"Hollywoodizing" Hollywood Debauchery

I loved the movie Less Than Zero when it came out 21 years ago. I watched it many times. I cried many times. All those pretty people leading meaningless lives, and pretty Andrew McCarthy as Clay trying to save his friends from that meaninglessness. Now I've read the novel, and Clay isn't quite as sympathetic a character in print as he was on film. And the characters in the book weren't just doing drugs and having casual sex. I don't really want to give too much away. It's still a good, depressing read, just as I found the movie to be good and depressing. I understand Ellis has been given a hard time about his writing - all the loose morals, gratuitous violence and such. But, when being a good American means, primarily, being a good consumer, why not numb yourself. It seems to me that Ellis is trying to point out that when your goals and interactions are meaningless - there's not one relationship of any depth among the characters - you have to escape somehow. I think when Hollywood cleaned up the story for the movie, they squelched its impact. The parents of the movie actually seemed to be concerned for their kids. Not so in the book. Ellis's felony indictment of American society is reduced to a misdemeanor. My recommendation: see the movie for the brooding performances of Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz and the realistic, stunning, and ominous performance of Robert Downey Jr. Read the book to really get the point.