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THIS IS NOT A HORROR FILM.
The Eighties. God, how I hated living through that decade. Untrammeled greed, minimalism, banal music everywhere you turned, women treated like absolute crap, and snobbery based upon the level of one's material comforts. And absolute blindness to evil. Come to think of it, much of that could still be said, and always could be. But pride in greed, which we still live with, reached a point of true malevolence in that decade in a way so obvious it screamed to be impaled.

Bret Easton Ellis often gets a bad rap because he presented the Eighties as it was without casting any moral judgment besides that which was implicit in the description itself. Which made people think he saw nothing wrong with it, which only goes to show how literal-minded and dumb most Americans are. But the best form of satire is, as David Byrne once observed, that which lets the target speak in its own words and hang itself thereby. If your subject is horrible enough, its own rancid viewpoint, presented clearly, should be sufficient. However, most satire-especially nowadays, and indeed for the past ten years-is so obsessed with pushing its moral viewpoint and not having the public mistake the target's viewpoint for the author's that it feels the need to moralize and tell the audience it's bad. But then, everyone wants to be liked. To his credit, Ellis doesn't care.

But look at Ellis' subjects-spoiled cokeheaded SoCal youth, materially obsessed misogynist yuppies, etc. His technique was always letting them describe their worlds, with no obvious input on his part. Readers reacted in disgust, as they were meant to. But the disgust was usually misdirected at Ellis himself, which is the risk one runs when writing hard satire; as though Ellis was somehow describing himself and didn't understand the evil of what he was saying. In retrospect, though, one finds that Ellis is the only writer of the 80s literary brat pack whose work still holds up. Like him or hate him, Ellis captured the loathsome soul-or rather, lack thereof-of a decade where we became hard, cold, hateful, and where every human relationship, in reaction to the admittedly sometimes nauseating warm fuzziness of the nonmaterialistic hippie culture that had made its way into mainstream thought by then, suddenly was entirely defined by economic relationships.

No wonder Marxism was so much more in vogue among the young then. (Now they just want to get into an internet startup)Look around you. Has the greed abated? Has

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