The glittering and dark California of the 1980s, as portrayed by Bret Easton Ellis, is now in a TV series+++

The spearhead of the West was 1980s California. It seemed as though all the happiness in the world was concentrated there. Never before, nor would it ever again, had such a mass of rich, fair-haired, self-assured people been seen. The West is the best. Such a collective human dream could only give rise to a serial killer. Or rather, many serial killers, for whom those years and that land were a golden age. "The Shards" is the novel by Bret Easton Ellis that has been adapted into a TV series airing on Disney+, which attempts to explain this apparent contradiction. It’s only apparent, because there’s no party that doesn’t end badly sooner or later. Whilst in Italy we’ve grown accustomed to romanticising the 1980s as an era of mindless carefree fun, “The Shards” takes us into the heart of darkness of the most glittering decade of the last century. It is the prequel to Ellis’s debut novel, "Less Than Zero", and recounts his formative years as a writer: a sixth-former in his final year, surrounded by super-cool peers, he sees a new student arrive at school, becomes infatuated with him and begins to suspect that he is the deranged killer making threatening phone calls to his friends. Intuition or hallucination? Ellis’s trademark is blurring the line between reality and the most paranoid fantasies. This ambiguity works very well in writing, but less so on screen, because images impose a sense of truth that the written word is quite happy to do without. The David Hockney-esque colours, however, are stunning, overlaid with shadows that swallow up the bodies.

Just like in films from the Reagan era, here too there are almost exclusively teenagers, who neither protest nor fight nor compromise with their parents. They simply ignore them. The few adults are teenagers who’ve aged terribly, and who, incidentally, lust after their daughters’ boyfriends. Decidedly frivolous people. Here’s the problem: how do you distinguish fantasy from reality if no one teaches you? Having taken a fair few knocks themselves, the grown-ups ought to be able to explain the difference between an open door and a closed one. But when there’s so much money, such huge swimming pools, and cocaine everywhere, who fancies giving or listening to lectures? Who bothers to grow up or help others grow up? Everything seems open, within easy reach. So reality takes its revenge. Because what is forgotten does not disappear but spreads. It’s the same logic as a sick body which, by pretending to be healthy, becomes even sicker and infects those around it. If there are no longer any cemeteries, the whole city becomes one – villas, drawing rooms and parties included. California in those years had banished grief from school records. Censoring it, however, has the sole consequence of losing control over it. If the killer preys on the most perfect of lineages, it is because the score there had remained unsettled for too long. Even the golden age, if you dig deep enough, is made of bones.