Abhiroop Das
Created by Ryan Murphy, FX’s ‘The Shards’ features a character who shares his name with author Bret Easton Ellis, whose book is the source material for the entire show. The similarities don’t end there, either, as this character, Bret, paints a vivid picture of the early 1980s and how his literary ambitions fit squarely within that period. As the psychological horror unfolds, we get a deeper look into the teenage consciousness through him, and the parallels between what is real and what is unique to this world begin to blur, if not disappear outright. It is not unusual for writers to dramatize themselves as the main characters of their works, be it as a metafictional commentary or as a wish-fulfillment exercise. Ellis’ take on this storytelling technique, though, cannot be neatly put into either of these categories, which adds its own unique flair to the tale.
Bret is a Semi-Fictional Self-Insert of Author Bret Easton Ellis
Bret, the protagonist of ‘The Shards,’ is indeed a heavily fictionalized version of author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis, perhaps best known for his novel ‘American Psycho.’ The FX series is based on Ellis’ book ‘The Shards’ and has often been described as a work of autofiction, a genre that blurs the line between classic autobiographies and straight-up fiction. Given this unique mix, autofictive works are often self-referential in nature and are known to play with the reader’s ability to guess what might be based in reality. Ellis has already attempted this style of storytelling with his book, ‘Lunar Park,’ which also features a protagonist named Bret, but in ‘The Shards’ we see a refined, much more complex blend of fact and fiction.
From the start, some details about Bret, the character, seem to directly overlap with Ellis’ life. Just like his namesake character, Ellis was born in Los Angeles in 1964 and attended the famous Buckley School, located at 3900 Stansbury Avenue, in Sherman Oaks. Much of the show takes place during Bret’s final year of school, where he navigates a complex situation back at home while spending most of his time with a core group of friends. In real life, Ellis graduated from Buckley in 1982, and the same year, his parents divorced. However, this is where we start to notice some differences between the real and the fictional world.
Bret’s Arc is Not Meant to Reflect the Author’s Exact Lived Experiences
Unlike the real-life Bret Easton Ellis, who has two sisters, the character of Bret is depicted as an only child. In his podcast, Ellis described this as a conscious decision to protect his sisters’ privacy, noting that they had previously objected to him writing about them in other novels. However, that doesn’t mean that all of the characters in ‘The Shards’ have been created from scratch. On the contrary, Bret’s friend circle, which includes characters such as Debbie, Susan, Thom, and Robert, is loosely based on Ellis’ friends and classmates from high school. That said, the author has never explicitly connected any of these characters to real-life people, and it is entirely likely that they serve as composite constructs meant to complement Bret’s arc.
In a conversation with Vanity Fair, Ellis talked about one of his former classmates connecting with him on social media to comment on how she is portrayed in the book. Her message, as he recalled, was “Of all the names you could have chosen, the name I hate the most is Debbie.” While this suggests that there are distinctive parallels between Ellis’ high school experiences and what is penned in the book, he has confirmed that the larger plot of ‘The Shards’ is still fictional. As a character, Bret serves as our eyes and ears into a very specific period and mood in history, and this is also reflected in the TV adaptation.
Under creator Ryan Murphy’s vision, the character of Bret comes to embody the 80s, be it in his visual aesthetics or speech, which is what really makes him a believable presence on screen. There is also the voiceover narration that runs throughout the show, and while recording it, Ryan and the actor Igby Rigney, who plays Bret, had to put in a lot of effort to match Ellis’s voice and line delivery, which can be found in the audiobook version of ‘The Shards.’ These stylistic overlaps aside, much of Bret’s journey has its origins in fiction, and the autobiographical elements of the show largely seem to serve as the foundations for the story.
Read More: The Shards Episode 1 and 2 Recap: Pilot and Don’t You Want Me?
You must be logged in to post a comment.