Abstract
“The ’90s are honest, straightforward. Let’s reflect that,” Victor says, moving around Damien’s new club at the outset of Glamorama. “I want something unconsciously classic. I want no distinctions between exterior and interior, formal and casual, wet and dry, black and white, full and empty” (G, 51). Victor’s vision for Damien’s club neatly articulates in miniature the image culture of the 1990s in which he moves, whereby one-dimensional forces have erased dialectical oppositions between the literal and figurative, reality and illusion. In chapter two, I argued that Bateman’s narrative exhibited the object fetishism of the 1980s and that American Psycho functions as a refusal from within the commodity object and thus effectively resists reification from within the reified object. Victor’s narrative is the voice of the spectacle of 1990s popular culture, which according to Andrew Gibson, from the late 1990s started “steadily invading or hoovering up its principal rival domains.—1 It is in Glamorama that Ellis most sharply critiques the postmodernist renunciation of the philosophical discrimination between essence and appearance. I suggest in the first part of this chapter that Ellis’s move from the 1980s to the 1990s is correspondingly a transition from a culture typified by object fetishism to a culture manifested by image fetishism.
The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
(Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle) “
“The photo exists.” (G, 65)
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 19.
Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 97.
Celeste Olalquiaga, Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 6.
E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism and Consumer Culture (London: Methuen Press, 1987), 145.
For an illuminating analysis of indie music in the 1990s, see Joe Brooker, “Commercial Alternative” in, New Formations: Remembering the 1990s, no. 50, 2003, 106–23.
Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003), 155.
Dorothy Nelkin, “The Gene as Cultural Icon,” Art Journal, Spring 1996, vol. 55, no. 1.
Copyright information
© 2011 Georgina Colby
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Colby, G. (2011). Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama . In: Bret Easton Ellis. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230339163_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29776-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-33916-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)