”
Of course, amidst the glam are hints of the dulling effect of consumerism, excess, and privilege. The mechanical tones of Blair and Julian when Clay first encounters them seem distant and cold, clearly intensified by the numbing effects of the cocaine. But it’s deeper than just a buzz getting in the way of their relationships. The filming and soundtrack emphasize that emptiness as the dance music switches to orchestral compositions, evoking a classic 1940s Hollywood romance in the room where Clay first sees Blair. With a nervous glance she could be Rita Hayworth, but there is an emptiness and distance. Their first interaction is as sterile as the room’s decor, and they fail to connect as Clay explains, “I didn’t come home for Julian.” Blair’s plea that “he’s wasted all the time” doesn’t make a difference. These early scenes reflect so many of the qualities Generation X and Gen X entertainment would come to be known for: irony, detachment, disaffection, dark humor, lack of faith in institutions, and a quest for authenticity, for feeling, for something. The characters in Less Than Zero both embrace superficial materialism at the same time as being glibly aloof to the allure and hypocrisy.
Holiday lights are everywhere in the film, but nowhere more captivating than in the headlights of the motorcycle gang zooming past Clay and Blair stopped in a moment of carnal attraction in the middle of the road. That moment of physical connection and energy is one of the few positive scenes in the story, though it actually masks the base, superficial excess of the season and the characters. “You don’t look happy,” Clay had noted to Blair the day before. “But do I look good?” she glibly asked in response. That preference of style as cocaine addiction rotted the rich and famous from the inside out was the perfect response in a 1980s Beverly Hills Christmas where the glitz and decoration cover up the shallow emptiness inside. Christmas is the “most wonderful time of the year,” when we forget all our woes and a problems and celebrate life, love, and family. But in reality, we’re not forgetting them, as much as dressing them up to repress them. It’s all a facade.
The excess of the holiday season is magnified in the film as producer Martin Worth noted to The New York Times, “it’s about people who were destroyed by having had everything.” For a generation raised on Miami Vice and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the existential charade of Less Than Zero is the perfect Christmas story. It’s film noir Gen X style — with the eerie silences and resonant back beats amidst scenes of fleeting momentary pleasure, such as when Clay and Blair share an intimate moment in her loft in the early morning after a night of excess only to be interrupted by the creepy amused stare of Rip’s enforcer looking for Julian. Moments like these bring a harsh reality to the hard living done by people who seemingly have everything. A similar eerie feeling comes when Clay encounters a frazzled and burned out Julian, lurking outside the family Christmas party, the blue lights of the pool bringing the characters faces in and out of clarity. These people are only a reflection of who they really are.
Nothing is quite what it seems in Less Than Zero, and the disjointed chronology of the films keeps the movie unsettled, from the early scene, filmed poetically in black and white of Blair telling Clay she’s not going to college. Clay’s dry sardonic response “Modeling? Why don’t you try something challenging like a game show host,” was certainly callous, but it also authentic banter, as the 1980s and Generation X saw the rise of the supermodel and the celebrity of Vanna White. Was it any doubt that the age of Kardashian was coming? Clay’s flashbacks to discovering the infidelity of Blair with Julian foreshadow that emptiness of the film’s relationships. But those images are contrasted with ones of Clay returning to Beverly Hills, the archetype for when in the 80s lifestyles of the rich and famous was sold to young people of Gen X. Of course he comes home to an empty house, but discovers an invite to a holiday party at an old classmate’s house where the offer is made to “Fuck Christmas together.”
The 1980s, formative years for Generation X, witnessed the explosion of advertising the good life. In fact, the entire decade of the 80s was an extended music video, which is how much of the movie comes across — show houses, hip clubs, fast music, and beautiful people. Gen X learned early — and probably knows better than any generation before or since — that “the good life” is often not what it seems. It’s for that reason that Gen X from its earliest moments was more inclined to choose lifestyle over career wealth. Generation X has long faced the law of diminishing returns, growing up against superficial excess at a time of eroding humanity. It’s not at all surprising then to recall how 1987 also brought Black Monday, just two months before the holiday season. How much of a Christmas could anyone really have after that financial catastrophe arguably wiped out savings and left families cash strapped?
Filmed at the height of MTV’s significance, Less Than Zero relies heavily on the music video genre to tell its story, and the eerily sentimental orchestral music and soft beats often backlight a movie that is visually overwhelming at times. The power and excess comes from the opening scene of Clay returning to LA, specifically Beverly Hills, set against the Bangles singing an energetic version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shades of Winter.” In the lyrics are loosely veiled indications of how far the kids have fallen from the hope and aspiration at their high school graduation just six months earlier. “Time, time, time, See what’s become of me. While I look around for my possibilities. I was so hard to please.” Yes, indeed. The sentiment is true Gen X apathy, and the tune is re-packaged with a frenetic 80s sound as the traditional becomes modern art deco. A frenetic guitar with an angsty urgency in the voice accents the scene of Clay’s return to the land of excess.
The bleak sense of relationships throughout the film seems synonymous with the family dynamic of Generation X, coming of age as divorce rates and broken homes skyrocketed throughout the 70s and 80s. The term broken home became reality across all income levels. You get the sense that Clay doesn’t really want to go home for the holidays, and that’s only slightly less depressing than Julian who can’t go home. “Having trouble at home?” Clay asks Julian who spent the night on a park bench. “All of them,” was the sardonic reply. The echoes of empty houses resonate throughout the film, especially as Blair stops by her Dad’s house, ultimately wishing him a Merry Christmas through a closed bedroom door. As the children of divorce, or just a disconnected, disaffected homes, the distant demeanor of Clay, Blair, and Julian reflect the Gen X ethos, superficially engaged but one or two steps removed from actual close personal relationships. It’s the images of 70s-esque childhoods with drunken vacuous Christmas parties of estranged families either on the verge of divorce or blandly dealing with the fractured pieces at a time of faux unity. The American institution of the family is exposed as being on the verge of breaking up, but never acknowledging, revealing, or talking about it except in hushed conversations down the hall amidst the superficially decorated houses. Is it any wonder that Prozac first hit the market in 1987?
The most compelling element of Less Than Zero is not the glam, the glitz, the music, or the style, but instead the enduring loneliness all the characters feel — even at the clubs. On their first night out together, the most haunting scene is Julian freebasing the coke Rip gave him, near the gate away from his friends whom he’d begged to join him. In true 1980s style, drugs don’t look fun in this movie — they look desperate. And Julian’s entire persona seems like a desperate attempt to feel something, anything at a time in a place devoid of connection. So often the friends appear together but alone, and their worlds are so clearly falling apart even as they make feeble attempts to hold them together. As the story careens toward its inevitable denouement, the increasingly haunting synthesizer music in the background contrast the earlier stretches of empty air and silence in the film. The bleak finality of Julian’s death on an empty desert highway near Palms Springs is the only way this Christmas story can end, with Clay and Blair’s weeping lost amidst the sweeping desolate landscape.
Is Less Than Zero a Christmas movie? Is it even really an 80s teen flick? Contrasted with the era’s naively hopeful John Hughes films, and released as the 1980s careened toward an end with a jarring stock market crash, it only made sense for the reality behind the whimsical teen film and the feel-good Christmas movie to reach its inevitable nihilistic decline in becoming Less Than Zero. 30 years later, the film still has the ability to captivate, reminding us of that weird fast time that was the late 1980s when everything seemed so glamorous, at least on the surface, but callously exposed the harsh reality of a society gone emotionally bankrupt. As far as Christmas movies go, Less Than Zero still qualifies, though it’s as Generation X’s pessimistic answer to Virginia’s classic question: No, Virginia. In Beverly Hills 1987, there is no Santa Claus.
But there is lots of snow.
