They’re who the kids are stuck with, though, when a girl’s mangled body is found fastened to a tennis net and their classmates start disappearing. Bret is certain that the handsome new boy in school, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere), is the culprit. But his logic—that Robert must be a killer because he denies having been at the screening of The Shining where Bret first spotted him—is pretty flimsy. For some reason, Bret can’t get his friends to care about the murders. They’re too busy planning homecoming festivities and angling to get on dance-contest TV shows. Maybe their denial can be shrugged off as typical teen self-involvement, but it doesn’t explain why he seems more invested in the case than police and even some parents of the missing.
The Shards is dense with references. To make sense of the show beyond the plot’s generic teenage politicking and serial-killer thrills, you must know that The Shining is a horror story about a writer becoming violently unhinged; that its other Jack Nicholson footnote, Chinatown, is synonymous with systemic evil too entrenched to fight; that the financial disaster that was Michael Cimino’s 1980 feature Heaven’s Gate symbolizes the end of New Hollywood’s auteur-driven ’70s renaissance, leaving the industry to chase youthful faces and shiny trends. (Bret gives a Patrick-Bateman-esque monologue about how music videos are the future of art.) The casting piles new signifiers atop the source material. Gerber is the spookily identical daughter of Cindy Crawford, the ultimate Gen X beauty. Gere shares a square jaw with his father, Richard, whose breakthrough movie, American Gigolo—another tale of sex and murder in L.A., whose writer-director, Paul Schrader, worked with Ellis on The Canyons—was released just in time to be referenced by The Shards’ characters. Richard Gere was married to Crawford in the early ’90s. Gerber and Homer Gere don’t share any parents, but the connection adds a pseudo-incestuous twinge to their characters’ mutual attraction. Dig deeper, and you’ll find that Homer Gere’s mother, the actor Carrie Lowell, was once married to Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Joan Didion, whose work both Ellis and his Shards alter ego idolize.
Read the full article here
