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Lonely Young Men: A Baudrillardian Analysis of the Disaffection in the Novels of Bret Easton Ellis

by Robert Coppin, Lancaster University

 

Introduction 

“In New York,” writes Jean Baudrillard, “the mad have been set free. Let out into the city, they are difficult to tell apart from the rest of the punks, junkies, addicts, winoes, or down-and-outs who inhabit it.”1 The place he describes has become a run for every facet of society, bunched together by their otherness, who, collectively, have “taken hold of the whole city”.2 It is “completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence”3; yet, along with Los Angeles, which is plagued by similar social difficulties, it is one of America’s twin iconic cultural hubs. It would seem inevitable that these problems, rife as they are, would affect the psychological constitution of the cities’ residents; indeed, Baudrillard states that urban Americans are “ideal material for an analysis of all the possible variants of the modern world.”4 This perspective is shared, it seems, by Bret Easton Ellis. With striking similarities to Baudrillard’s picture of New York, Julian Murphet describes Ellis’s “fictional ouevre” as “the absence of innocence, the hollowness of character, lack of connection, the arrogance, indifference, apathy and sheer waste of white, middle-class America”5. These similarities, their causes, effects and attempted resolutions, are the topics of this dissertation.

Ellis’s novels all concern disenfranchised young men attempting to connect and communicate with others. This seems to be the opposite of the relentless frontier pushing of the ‘American Dream’, in which the ideal is to become self-sufficient enough to be able to exclude other people and transcend the necessity of community. Yet it is this very ideal that seems to have choked one of the cornerstones of humanity (as opposed to existence) – that of the interpersonal relationship. Social aspect of Ellis’s work such as this are often overlooked in favour of the admittedly shocking scenes that appear, in differing quantities, in all his books, but to focus on these passages is to mistake his fiction. Instead, one should read these scenes in the broader context of his canon as a whole, seeing them as part of a collage of techniques used to illustrate a wider concern: that of a consumer society expanded too far and too drastically into every sphere of life.

As evidenced by his book of the same name, ‘the consumer society’ is also one of Baudrillard’s chief preoccupations. He equates consumption and consumerism with a “luxurious and spectacular penury”6 in which “the humans … are surrounded not so much by other human beings…but by objects” (TCS, p.25). With this in mind, a detailed critique of consumerism and its effects on characters in Ellis’s novels will constitute the first, main chapter of this study, the first half of which will deal with how the characters are restrained and the second half with how, if at all, they try to escape these restraints. I will then progress to a discussion of more general themes relating to alienation in both writers’ work, with a particular emphasis on the mental state of Ellis’s protagonists and the implications this for society as a whole.

Chapter One

It should be pointed out first of all that wealth and consumption as we understand them are, at least partly, symptoms of greater neuroses and concerns. Baudrillard quotes E. Lisle: “the cost of rapid progress in the production of wealth is … the instability of employment, [which] produces a general sense of insecurity. The psychological and social pressures of mobility, of status and competition at all levels … are becoming more burdensome for everyone”(TCS p.40). This is reflected, Baudrillard states, by the current trend of buying – and depending on – bottled water, a phenomenon widespread in Ellis’s fiction. This behaviour is “a response to the deficient quality of urban water”(TCS p.39) rather than a simple display of affluence. Similarly, the concept of banking money displays a deep-seated fear that everything will be lost at some point and thus one will need reserves to rely on. For this reason, Baudrillard cites ancient civilisations like the Kalahari as the only groups who have ever known “true affluence” since they never saved or stored, eating food immediately and “shar[ing] everything within the group”(TCS p.67). This is at least the initial reason why wealth does not immediately beget happiness – because behind its fundamental principle lies anxiety.

Consumption, according to Baudrillard, is not something that people do in order to find fulfilment in our society. It is not an active pursuit in which the more one consumes, the more joyous one will be. Instead, it is a self-perpetuating phenomenon that coerces subjects into using a system of signs that affects their methods of communication and interaction: the consumer is “endowed with a heightened sense of formal rationality” which causes him to “seek his own happiness without the slightest hesitation” and “prefer objects which will provide him with the greatest satisfactions”(TCS p.69). Hence, happiness is “measurable in terms of objects and signs”– it is purely the command of “visible criteria”(TCS p.49) and thus creates a sense of alienation from ourselves and others. This externalised, objectified manifestation of happiness is visible in abundance throughout Ellis’s fiction. His prose is punctuated with instances of characters’ moods being affected by possessions, such as American Psycho’s famous scene in which, confronted by a colleague’s new and expensive business card, Patrick admits how “the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum, compared to [the] card”7. However, despite living in a consumerist “utopia”8 in which everything is available for purchase, anything more than a fleeting sense of smugness caused by one’s possessions seems elusive. In fact, the constant pressures of keeping up with trends takes its toll on Ellis’s protagonists, with each of them suffering some sort of anxiety attack at some point in their respective novels. Furthermore, each of his novels are pregnant with a sense of foreboding: in American Psycho the first words the reader sees are “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” (AP p.3) followed up by violent nosebleeds occurring periodically throughout the text; whilst in Glamorama Victor, the lead, sees “giant eruption[s] of flies”9 wherever he goes. This gives us the first indication that the world Ellis describes is not a modern paradise.

Rather than describe his characters’ environments in terms of their structural and geographical surroundings, Ellis chooses to surround them with media and possessions. These are what make up the characters’ locations, not architecture. Indeed, it is this relentless barrage of objects and product placements that defines Ellis’s work, a characteristic expanded upon in Glamorama in which, due to the abundance of celebrity-heavy parties, names like Armani and Alexander McQueen refer both to products and the individuals themselves. This highlights the fact that, like Baudrillard observes, “sumptuary, useless, inordinate expenditure”(TCS p.46) is what is worshipped and aspired to, as opposed to intellectual excellence or any internal, emotional process. In a statement that seems eerily prophetic of Ellis’s work, Baudrillard then alleges that characters are “never so great as when … they pay for this elevated position with their lives”(TCS p.46). Although none of Ellis’s central protagonists ever physically die, it is left for the reader to make a judgement on whether the empty lives they live constitutes a psychological expiration.

Baudrillard claims that two ‘buzz words’ of consumer society, “‘environment’ and ‘ambience’”, have “only enjoyed such a vogue since we have come to live not so much alongside human beings … as beneath the mute gaze of mesmerising, obedient objects”(TCS p.25). This idea is particularly pertinent with regards to Glamorama, in which Victor is employed to design venues which are less clubs than “aphrodisiac[s]”(G p.45) – devaluing the presence of people in favour of décor. Notably, Victor is a willing participant in this process: the novel opens with him exhorting his team to greater efforts in order to ready his new bar in time for its opening. In an environment where priorities are so willingly inverted, it is only natural that characters’ self-worth should be adversely affected.

Nevertheless, despite the notion of place being skewed to override that of the individual, characters attempt to seek refuge by finding a ‘place’ in which they feel secure and accepted. The difficulty of finding this elusive location, however, often makes this impossible. Less Than Zero is based around the premise of Clay’s return to an abandoned, comfortless home over a University vacation, for instance, whereas Victor’s disorientation in Glamorama is partially achieved by shifting his location regularly so he cannot adjust to any one environment. Having a stable place of residence is important, Baudrillard states, because a “degradation of our shared living space” has been induced by the “advances of affluence”(TCS p.39). We need a territory of our own not only as a marker of wealth but also as a retreat, since communal and public areas have become corrupted. Naturally, in an age of physical demonstration, the larger one’s space the higher the status (hence the attraction of balconies and second homes, which increase the size of one’s territory). Consequently, after Patrick murders Paul Owen in American Psycho, his first action is to colonise his apartment and “send the bastard to England”(AP p.218). This shows a desire for absolute control not only over Owen’s life but also over his living space, furthering the idea of a personal arena as integral to one’s existence. By taking over Owen’s apartment, Patrick increases his own symbolic power and attempts to subdue his ever-present insecurity.

Perhaps the most cited space in Ellis’s work is that of Camden University. Each one of his novels includes at least one reference to it and The Rules of Attraction is set there, making it one of the spiritual cores for his characters. The Rules of Attraction is notable for being quite unlike any of Ellis’s other books inasmuch as it harbours a “sneaking mawkishness and sentimentality”10 for its characters and, one suspects, its setting (being a fictionalisation of his own college, Bennington11). However, partly because of this, it includes ideas relevant to Baudrillard’s theories on space. The two main off-campus excursions in the book – Sean and Mitchell’s aborted drug deal and Paul’s trip to Boston to see his mother – both end as unmitigated disasters, thus displaying the campus if not as a ‘safe haven’ then at least as somewhere less menacing than the outside world.. Similarly, Sean’s roommate, Bertrand, hangs up a red parachute in their room, dividing each occupant’s half and ensuring each one is private. For ease of communication the parachute has a “slit”12, making each half distinctly womb-like in appearance. By portraying the Camden’s campus as a safe haven and equating one’s personal space with the womb, Ellis again highlights Baudrillard’s theory of the grave importance of a secure territory.

Baudrillard sees the cessation Universities as a place of educational expansion. Instead, they have become places where “we must be trained, we must learn, to consume”(TCS p.4). Any other perceived function has expired. This is mirrored by Patrick mistaking a student “sitting on the steps of a Brownstone on Amsterdam [with] a Styrofoam coffee cup” for a homeless person and putting a dollar in her (full) cup of coffee – education is redundant, the message seems to be. This perspective is strengthened by the fact that Universities in Ellis’s fiction are always satellites around towns, never in the urban centres themselves – suggesting a spatial alienation if nothing else. Additionally, being “a class institution”(TCS p.59), a University education signifies the possession of and desire for wealth. This further explains the student’s initial appearance as a beggar.

Finally, it should be noted that Camden students seem to do everything apart from actually study. Rules…sees its characters attend far more parties than classes and Victor, Lauren’s absentee boyfriend, spends entire terms smoking “a lot of hash”(TROA p.17) in Europe. This is the final nail in the coffin for education as a means of countering one’s disaffection, as even the process of education is missing from a University lifestyle.

Characters in Ellis’s novels spend a huge amount of time and effort on their bodies. Victor, for instance, spends hours at a time with his personal trainer, who costs $175 per hour and is “so well defined he looks skinned”(G p.54); Patrick Bateman, similarly, in chapters such as ‘Morning’, describes his morning beauty routine in such excruciating and almost religious detail that “all vestiges of ‘Patrick’ have vanished in the veneer of promotion”13. Such “treatments and regimes … and sacrificial practices” attached to the body “all bear witness to the fact that the body has today become an object of salvation …. [it has] taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul ”(TCS p.129). Characters literally seek redemption through their bodies, working out or grooming as a form of self-flagellation designed to purge their insecurities. However, this is ultimately an exercise in futility. For working out, the very approach through which “salvation” is sought, is a means of investing in the body “as capital and as fetish”(TCS p.129), “a sign, at the level of the body, that one is a member of the elect, just as success is such a sign in business”(TCS p.132). The body is only ‘liberated’ through attention because “[i]t has to be ‘liberated, emancipated’ to be able to be exploited rationally for productivist ends”(TCS p.135). Therefore, by going to such great lengths to ‘improve’ themselves, characters are in fact perpetuating the very system of consumption of signs and signifiers that their alienation originated from, turning their bodies into “a sign for others”14. Indeed, the very methods through which characters ‘liberate’ their bodies – exercise machines, tanning salons, lotions and mousses – take place via objects, proving that “the only drive that is really liberated is the drive to buy”(TCS p.135).

Patrick Bateman’s morning routine, characterised by its heavy employment of “deep-pore cleanser lotion” and “clarifying lotion that removes flakes and uncovers fine skin”(AP pp.26-7), is also particularly interesting when we examine it in the light of Baudrillard’s theories on hygiene. It displays “fantasies of sterility, asepsis [and] prophylaxis” and “aims at a negative definition of the body, by elimination, as if it were a smooth, faultless, sexless object, cut off from all external aggression and therefore protected from itself”(TCS p.141). Patrick associates this removal of ‘flakes’ with a removal of humanity and sexuality; his body, and the bodies of all Ellis’s protagonists, are vessels of a “forgotten, censored desire” that must be “watched over, reduced and mortified”(TCS p.142). This can be seen best most effectively in the field of fashion. The “body of [the] absolute model,” writes Baudrillard, “constitutes itself as an object that is equivalent to the other sexless and functional objects purveyed in advertising”(TCS p.134). Victor’s body, and the bodies of the “blond-haired pretty male model”15 crowd that populates all of Clay’s parties in Less Than Zero, have ceased to become bodies as much as they have become “a forum of signs”(TCS p.133).

Through their exclusive health club membership, personal trainer sessions, diets and medication, Ellis’s characters display a “deep-seated belief that it has to cost you something … for your health to be yours in exchange”(TCS p.140, emphasis omitted). The system of consumption and production has affected their comprehension of their own bodies; they now feel that they must consume in order to attain the right to be healthy, assuming not that “the body should serve”, but rather that they are enjoined to “put themselves in the service of their own bodies”(TCS p.140). Such an inverted relationship occurring in a system in which ownership is valued above all else suggests alienation from the character’s own selves.

A recurrent image in Ellis’s fiction is that of the restaurant meal. Fashionable establishments are the accepted meeting place for his characters, whether they are meetings with parents, friends or colleagues. In an environment where “monkfish with mango slices and red snapper sandwich on brioche with maple syrup”(AP p.235) is a normal lunch, “slenderness becomes a distinctive sign in itself”(TCS p.141), signifying, as it does, the ability and desire to achieve aesthetic excellence, and also nullifying the traditional link between food and comforting homeliness. However, it is also an attempted rebellion against the abundance of open advertising space surrounding them – in contrast to billboards, airwaves and the general ubiquity of advertising that characterises the consumer society, Ellis’s characters set themselves incredibly restrictive spatial limits. They pit themselves directly against the world they inhabit by virtue of what is effectively a form of sado-masochism in which “the body is literally sacrificed”(TCS p.143). This rebellion, whether it is conscious or unconscious, represents the opposite to pregnancy, symbolising as it does the refusal to bring any more potentially corruptible flesh into the world.

Even the food served in the restaurants has been corrupted. Dishes that are essentially different forms of dead animal are turned into gastronomic miracles, such as “lamb sausage salad with lobster and white beans sprayed with lime and fois gras vinegar”(AP p.296), which have “disguise[d] the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food”16. Even the characters’ nutrition is “based on coatings and alibis”17. Through the constant obligation to live their lives immersed in a barrage of signs and falsities, they become distanced even from life’s vital functions such as eating. As Young says, “[w]hen every aspect of life is mediated by commodity form it is impossible to experience anything without the mediation of commodity”18, so their food’s commodification contributes to their alienation.

Restaurant-centric lifestyles are a symptom of the lack of actual work that takes place in Ellis’s fiction. Back for Christmas, Clay does not even consider getting a job or even studying for his return; Patrick’s attempt at “stressing his normality”(AP p.268) in his work environment consists of pretending to give advice on sartorial etiquette to an imaginary caller; Victor protests against an important business meeting because he is “in the middle of becoming some kind of brooding god”(G p.57). All these characters have extravagant amounts of leisure time on their hands and seem to rejoice in having very few commitments save their social engagements. This not only displays wealth through signifying “unproductive consumption of time” which has a “value of social distinction”(TCS pp.157-8), but also, on a less intentional level, suggests a “fervid hope for freedom”(TCS p.152), a desperate desire to escape the constraints that the consumer society has forced upon them. But the paradox is that, in having this leisure time at their disposal already, “the desire is already absent, necessarily absent”(TCS p.152). The concept of ‘free time’ is a product of consumer society (Baudrillard again cites the Kalahari people whose time was filled with activities) and is therefore “necessarily subject to the same status as all the goods produced or available within the framework of that system of production: that of … the object, possessed and alienable”(TCS p.152). Hence, just as one would stop desiring a Rolex watch when one owns a Rolex, Ellis’s characters are unable to use free time as an escape because they already possess it in large quantities.

Baudrillard quotes Hubert Macé when he states that, when socialising, the presence of a crowd is necessary to make an individual “‘feel as though they are really somebody’”(TCS p.156). This is why parties are such a key motif in Ellis’s fiction – even when characters dislike the company they are in, such as when Patrick dismisses Evelyn’s Christmas party as being full of “[m]idgets who are about to sing ‘O Tannenbaum’ … Do you know how scary that is?”(AP p.190), they still stay because they feel justified in their existence when in the company of others. It is “gaining the approval of others”(TCS p.171) that is the driving force behind the system of consumption, as ‘approval’ is what the purchase of objects supposedly achieves. This addiction to socialising becomes so pathological, however, that it starts to have negative repercussions on their lives. When Victor is being held captive in Glamorama, for instance, his guard knows he will return to him after an unaccompanied walk because he has “no [other] place to go”(G p.477) in which people will know him. This shows that the need for attention and acceptance, the need for a ‘pack’, hinders the desire to escape (literally, in Glamorama) from consumerism.

Interestingly, but somewhat predictably, the behaviour of groups of peers in Ellis’s fiction is heavily stylised and impersonal: “What’s going on?”(TROA p.8) is the default student greeting, whereas “cackles [and] high five[s]”(AP p.51) play the same role in American Psycho. The obligation to follow such strict social protocol reaches an utterly bizarre apex when Victor refers to his father as “bro”(G p.80) during a meeting. The eradication of “spontaneous [and] reciprocal” human relations and ensuing replacement with lukewarm ritualistic niceties is indicative of human warmth only being transferable “in signified form …. waves of fake spontaneity, ‘personalised’ language [and] orchestrated emotions”(TCS p.161, emphasis omitted). Greetings are now designed merely to gratify all the involved parties, rather than communicate any meaningful message.  However, Baudrillard does not stop there:

This system of solicitude is based on a total contradiction. Not only can it not mask the iron law of market society … which is competition … but this system, in spite of appearances, is itself a system of production. It is the production of communication, of human relations in the service sector style. What it produces is sociability …. Though designed to produce solicitude, it is condemned simultaneously to produce – and reproduce – distance, non-communication, opacity and atrocity. (TCS p.162)

Thus we see that, through their casual but co-ordinated methods of greeting, Ellis’s characters merely succeed in alienating themselves further.

Baudrillard’s mention of the ‘service sector’ raises a separate point in relation to Ellis’s work – that of his characters’ proficiency in everyday life. Murphet describes Patrick Bateman’s confident first-person narration style as “a smokescreen masking risible ineffectuality”, an inefficiency that makes him “unable to reserve seats in Dorsia, unable to handle the elusive Fisher account, unable to hire a new video, unable to hang his David Onica the right way up, unable to strangle Carruthers, unable to retain control over Paul Owen’s apartment, and so on.”19 Nor is this incompetence limited to Patrick. Clay cannot stop listening to the snuff film, nor save Julian from his life of prostitution, nor save the girl that Spin has abducted; Sean and Mitchell cannot execute a simple drug deal; and Victor must be one of the least able protagonists ever committed to the page. This pronounced lack of efficiency betrays a distinct lack of real power at the characters’ disposal – despite their enviable material wealth, they find themselves impotent at every turn and lacking in “[k]nowledge and power [which] are … the two great scarce commodities of our affluent societies”(TCS p.57). The power that they possess is “a special effect”20. This lack of meaningful ability is compensated for by characters’ meticulous “mask[s] of sanity”(AP p.279) – fields in their lives over which they can administer absolute authority. For instance, when interviewed by MTV, Victor requests that the topic be changed from something that makes him “confused” to his “personal relationships with Robert Downey. Jr., Jennifer Aniston, Matt Dillon, Madonna, Latouse LaTrek and Dodi Fayed”(G p.140). Here, we see the lack of genuine power that consumerism confers on its subjects being obscured by a façade of knowledge.

Conversely, the service industry figures that Ellis’s protagonists encounter are much more aware of their predicament and seem less concerned with presenting an image of control and false satisfaction. The “jabbering”(AP p.82) dry cleaning assistant, the bartender who “rises out of his stupor a little too quickly”(LTZ p.119): the behaviour of both is “that which, within them, is battling against the contradiction of having to embody … a systematic devotion for which they are also paid. Hence the unwholesome ambience … of this exchange of ‘services’ in which the real persons resist the functional ‘personalisation’ of the exchanges”(TCS p.163). In this way, the reader associates the various waiters, assistants and prostitutes encountered in Ellis’s work with a greater humanity than is present in his protagonists.

But at the same time, this culture of false solicitude is also one of repression. The mass media should take partial responsibility for this, filling “‘pacified’ daily life” with “news reports of accidents, murders, revolutions”(TCS p.174). The prime example of this in Ellis’s work is that of Patrick’s addiction to the Patty Winters Show, a daily ‘reality’ talk show with such titles as “UFOs That Kill” (AP p.115), “Toddler-Murderers”(AP p.138) and “Teenage Girls Who Trade Sex For Crack”(AP p.181). This daily inoculation of ‘reality’ at its most shocking and hysterical, acts as a “vaccine against fragility” to familiarise the viewer with, and protect them from, “the real fragility of [their] pacified life”(TCS p.174). That this needs vaccinating against, of course, indicates that fragility is what provides the biggest obstacle for consumerism. Through desensitising their audience to such phenomena as toddler-murderers in a “consumed, packaged, homogenised way”, the media are keeping the “spectre of fragility”(TCS p.174) at bay and mollifying society.

The influence of the media on Ellis’s characters cannot be overstated. Action in his novels progress according to Baudrillard’s “radio sequence”(TCS p.121) model: there are portions of ‘serious’ drama (violence, drug abuse and ‘graphic sexual scenes’, to utilise television’s own catchphrase) interspersed with adverts (pop music, restaurants, movies), mirroring commercial radio’s own perennial progression. However, the supposedly ‘serious’ periods “are also, paradoxically, the periods of neutrality and impersonality”(TCS p.121) – the periods where the tonal vacancy of the media fail to evoke any sort of reaction on the part of the audience. This “contrasts with the highly charged nature of the discourse on objects, with its cheery, elevated tone, its vibrato. All the pathos of reality … is transferred to the object and its discourse”(TCS p.121). Such an effect is clear in Ellis’s characters’ narration, which blankly depicts child rape (Less Than Zero) and some of the most notorious scenes of violence ever written (American Psycho) in far less involved language than the same narrators describe their contemporaries’ clothing. As Murphet puts it, “[t]he adjectives used for Gel Appaisant (‘gentle, soothing’) are so much more lively and human than those used for the people in the text[s]”21. Characters find refuge in objects, things that they can control and dominate on their own terms. This willingness to alienate themselves from life and attach themselves instead to consumption is, in Ellis’s work, due to the media.

This non-linear, episodic structure of Ellis’s novels also reflects Lyotard’s theories regarding grand narrative.22 From the opening maxim of Less Than Zero – “People are afraid to merge”(LTZ p.1), repeated throughout the book – the reader is aware of a disjointed narrative arrangement that avoids chronological conventions and the need to ‘merge’ chapters into a fully coherent unit. There are instances in each of Ellis’s novels during which episodes from the future or the past are relayed to the reader, such as Clay’s ten anecdotal retellings of “[w]hen [he] was fifteen”(LTZ p.66) scattered throughout the text. The effect of such a technique on Ellis’s part is that it alienates the narrators even from their own story. They cannot provide a synchronous account of their own lives, highlighting how little control they have over their existence.

The premise of all Ellis’s novels – that of a young male protagonist dealing with youth and its trappings – would seem ideal territory for Bildungsroman-type development, but this is instead notable for its absence. From Clay’s slack-jawed progression through life to Victor’s helplessness in thrall of “the film crew”(G p.293), characters in Ellis’s novels make absolutely no intellectual development; indeed, the short chapters found in each book reflect the characters’ short attention spans. Even the first-person narrative device used in each of the books bears no fruit, with the characters’ accounts of their surroundings and situations sterile and undemonstrative. In a series of books where the constant presence of objects and consumerism is shamelessly conspicuous, the reader draws the conclusion that development is rendered impossible by the disposable and ephemeral society that consumerism encourages.

Characters’ methods for relaxation – namely, obsessions with pop music and MTV which, if removed, would inexorably lead to them “get[ting] bored”(LTZ p.86) – actually contribute to their separation from reality. This is because the “true” messages of the media “is not the manifest content of sounds and images, but the constraining pattern … of the disarticulation of the real into successive and equivalent signs”(TCS 122). By listening to pop music continuously or, indeed, exposing themselves to oversaturation of any medium, characters voluntarily disassociate their lives from reality and immerse themselves in a world of signs and signifiers which distances them from any true meaning or significance. Hence, through watching “Pamela’s Tight Fuckhole”(AP p.177) and similar films repeatedly, Patrick destroys sex as a meaningful act and, instead, emblazons it with explicit pornographic description: “Sex happens – a hard-core montage”(AP p.303).

However, we should not blame Ellis’s characters for this lack of distinction between fantasy and reality; nor, perhaps, should we even blame the media themselves. By allowing themselves to be influenced as they lie mentally supine and receptive, by not assuming the mantle of some kind of moral crusader against media persuasion, both the characters and the media rid themselves of any pretensions of a “sacred function”(TCS p.116) and thus of hypocrisy. If we were to expect Patrick – who, lest we forget, prefers the “pop” of post-Peter Gabriel Genesis to the “complex, ambiguous”(AP p.133) music produced before Gabriel’s departure – to oppose or even recognise the futility in commercialism (be it in the field of music or anywhere else), we would be clutching at straws. Instead, they seem to have assumed the identity of just another “’consumed’ … object”(TCS p.117).

Therefore we can see that the type of consumer society displayed in Ellis’s fiction, far from being a utopia in which subjects have the ultimate freedom of ownership of whatever they want, is in fact a web of constraints erected around the consumer. This web is so dense that they end up losing control over themselves, ending up just as commodified and produced as the objects they worship. Like any system of constraints, however, “the new social constraint must be accompanied by a new type of demand for freedom”(TCS p.176). Baudrillard says that, in the case of consumerism, the ‘demand for freedom’ will manifest “in violent and Erostratic form”(TCS p.176). The reference to the myth of Erostratus is a noteworthy one as, unlike Erostratus (who burnt down the temple of Diana solely to achieve eternal fame, a move that proved futile when mentioning his name was outlawed), none of Ellis’s protagonists act in their shocking ways purely in order to achieve notoriety. Indeed, the terrorism in Glamorama works in such a way that famous models embrace it in order to be out of the public eye. Instead of eminence, characters seem to be looking for means through which to gain sensation in an otherwise anaesthetised world. Baudrillard summarises these means as “destructiveness … escapist behaviour [and] contagious depressiveness”(TCS p.175), all of which are visible in abundance in Ellis’s fiction.

Patrick Bateman’s violence is an obvious manifestation of his desire for cathartic destructiveness. Frustrated to the point of literal psychosis by the lack of connection with anyone around him, Patrick lashes out in a series of horrifically violent attacks that are not premeditated as much as they are opportunistic, including, as they do, individuals from almost every social sphere. This “wild, objectless, formless” violence is so seemingly random because “the constraints that it is contesting are themselves unformulated, unconscious, illegible”(TCS p.176). Consequently, the abstract boundaries penning Patrick in are reflected in his random brutality. However, when one collates the instances of violence together, one is met with a kind of pattern. The homeless Al; the “old queer”(AP p.164); Bethany, who “starts giggling”(AP p.244) at his Onica painting; the delivery boy; the prostitutes; Paul Owen, the source of Patrick’s own jealousy regarding the Fisher account – all these victims awaken, in some way, Patrick’s “profound race and class arrogance, homophobia, misogyny, and solipsistic vanity.”23 The consumer society he personifies has restrained him in his yuppie mould so effectively that anyone that falls outside his myopic vision of reality becomes a target, a threat to his consumer utopia. In Patrick’s world, however, the strength of his alienation is so great that rather than simply being prejudiced against these ‘others’, he actually eradicates them (literally eradicating any trace of Paul Owen by “wetting the corpse down [and] pour[ing] two bags of lime over it”(AP p.219)) or consumes them (again, literally in the case of the chapter “Tries to Cook and Eat Girl”(AP p.343)). Additionally, this shows a “consumption of the surplus” that predicates Patrick’s “pre-eminence”(TCS p.43), in what can be seen as a form of potlatch.

It should also be noted that the objects themselves are implicit in Ellis’s fictional violence. The abducted and raped girl in Less Than Zero is objectified by the application of “a lot of makeup”(LTZ p.176), whereas Patrick uses a “Minox LX ultra-miniature camera that takes 9.5mm film, has a 15mm f/3.5 lens, an expensive meter and a built-in neutral density filter”(AP p.304) to film several murders, Bobby and Bruce doing the same in Glamorama. Objects are imbued with menace when seen in such circumstances, again linking consumerism with apocalyptic images.

The culture of non-violence is just as visible as the culture of violence, although it is less eye-catching and less commentated on. In Ellis’s novels, non-violence is largely characterised by the consumption of massive amounts of prescription sedatives and antidepressants, characters subduing themselves through “immense neutralisation, which is dubbed … pacified monotony on the quotidian level”24. This extends the “orchestrated passivity of [consumer] society (behind its façade of hyperactivity) into a practice of abdication and total asociality”(TCS p.180). Characters who think that they are escaping their consumerism-induced “nervous energy”(TROA p.189) by sedating themselves are, in fact, feeding themselves back in that very same system; their new-found tranquillity merely assuages their “latent violence”(TCS p.180). The very fact that drugs are needed to induce apathy shows to what extent consumerism has infiltrated the brains of Ellis’s characters – they are unable to even relax without consuming.

Throughout Ellis’s work, there is “much spontaneous talk of ‘nervous strain’, of ‘depression’ and psychosomatic illness”(TCS p.181). Clay and Julian both have an “expensive shrink”(LTZ p.169), and “I’m going crazy”(TROA p.197) is a recurring thought of Paul’s. What is more, characters often appear tired, with their “eyes glazed over”(G p.181). Although seemingly due to their social excesses (Victor’s glazed eyes are, he says, down to the fact that he “[got] torqued last night”), their exhaustion is in fact “nothing to do with muscular fatigue or lack of energy”.  It is “one of the dysfunctions of prosperity”, a dysfunction that signifies only one thing:

This society which claims to be – which regards itself as being – in constant progress towards the abolition of effort … is in fact a society of stress, tension and drug use, in which the overall balance sheet of satisfaction is increasingly in deficit, in which individual and collective equilibrium is being progressively compromised. (TCS p.181)

This is exceedingly similar to Baudrillard’s observations regarding animals penned together in a vivisection unit, who “develop a morbid anxiety …. [and] general terror”25. Instead of promoting and allowing everyone to consume happily as one social unit, the consumer society has only an antagonistic effect, alienating people from one another and affecting mental damage. The profound disaffection that Ellis’s characters exhibit is not caused by their debauched or horrific behaviour; rather, their behaviour is caused by their disaffection.

At this point, we should ask what it is that makes characters in Ellis’s work want to be satisfied at all. After all, surely a more effective technique than tranquillising oneself with expensive medication to escape life’s inherent banality would simply be suicide? Indeed, at one point in The Rules of Attraction Sean makes a lacklustre attempt on his own life, forming a noose with a Ralph Lauren tie and hanging “for about a second (not even a second) before the tie rips and [he] fall[s] like an idiot to the floor, screaming ‘Shit’”(TROA p.240). Of course, the Ralph Lauren tie would not provide the means for escape; Ralph Lauren symbolises exactly the impasse that Sean is trapped in. When questioned about his suicide attempt later in the book, Sean denies it ever took place (TROA 241). This embarrassment relating to suicide is due to consumerism indoctrinating in its subjects the idea of “enjoyment as an obligation”, through which the consumer “sees it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated … euphoric and dynamic”(TCS p.80). Characters try to make the most of their lives by the concentrated use of as many signs and objects as they can, just as consumerism advocates. To cut short this process would be treachery. This can be seen in Patrick’s incessant desire to try new restaurants, in Victor’s invitations to every conceivable celebrity to his parties and in Camden college’s proposed new motto (“You’ll never be bored” (TROA p.185) – everyone feels obliged to try new experiences and meet new people “for fear of ‘missing’ something”(TCS p.80) that might be able to provide enjoyment. The society of consumption has made it antisocial to ‘give up’ or ‘make do’; its central premise is that anything can be attained or obtained.

Throughout Ellis’s work and consumer society as a whole, “the ambivalence of desire … is split apart”(TCS p.184). The positive aspects manifest themselves in the satisfaction of consumption; the negative aspects – and there are many of these, as consumption is characterised primarily by a desire for something not yet owned – are “censored by satisfaction itself, and … crystallise into a gigantic fund of anxiety”(TCS p.176). This is the only way that consumerism’s trademark “multiplicity of disparate phenomena (affluence, violence, euphoria, depression)”(TCS p.184) can be explained. The subject is alienated from itself, it does not know its place. Furthermore, the alienated human being is not even left “intact in its essence: it is a being turned inside-out, changed into something evil, into its own enemy … the repressed returning through the agency of repression itself”(TCS p.190). We can see, therefore, that the consumerism displayed in Ellis’s novels is, if read in the light of Baudrillard’s observations in The Consumer Society, a wholly unhealthy phenomenon. Necessarily alienating its subjects from themselves and from each other, it encourages the build up of a pool of “fatigue, depression and neuroses [that is] always convertible into violence”(TCS p.182). It seems that “[a]ffluence is not, then, a paradise”(TCS p.175). It is instead an “age of radical alienation”(TCS p.191).

Chapter Two

Any study of Ellis’s work should take care to put it in historical context. His books are saturated with so much cultural and political detail that they become very specific to the era in which they are set – for instance, the ‘MTV culture’ is portrayed in Less Than Zero; the era of ‘celebrity worship’ gets the same treatment in Glamorama. The political theme that has straddled the period in which Ellis has written, however, is exceedingly sinister. Baudrillard states that since the Reagan administration (during which Less Than Zero, Ellis’s first novel, was published), every country’s population acts as “hostages for the super powers: their death and destruction serve as the rationale for deterrence”26. This persistent state of being held hostage inevitably affects the way society views each one of its citizens, implying that, because each of us is a hostage, each one of us is responsible not only for our own actions, but also for those of the society that we inhabit. The society in which anonymity is aspired to is, therefore, also one of “total responsibility”27. In an environment where such a contradiction is inherent, it is no wonder that individuals such as Ellis’s characters cannot draw strength or security from their surroundings.

Additionally, the Reagan era brought with it the idea of a power “mirage”, in which “political weakness or stupidity are of no importance”28. Politics, supposedly the height of power in America, was transformed by Reagan into something cinematic, something reminiscent of one of his B-movies, in which image and presentation nullified the lack of any real substance. Hence the assassination attempt on his life was turned into a publicity stunt when he famously said to the operating staff, “I hope you’re all Republicans”. This image-centric system of priorities permeates Ellis’s work as we have already seen, turning people into billboards who attempt to “perform an appearing act without ever concerning [themselves] with being – or even with being seen”29. “Disappear Here”(LTZ p.30) is the mantra repeated in Less Than Zero, adumbrating this desire for anonymity.

The reality beneath the ‘mirage’ –  “[t]he corpse of the Real”, as Baudrillard puts it – “has not been recovered, is nowhere to be found …. [Reality] has purely and simply disappeared”30. This could not be more true of Ellis’s fiction, which includes numerous instances of reality – and characters’ identities in particular – being obscured or blurred. Despite confessing to “thirty, forty, a hundred murders”(AP p.352), Patrick Bateman’s victims’ bodies are never discovered and, in fact, his entire narrative is thrown into doubt at the conclusion of American Psycho; similarly, in Glamorama, Victor gets replaced with a replica of himself. Even during intercourse, characters are not ‘themselves’: sex is “like in a movie, like animals”(AP p.288). This victory of the hyperreal signals the end of true identity, the beginning of an age where there is “more and more information, and less and less meaning”31 and in which no one – least of all Ellis’s characters, who are already living an alienated life – can depend upon the solidity and reassurance of reality. Such a phenomena is realised in Victor’s gradual progression into nonexistence – with the appearance of additional mysterious script in his life comes a new wave of uncertainty until, in the end, he surrenders even his identity.

The frenzied sexual violence in American Psycho is Patrick’s attempt at hyperreal fulfilment. He has ceased to be satisfied with plain sex, a state of affairs summarised by him reaching “an orgasm so weak as to be almost nonexistent” before he “literally wilt[s] out”(AP p.105) of Courtney during one sexual encounter. Instead, Patrick is looking for “an obscenity that is purer, deeper, more visceral; [that] explore[s] the very interior of the body and its viscera”32. This desire is realised by the barbaric gutting of his sexual victims, during which, in contrast to his insubstantial arousal with Courtney, Patrick is “so hard that [he] can even walk around … carrying [a] head on [his] dick”(AP p.304). This is in no way down to sexual desire on Patrick’s part, though. Instead, he is seeking a ‘cellophane reality’, a system whereby everything that “still enjoys a forbidden status, will be unearthed … and made to bow beneath the facts”33. Pleasure and fulfilment have become so elusive in everyday existence that he is forced to sink to depraved depths to try and recover it.

But herein lies the tragic flaw of Ellis’s world. By replacing reality with the hyperreal in an attempt to protect our identity and our capability for enjoyment, characters are in fact exposing their weaknesses further. The principle attribute of a fortress, states Baudrillard, is that it is by definition vulnerable;34 the same is true for us. Despite their active sex lives, the one thing all Ellis’s protagonists have in common is that they are unable to converse with women, often possessing a cringeworthy awkwardness. From Clay – who, nervous, tries to “steer the conversation away”(LTZ p.63) from sex with his girlfriend – to Victor – who uses “any prop to keep [himself] occupied”(G p.211) when he’s talking to Mariana – they are all incompetent. Even Patrick gets told that he could “barely pick up an escort girl”(AP p.388, emphasis omitted) by his psychiatrist. Due to seduction’s ambiguity (sex may come of it, but equally it may not), it has become a “subaltern form”35 and often ignored in favour of the immediacy, the transparency of sexual intercourse. Hence, characters’ techniques for reintegration into society are counterproductive.

The death of seduction and its subsequent replacement with sex also provides an allegory regarding Ellis’s world of relentless consumerism. Baudrillard notes that there is a constant battle against “that which seeks to seduce us. In this struggle all means are acceptable, ranging from relentlessly seducing the other in order not to be seduced oneself, to pretending to be seduced in order to cut all seduction short”36. In this theory lies the basis for how Ellis’s entire cast of characters attempt to deal with the consumer society in which they are submerged. To try and retain autonomy when confronted by a system that truncates the individual, characters either try to turn that system onto others by objectifying them and making them available, or they just ‘play along’ in order to avoid the attention of society’s collected ideologies. The former explains Patrick’s enthusiasm for prostitutes (they are easier to objectify than women he already knows); the latter explains why Clay, despite being confronted with the prostitution of his best friend and a kidnapped and raped young girl, does not actively try to influence what is going on around him. However, since “[every] challenge must be met with a response”37, by providing what is effectively a ‘challenge’ to consumerism they leave themselves vulnerable to becoming the most seduced, the most commodified, of all.

In their efforts to escape total alienation by objectifying others, Ellis’s characters show that they prescribe to Baudrillard’s view that “the world is built of networks of symbolic relations – not contingent connections, but webs of obligation, webs of seduction”38. Their Althusserian “interpellation”39 as objects stimulates their desire to interpellate others as the same. But it is at this point that their philosophy becomes a self-defeating one, for by attempting to use others as ‘stepping stones’ to avoid being swallowed by consumerism, their claim that “everything can be seduced”40 affirms their own helplessness. Despite any protestations that they might have on an unconscious level, they cannot escape seduction by consumerism.

Talk of ‘protestations’, though, suggests that Ellis’s characters are fully cognisant when it comes to their position as powerless subjects in the thrall of consumerism. In reality, this is untrue. They are aware of a general malaise surrounding them – phrases like “I feel empty, hardly here at all”(AP p.300) dot the narration – but at no point do any of them make the connection between this malaise and the surrounding commodification. On the contrary, in fact: during the moment where Patrick comes closest to realising the futility of his consumer lifestyle when an “existential chasm opens up before [him] while [he is] browsing in Bloomingdale’s”(AP p.179), he calms himself by buying shaving cream at the Clinique counter. Ultimately, Patrick soothes himself in the face of existential panic by reciting his current outfit once more. This is “a victory over existence, a certainty”41 that is unavailable anywhere else, particularly in Patrick’s own disposition.

Such gaping holes in characters’ capacities for free thought can be attributed to the proliferation of artificial intelligence throughout the novels. I have already noted the use of cameras to record various incidents, but computers and other forms of technology designed to make life easier for the consumer are also utilised. The boon that these technologies gift society – that of lack of effort – is also a hazard, in that it “frees us from real intelligence” and hypertrophies “thought as an operational process”42. Through viewing television and computer screens, characters view images that originate far from where they are. The ability for free thought is lost, replaced instead by a homogenised, thought-less mental plain. Patrick’s obsession with videos, for instance, accelerates this process by virtue of the fact that his video player “sees the film in [his] place”43; similarly, it is quite fitting that the true magnitude of Victor’s situation is relayed to him through a VCR (G pp.474-5). This “servitude”44 necessarily impacts severely upon our freedom, but we cannot realise this because, as the technologically adept human has “no will of his own”, he “knows nothing of serfdom”45. Alienation therefore originates not only from our society and ourselves, but also from the very objects we use to make life easier.

According to Baudrillard, this imposed synergy is rejected by the mind, which produces “[a]breaction, rejection and allergy”46 in an attempt to rid itself of subjugation. In a society where normal negativity and unhappiness is seen as unacceptable, these ‘allergies’ take the form of “our time’s most emblematic phenomena: viral pathologies, terrorism, drugs [and] delinquency”47 – all of which are present in Ellis’s novels. It is important that, in reading his work, instances of this sort are not painted as isolated aberrations, but instead are seen as “completely in accord with … society’s accelerating plunge into the void”48. They result from the implosion of the incontrovertible repression that is being perennially entered into.

One of the forms of ‘allergy’, terrorism, which has proved so interesting for Baudrillard, also becomes a key subject in Ellis’s fiction through Glamorama (which concerns a group of highly efficient and secretive international terrorists). The effectiveness of this form of attack lies in the very fact that terrorists are unable to overwhelm society with force; instead, they chip away at society’s values and infrastructure, much like a virus.  Their modus operandi is destabilisation rather than total destruction. The type of terrorism depicted in Glamorama is particularly pertinent because, unlike the happenings in Ellis’s previous work, it is a global affair. By situating his previous fiction in a sequence of small, self-contained environments (Camden, New York, Los Angeles) populated with recurring characters, Ellis had run the risk of labelling the type of alienation he displayed as a purely American animal. However, with the inclusion of many global locations in Glamorama (London, Milan, Belgrade, Palestine, Zagreb and Vienna to name but a few), Ellis makes it clear that the alienation he is describing is a global phenomenon.

Another manifestation of ‘allergy’ is that of the “attempted role reversal”, in which spectators or subjects turn themselves into actors, “invent[ing] their own spectacle”49 and usurping politicians and other traditional centres of attention from their pedestals. This is the logical progression of participatory consumption, in which subjects are invited – expected, even – to intervene by consuming. This would explain why, despite the motivation for characters’ actions not being fame, as I have already argued, the shocking incidents portrayed in Ellis’s fiction are spectacular. Snuff movies are shown on large television screens (LTZ pp.141-3), entire London streets are bombed (G pp.237-9) and Patrick screams “like a banshee”(AP p.166) after killing one of his victims – ‘Look at me,’ they seem to be saying, ‘I am worthy of attention’. Lacking the feeling of self, they try to “make traditions and places”50 independently. Forced anonymity has caused them not to seek observation themselves, but to create events that are worthy of observation independently. Like Barthes notes, it is all about “the spectacle of excess …. what matters is not what [one] thinks but what [one] sees”51.

As we have already seen, a preoccupation with identity haunts Ellis’s fiction. This even permeates the novels’ physical settings, with graffiti – the anonymous proclamation of one’s presence – often visible in establishments’ toilets, denoting the rot present behind the sheen of exclusive restaurants. Baudrillard remarks that, today, “the absolute urge is simply to verify [one’s] existence”52 – this is, in the end, exactly what Ellis’s characters want to achieve. They all resist seduction, fearing undue influence by some “artificial power”53 might jeopardise their quest for identity by “demand[ing their] love in return”54. Similarly, the ideas of children and reproduction horrify them: this is why the snuff movie’s castration scene in Less Than Zero holds such an attraction, and also explains why seeing a baby being breast-fed “awakens something awful”(AP p.297) in Patrick. If we take Baudrillard’s claim that having children equates with “putting our identity on the line”55, these examples of behaviour become rationalised as well as reflecting the sterility of Ellis’s world.

Childhood – or, rather, the state of being someone’s child – is an important recurring topic in Ellis’s novels. Parental figures are notable by their absence throughout: Clay’s divorced mother and father hardly ever see him, despite it being his Christmas vacation; Clay’s friend Kim assumes her absent parents are in England because “that’s what [she] read in Variety”(LTZ p.73); Paul has to go to Boston to see his mother; Sean and Patrick’s mother is constantly “heavily sedated”(AP p.365); and Victor’s father “wanted [him] out of the country”(G p.422) in case he ruined his chances in an upcoming election. Without trying to bring up the possibly overexposed idea of parental presence automatically equalling a happy, balanced adolescence and adulthood, it seems no coincidence that the alienated characters in Ellis’s works have little contact with, or attention from, their parents. At the very least, such an absence demonstrates that characters in Ellis have become so preoccupied with other priorities in their lives that the family unit is pushed to the back of the queue; at worst, it suggests that the parents’ non-appearance contributes to the awful alienation of their offspring, and hence their offspring’s lifestyles.

The occupations of the parents should not go overlooked. Investment bankers, film producers, executives: all of them hold positions of power in professions that influence consumerism. That their children are the subjects of what is essentially a series of satirical exposés clearly implies that the product of such occupations is wealth, certainly, but also the alienation, reification and disaffection that accompanies it.

The lack of identity foisted upon the consumer generation, which Baudrillard recognises as American but which is, in reality, global (hence the massive international success of Ellis’s writing56), is adumbrated in a particular and disposable way – that of the smile. “Smile if you have nothing to say” exhorts Baudrillard; “Americans may have no identity, but they have lovely teeth”57. This is certainly true of Ellis’s characters, all of whom have “teeth which are completely straight and white and gleaming”(AP p.158) in the all-American mould and yet constantly mistake each other’s identities in a huge web of anonymity. Yet such a smile is, simultaneously, the “primal scream of a man alone in the world …. [one which] continues to float on faces long after all emotion has disappeared”58. It is “indifference”59 that is summed up by such a smile. Even a relatively simple sign such as this, however, is capable of being subverted by the alienation present in Ellis’s work: trapped in one of his swirling episodes of nausea, Patrick exits Tower Records only to be greeted by an unidentifiable acquaintance; he immediately “belch[es] into his face … greenish bile dripping in strings from [his] bared fangs”(AP p.151), a grotesque parody of the vacuous smile he is presumably expected to give. This shows that, in Ellis’s novels, the meaningless smile – displayed to give the impression that everything is all right – hides a deep disaffection which is unable to be buried with “something resembling the smile of a corpse in a funeral home”60.

Superficial gestures like the smile summarise Baudrillard’s denial of a “‘depth model’ of interpretation which would devalue the surfaces of things in favour of [an] underlying essence”61, and also provides the reader with the essence of hyperreality – the real smile has been replaced by its image. However, this very theory of the hyperreal reveals a paradox necessarily present in Baudrillard’s work. Assuming that the hyperreal has indeed taken over from the Real, we cannot justifiably talk about this ‘Real’ as we do not know it. So how, then, does Baudrillard “describe its nature, and outline the transition from the real to the hyperreal”62 without being trapped in the hyperreal himself? He purports to give an objective view, and yet, if the theory his elucidates is true, this is impossible for anyone to achieve. So, how do we reconcile this contradiction? The answer, thankfully, lies in Ellis’s texts. Throughout his work, Ellis has provided the reader with a series of novels pregnant with an apocalyptic ambience. Like reading Baudrillard, reading one of Ellis’s books makes one unsettled; it is uncomfortable subject matter. However, he never explicitly articulates what it is that has caused this degradation in the society he depicts. He provides signposts, certainly; but there is never a resolution in which a particular aspect of life has the blame for society’s corruption laid squarely at its feet. This is similar to Baudrillard’s technique: he explains that the hyperreal has obscured reality, but he does not point the blame at one thing in particular and nor does he purport to be some kind of messianic figure offering a resolution. This would be an impossibility, living, as we all do, within the hyperreal. Instead, his books deal with a variety of examples of ways in which the hyperreal has become prevalent. Consumerism is one option, but one could never say that this is the sole cause of society’s alienation from itself. Like Ellis, he simply presents us with a range of images from which we can draw our own assumptions.

That Ellis, like Baudrillard, refuses to resolve the problems he describes in his work, has convinced some critics that the he takes the “ethical contradictions”63 present in his work to be illusory. Denzin, for instance, argues that writers like Ellis think problems to do with consumerism are “fictitious”64. This is simplistic thinking, however. The reason behind Ellis’s lack of moral judgement or solution is that to indulge in such an exercise would be utterly futile. The vista Ellis describes is so repugnant that it would be impossible to attach a saccharine happy ending without appearing hypocritical and unrealistic. This shows that there is no ‘quick fix’ available in an overtly commodified world – indeed, the very actions of Ellis’s protagonists are their attempts at ‘quick fixes’ designed to alleviate the alienation they feel but cannot ascribe to anything specific. Therefore, we can see that the problems outlined in Ellis’s work are not ‘fictitious’. Instead, they are so ingrained in society that his characters fail to recognise their existence at all.

A criticism levelled at Baudrillard that can equally be applied to Ellis’s view of an affectless society is that of an overly sentimental view of the past. We have already seen that Baudrillard cites civilisations like the Kalahari as the only truly wealthy cultures, and his criticisms of modern technology and lifestyles seem to point towards a nostalgic yearning for a past that he knew nothing about. Parallel to this runs the assertion that Ellis’s books, as unmistakably contemporary as they are, can also be read as tapping into a fear about modern society as dangerous and corrupting. The truth, though, is that they are not mourning the loss of a romanticised past; instead, they are describing how the cynicism of modernity has come about. Young explains that the “consciousless”65 figure has always been around, and with this in mind we can confidently say that Baudrillard and Ellis avoid critiquing today’s society as the first one lacking in substance, but instead describe the specific and new ways in which it lacks substance. What they illustrate is “not so much anything (the masses) as the relationship between things (the social and the masses)”66. Their interest is the way interaction has changed, not a new generation of nihilists.

Conclusion

 

Reading Ellis’s work, particularly the more intolerable passages, brings about a sense of complicity on the part of the reader. We feel “voyeuristic”67 in working our way through them, simultaneously horrified but unable to put the book down. This inevitably has the effect of making us aware of our own roles – of the roles of everyone in the consumer society – in the picture he is describing. This is mirrored by the ever-broadening scope of Ellis’s fiction – first it was set in a circle of friends, then a university campus, then New York, then a variety of locations that encircled the globe. Victor’s globe-trotting is met with the same “white and silver confetti”(G p.421)  and the same freezing cold temperatures wherever he goes. The outcome of this is a realisation that what Ellis is describing is not some literary in-joke or paranoid fantasy. Instead, we are all caught up in the world he is brutally satirising.

This is a view shared by Baudrillard. With the swift and borderless proliferation of consumerism, all of us have been swept inside the sheen of the hyperreal and have lost our sense of worth, our sense of meaning. We have been alienated from ourselves, living in a simulacra of life that bears so little resemblance to actual existence that it has become something new entirely. This is reflected in the shift in Ellis’s style in American Psycho – up until this book, Ellis’s narrators were at least capable of voicing some disagreement with the world they inhabited. During and after American Psycho, however, this reclusive morality became extinct and it was left purely to the reader to distinguish between right and wrong and true and false in a world where “[t]here are different truths”(G p.406).

So what next? We have seen that neither Baudrillard nor Ellis provide – or even suggest – ways in which we can escape the world we live in, the very world that, through its seduction, has caused us to surrender our identity and be alienated from ourselves. Baudrillard argues that since America “ducks the question of origins … it has no past and no pending truth”68, and with that in mind it is hard to speculate about what will happen next. Mike Featherstone notes that the “peculiarly modern crisis of meaning” is linked to “the progressive decline of the influence of religion”69, so perhaps this will come full circle and we will see the demise on consumerism in favour of a new religious age. Or maybe consumerism is the new religion, with its placards and billboards the cathedrals and mosques for the modern era. Either way, any supposition about the future seems rather futile when, as illustrated in the novels of Ellis, we cannot distinguish fact from fiction in the present day.

1Baudrillard, Jean, America, trans. by Chris Turner (Bath: Verso, 1988), p.19.

2 Ibid., p.19.

3 Ibid., p.23.

4 Ibid., p.28.

5 Murphet, Julian, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide (USA: Continuum, 2002), p.18.

6 Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (Wiltshire: Sage, 1999), p.68. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

7Easton Ellis, Bret, American Psycho, 2nd edn. (Chatham: Picador, 2000), p.44. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

8 Baudrillard, America, p.75.

9 Easton Ellis, Bret, Glamorama, 2nd edn. (Chatham: Picador, 2000), p.426. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

10Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.14.

11 Ibid., p.14.

12 Easton Ellis, Bret, The Rules of Attraction (Chatham: Picador, 1988), p.238. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

13 Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.27.

14Featherstone, Mike, Consumer Culture & Postmodernism, 5th edn. (Bristol: Sage, 1993), p.90.

15 Easton Ellis, Bret, Less Than Zero (Chatham: Picador, 1986), p.14. All other references to this text will be given parenthetically.

16 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, ed. and trans. by Annette Lavers (Viborg: Vintage, 2000), p.78.

17 Ibid., p.78.

18Young, Elizabeth, ‘Vacant Possession: Less Than Zero – A Hollywood Hell’, in Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction, ed. by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney (Reading: Serpent’s Tail, 1992), pp.33-4.

19 Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.32.

20 Baudrillard, America, p.107.

21 Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.28.

22www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/g/r.htm

23 Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.45.

24 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (USA: University of Michigan, 1994), p.43.

25 Ibid., p.130.

26 Baudrillard, Jean, The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968 – 1983, ed. by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (Worcester: 1990, Pluto), p.170.

27 Baudrillard, The Revenge of the Crystal, p.171.

28 Baudrillard, America, p.108.

29 Baudrillard, Jean, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James Benedict (King’s Lynn: Verso, 1993), p.23.

30 Baudrillard, Jean, The Vital Illusion, ed. by Julia Witwer (USA: Colombia University, 2000), p.61.

31 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p.79.

32 Baudrillard, Jean, Seduction, trans. by Brian Singer (Canada: Macmillan, 1990), p.32.

33 Ibid., p.32.

34 Ibid., p.16.

35 Ibid., p.41.

36 Ibid., p.119.

37 Ibid., p.119.

38 Ibid., p.144.

39 Althusser, Louis, 'Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects', in Identity: A Reader, ed. By Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (London: SAGE Publications, 2000), p.33.

40 Baudrillard, Seduction, p.144.

41 Murphet, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, p.37.

42 Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p.58.

43 Baudrillard, Jean, ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality’, in Art and Artefact, ed. by Nicholas Zurbrugg (Wiltshire: Sage, 1997), p.24.

44 Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p.58.

45 Ibid., p.58.

46 Ibid., p.71.

47 Ibid., p.71

48 Ibid., p.76.

49 Ibid., p.76.

50Kolb, David, Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture and Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990), p.3.

51Barthes, Mythologies, p.15.

52 Baudrillard, Jean, The Ecstasy of Communication, trans. by Bernard Schutze and Caroline Schutze (USA: Semiotext(e), 1988), p.30.

53 Baudrillard, Seduction, p.99.

54 Ibid., p.122.

55 Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, p.29.

56Young, Elizabeth, and Graham Caveney, ‘Introduction’, in Shopping in Space, p.vi.

57 Baudrillard, America, p.34.

58 Ibid., p.33.

59 Ibid., p.34.

60 Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p.45.

61Callinicos, Alex, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique, 6th edn. (Cornwall: Polity, 1999), p.145.

62 Ibid., p.147.

63Denzin, Norman K., ‘Reading Wall Street’, in Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. by Bryan S. Turner, 5th edn. (Guildford: Sage, 1995), p.32.

64 Ibid., p.32.

65 Young, ‘Vacant Possession’, p.31.

66 Butler, Rex, ‘Jean Baudrillard’s Defence of the Real: Reading In The Shadow of the Silent Majorities as an allegory of Representation, in Art and Artefact, ed. by Nicholas Zurbrugg (Wiltshire: Sage, 1997).

67Weissenberg, C., This Is Not An Exit: Reading Bret Easton Ellis (University of Essex, 1997), p.157.

68 Baudrillard, America, p.76.

69Featherstone, Consumer Culture & Postmodernism, p.112.