Less Than Zero Analysis

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“While greed may have been rewarded in the '80s, lust, be it for drugs or sex, proved fatal for thousands.” The 1980’s, because of development in technology, saw major changes of socio-economics. Many Americans’ symbolize this time period as the “yuppie” generation: a baby boomer with a college degree, a well paying job, and very exclusive taste. This decade was more materialistic and self-centered than anyone in their past heritage had ever been. Television shows such as The Big Chill and Bright Lights, Big City portrayed young men and women as very successful, but showed them with many insecurities and not much happiness. One of the biggest characteristics during this era is first 24-hour music video channel, MTV, airing the first video “Video …show more content…
Freese argues “the ubiquitous mass medium of Music Television with its incessant flow of video clips, its devotion to glittering surfaces, its limitation to the immediate present, and the reduction of its 'stories' to the short attention span of contemporary youth really found its verbal equivalent in a new narrative style”. Demonstrating how Less than Zero gives a scary entrance into social failure through the influence of mass media like MTV. Freese evaluates Ellis’s decision to express characters emotion through repetitive song lyrics, which consequently keeps the reader searching for answers that never seem to appear. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the young adults around the age of Ellis’ characters and explains their “ruthless pursuit of pleasure, and their violence and inhumanity is the formative influence exerted upon them by the ubiquitous mass media devoted to the lurid”. While Pan argues the “is it real” aspect of the novel he addresses Ellis’ way of making one feel as if they have missed out on the action in Los Angeles, but allows them to experience these things within the upper class. This is illustrated in a scene in Less than Zero "Yeah, I think it's real too. It's gotta be. Yeah? I mean, like how can you fake a castration?” Pan discusses Ellis’s use of mature subject matter, how it was a controversial subject and allowed the reader to question the …show more content…
Without the consumerist lifestyles they are given, their parents would have been more engaged in their children’s lives. Even Clay’s psychiatrist continues to focus on his own consumerist lifestyle instead of focusing on his patient’s emotional conflicts. Just as Sahlin argues, there is much corruption living in such materialistic lifestyles shown in Less Than Zero and it is evident how drugs, alcohol, parties, death and loneliness is the outcome of this consumerist lifestyle. By focusing on parental involvement in their child’s lives it is proven that “nothingness” is an actual feeling that comes from the emotional neglect of parents being absent physically or emotionally. Without the consumerist lifestyle parents would have been more physically involved because they could not afford to constantly be gone, such as whenever Clay asks where one of his friends’ mother is and she says one place, but her mother was pictured somewhere differently. There was no connection between mother and child because of the materialistic block. In Less than Zero it is very evident that those who have everything family is close to nothing and it seems as if no one in the family has a goal of any type. This lack of emotion is inherited along with the money from older generations, both of which had negative outcomes for the youth. Parents would travel on
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