Ryan Murphy's Shards Looks Critical While Making Excess Visually Transcendent
Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Shards arrives this week as what the marketing promises us is a critique of amoral teenage excess in 1980s Los Angeles.
The show doesn't hide its ingredients, which include cocaine, serial murder, designer clothes. Parents so absent they barely exist as concept. What Murphy seems to be offering is a moral reckoning with inherited wealth and the narcissism it breeds—but what viewers will actually consume is something far more seductive and far less critical than that.
This exact structural trap caught fire thirty years ago with Mary Harron's American Psycho. Released in 1991, the film was positioned as savage satire of the investment banking bro—a scalpel aimed at masculine ambition and consumerism gone septic.
The visual language—the obsessive attention to Valentino suits, the lingering shots of business cards and apartment design, the eroticized violence—looked like critique through the distance of irony. But for the finance and fashion men who actually watched it, American Psycho functioned as an instruction manual. They didn't absorb the satire because the satire wasn't where the visual pleasure was concentrated. It was in the surfaces.
You can't mock cocaine hedonism while making cocaine hedonism look transcendent.
”The Shards builds itself the same way. Murphy and Ellis have created something that looks accusatory from far away—but parental absence becomes narrative setup rather than something interrogated. Cocaine addiction reads as aesthetic rather than consequence. The visual excess arrives first. The critical commentary arrives buried or not at all.
Satire dies the moment the thing being satirized becomes visually more compelling than the satire itself. This isn't about intent. It's about what happens in the actual space between what's on screen and what people take home. When you consume something beautiful that's supposed to sicken you, the beauty usually wins. Watch how carefully you're actually interrogating the excess versus how often you're just admiring it.
Rewatch Mary Harron's American Psycho and notice where your eye lingers—the Valentino suits and business cards or the satirical critique—to understand how visual seduction can neutralize moral argument.
