Sheli Ayers

Department of English
University of California at Santa Barbara
sayers@calarts.edu

 

Review of: Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.

 

In his New York Times review, Daniel Mendelsohn calls Glamorama “a bloated, stultifyingly repetitive, overhyped book” full of vacuous characters “who talk to one another and about themselves in what sounds suspiciously like ad copy” (8). In short, Mendelsohn’s suspicions are well-founded. Glamorama is repetitive and bombastic (though also, at times, wickedly funny). The characters do without a doubt speak in ad copy. But his glib judgment bypasses the most important function of aesthetic criticism–that is, not to “make taste” but rather to illuminate the historical situation of a particular aesthetic act. The question is: why has Ellis moved steadily further into the realm of allegory, and what relation does this allegory bear to the culture of postmodernity?

 

To say that Glamorama is a novel would be misleading. Although Ellis plays with and against the conventions of the first-person Bildungsroman, Glamorama is less a novel than a system of textual effects analogous to other scripted spaces: themed architecture, animated digital games, and special-effects films. Erik Davis has noted that adventure games cast the player in a first-person allegory, a highly structured space through which players wander, gathering objects and deciphering clues (213). A number of recent films, including The Matrix, Existenz, and Eyes Wide Shut, have explored this allegorical landscape. Yet, judged by traditional novelistic criteria–particularly the staid psychological realism that still prevails in many American creative writing programs–such texts inevitably fail. Characterization appears facile, tone flat. Plots seem gimmicky, often thematically overloaded and unbalanced, juvenile, or incoherent. Yet, given their prevalence and visibility in various media, only reactionary criticism can continue to dismiss these immersive allegories that offer the opportunity to act within a scripted space from the vantage point of a model identity. Our model in Glamorama is Victor Ward (née Johnson), semi-famous It-Boy and son of a US Senator, who falls in with a group of high-fashion terrorists. In a scene near the beginning of the book, Victor explains that Super Mario Bros. mirrors life: “Kill or be killed…. Time is running out…. And in the end, baby, you… are… alone.” Near the end of the book, as Victor’s narrative slides occasionally into second-person, it is clear that this wisdom refers to the allegory of Glamorama itself.

 

Ellis’s interest in this kind of allegory appears to date back to his first book, Less Than Zero (1985).¹ But Glamorama foregrounds allegory with new intensity. This movement into the forest of allegory may relate to the controversy that has surrounded his books, especially American Psycho (1991). This debate has focused rather narrowly on representations of violence in Ellis’s work, and whether these representations are justified by a didactic satirical intent. Moving to the stage of international terrorism and conspiracy, Glamorama attempts to reframe these issues in terms of a historical thesis: Victor Ward and the enchanted panorama through which he moves are symptomatic of a cultural condition. In this respect, we might recall Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that allegory arises during historical periods of radical change, when cultural referents are stripped of their traditional values and must be re-signed through allegory. Benjamin might argue that the violence, confusion, amnesia, and enchantment that characterize Victor’s condition should not be seen as mere thematic content; such conditions are manifestations of allegorical form.

 

In allegorical narrative, surface is the essence of the thing. In Glamorama this rule applies not only to consumer commodities and designer fashions but also to male and female bodies, indiscriminately. Victor acts as a beautiful-but-disposable avatar within a textual labyrinth. In his Xanax-laced dreamstate, he cannot recall many past events or effectively account for his own movements. He’s a “sample size” with “the standard regrets,” cast in this role for his “‘nonspecific… fabulosity.'” Superficial from the start, he struggles feebly to stanch an ontological leakage that leaves him empty and used up. He struggles to awake, but manages only relative degrees of wakefulness. His limbs keep going numb, then finally his entire body “falls asleep.” Ultimately, Victor is nothing other than the emblematic image of fashion. When he describes himself as “coolly disheveled in casual Prada, confident but not cocky,” I am reminded of Benjamin’s description of the characters in baroque drama: these characters are emblematic images, and the words they speak are like captions “spoken by the images themselves” (195).

 

Glamorama points toward the shortcomings of its narrator without transcending those shortcomings. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) his vacuity, Victor emerges as a privileged knower. His ability to grasp things by their surface appearance and his mastery of fashion and pop-culture codes enable him to operate in this textual world. While his memory is faulty in every other respect, it functions perfectly as an index for trivia such as the names and lengths, in minutes and seconds, of popular music tracks. Thanks to his knowledge of a specific track on Paul McCartney and Wings’s Band on the Run album, Victor alone can decipher the terrorists’ plans to bomb an airliner. (Unfortunately for the fictional passengers as well as for the squeamish reader, he decodes the message too late.) In short, while Victor cannot change anything fundamentally, he does suffice admirably as an avatar navigating within the provisional spaces that constitute the entirety of his textual world.

 

Ellis utilizes allegorical effects that transform the text into a kind of rebus. Repetitive mottoes, cultural references, and word-images (flies, confetti, ice) compose a network of correspondences. This is not to say that he achieves a hermetic textual system to rival, say, an alchemical manuscript from the seventeenth century. Glamorama may invite decipherment, but it operates mainly on the level of ineluctable confusion. Just as the seventeenth-century Vanitas signified uncertainty of the senses–life as dream and illusion–Glamorama invites the contemplation of a confused reality. The brevity of life and the ephemerality of fashion appear against the backdrop of a world outstripped by rapid technological change.

 

Glamorama represents the history of imaging technology–cave drawings, trompe l’oeil, theater, still photography, film, animation, video, and various digital media–as a confused totality. From the first sentence, Victor is haunted by various kinds of “specks.” Confetti pervades the text; video screens show static; characters wave flies away from their faces despite the freezing temperature. These specks suggest a pixelated and infinitely transformable universe. Strangely, Ellis draws no strong distinction between analogue and digital imaging technologies, even though the advent of the digital would seem to be the direct cause of this state of historical crisis and transformation. Instead, he stresses the prolific production of images of all kinds. The result is a telescoping of history in a technological apotheosis. All techniques of illusion–from perspective to the cut to the morph–are employed in the transformation of the real.

 

Bodies too are subject to this transformation. Torture and dismemberment are means by which allegory re-signs the body because parts of bodies are more useful emblems than whole, living bodies. Benjamin notes that the many scenes of torture and martyrdom in baroque drama are actually the means by which allegory partitions the body for emblematic use: “And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter the homeland of allegory” (217). In the Arcades Project, Benjamin develops further the deep kinship between allegory and fashion that Glamorama brings to an extreme conclusion. In Glamorama, the way in which bodies are killed–most often by emptying out or by dismemberment–is not irrelevant to their preparation as emblems or “statements.”

 

Only through death may the body enter the domain of pure fashion. To demonstrate this, Glamorama offers stylized tableaux of fashion and torture perpetrated by models who fail to recognize a difference. In one scene, the body parts of bomb victims–including “legs and arms and hands, most of them real”–lie in piles among the mannequins and goods from designer outlets and corporate retail chains, their logos splattered with gore. In another scene, the aftermath of the airliner bombing, “the trees that don’t burn will have to be felled to extract airplane pieces and to recover the body parts that ornament them… a macabre tinsel.” The belongings of the young passengers lie strewn among this corpse-swag, bodies that have been rendered equivalent to things: “entire wardrobes of Calvin Klein and Armani and Ralph Lauren hang from burning trees.” Objects exchange traits with other objects, caught in the leveling whirl of death.

 

Torture, exercise, and sex serve equally to demonstrate the pornographic (that is, technological) possibilities of the body. Body parts are modifiable, detachable, and interchangeable. Victor’s celebrity trainer exclaims, “Arms are the new breasts.” Fetishistic or emblematic tattoos mark bodies that may be dismembered at any moment. Party chatter revolves around clothes and bodies, as characters compliment each other’s eyebrows and arm veins. Tortured and dead bodies look inauthentic, like props or wax anatomical dummies, and the characters remind each other of automatons, dolls, and puppets. Devoid of interior lives, they wear “glycerin tears,” “sob inauthentically,” offer “canned responses.” Gyms double as torture chambers, and sex is coldly gymnastic. Pain itself is stylized: “She suddenly looks like she’s shot through with something like pain or maybe something else like maybe something by Versace.”

 

Clearly, Ellis is exploring territories charted long ago by J.G. Ballard and Andy Warhol. But he is also advancing his own project, not only by increasing the body count but also by altering the relationship between violence and history. American Psycho attributes violence to a social class accustomed to commodification and the instrumental use of the body. Glamorama employs this kind of social satire, but it also suggests that violence arises as a condition of rapid technological change. The body must adapt–or be adapted through death and disfigurement–to meet a new historical condition. In this way, Ellis issues a didactic moral in the Vanitas image of transformation through death. And yet, this memento mori remains wholly consistent with capitalist consumption in practice. Glamorama operates within an ethos of accommodation, representing a diminishment of political possibilities akin to baroque pragmatism: “Confusion and hopelessness don’t necessarily cause a person to act. Someone from my first publicist’s office told me this a long time ago. Only now does it resurface. Only now does it mean anything to me” (emphasis in original).

 

Glamorama warrants critical attention not as an original or successful novel, but rather as a text that typifies a momentary cultural ethos. Even now, as I turn my eyes away from the text, this pop-millennium book becomes obsolete, opaque, difficult. In ten years Glamorama will lie buried under the glaciers of consumer memory. And in its strangely baroque sentiment, this is possibly its singular claim to literary immortality: it was conceived from the outset as post-consumer waste. “In is out,” as Victor says. “Out is in.”

 

Note

 

1. One of the epigraphs to Less Than Zero is a lyrical fragment by the band X: “This is the game that moves as you play.”

Works Cited

 

• Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB, 1977.
• Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony Books, 1998.
• Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Lesser Than Zero.” Rev. of Glamorama, by Bret Easton Ellis. The New York Times Book Review 24 Jan. 1999: 8.