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Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama and Jay Mcinerney's Model Fashion Glamor and Mass-Mediated Reality: Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama and Jay McInerney’s Model Behaviour By Sofia Ouzounoglou A Dissertation to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki November 2013 i TABLE of CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………………...ii ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................................iii INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: Reconstructing Reality in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998) 1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..15 1.1 “Victor Who?”: Image Re-enactment and the Media Manipulation of the Self……..19 1.2 Reading a Novel Or Watching a Movie?.....................................................................39 CHAPTER TWO: Revisiting Reality in Jay McInerney’s Model Behaviour (1998) 2. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………..53 2.1 Media Dominance and Youth Entrapment…………………………………………...57 2.2 Inset Scenarios and Media Constructedness……………………………………........70 EPILOGUE………………………………………………………………………………...........80 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………...91 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE……………………………………………………………………....94 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This M.A. thesis has been an interesting challenge as I set off to explore the literary works and theories of great writers, philosophers and theoreticians. Its writing was made possible by the guidance of my supervisor. I particularly thank Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou who supported my project with her valuable advice, helpful comments and immediate responses. I would also like to thank my family which has encouraged me and supported me throughout my studies. iii ABSTRACT This thesis explores the celebrity and youth culture of 1990s New York in conjunction with the consumerist lifestyle of fashion models, as evidenced in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998) and Jay McInerney’s Model Behaviour (1998). Both being postmodern texts, they expose readers to a world of external appearances vis-à-vis absurd consumption. In particular, the two novels comment on the hallucinatory reality of the 1990s media-generated culture with emphasis placed on the hollowness of fashion and entertainment industries as well as on the behavior stereotypes these generate. Although each writer touches upon the fashion system from a different perspective, they both expose the superficiality of celebrity and fashion culture via a range of characters and points of view. Ellis’s and McInerney’s novels criticize the commodification of human identity and body abuse by the advertising and fashion industry which sells products and ideas through the selling of the human body itself. The popularization of the fashion model image via advertising fragments and disorientates the self. As the two novelists describe in their writings, the rising modeling culture of the 1990s in the U.S. commercialized the human body by exchanging its subjectivity with the objectivity of the commodity. As for the role media play in the two novels, they further enhance the superficiality and constructedness of reality as well as the reproducibility of human identity through its own mediated image. The main keywords that this thesis touches upon are the following: fashion culture, consumerism, constructedness, media- oriented culture, reproducibility, simulation, artificiality and commodity-driven autonomy. Ouzounoglou 1 INTRODUCTION American culture of the late 1990s is characterized by capitalistic trends that have led to the exploitation and hollowing out of human identity. Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama (1998) and Jay McInerney’s Model Behaviour (1998) constitute two popular texts of the late 1990s touching upon the manipulation of the individual by the celebrity and fashion world of the time. The aesthetics explored by Ellis and McInerney question objective reality and individual wholeness as opposed to the simulated reality of glamor entertainment and the images it constructs. One of the theorists to be considered is Jean Baudrillard and his theory of a commodity- driven reality in his book The System of Objects (1968). He discusses the transformation of the object into a sign via advertising. Advertising, according to Baudrillard, constitutes a process which connects the object with the subject and vice versa. He suggests that the relationship between objects and subjects has been breached due to the emergence of a consumerist society. It is the object as sign that constitutes the new communication system that pushes the individual towards consumption. According to Baudrillard, objects now are by no means meant to be owned and used but solely to be produced and bought. In other words, they are structured as a function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead constitute a system determined entirely by an ideological regime of production and social integration. (The System of Objects 162-63, italics in original) In other words, advertising has turned everything into an object that the individual passively consumes. This sign-based system has the capacity to keep on transforming the object into further signs holding the individual forever into a process of reproducibility and consumption. As Baudrillard stresses, “this conversion of the object to the systematic status of a sign implies the simultaneous transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption – of Ouzounoglou 2 consuming and being consumed” (200). This point emphasizes the infinite production of ideas which traps the individual into a superficial, consumerist-driven lifestyle. Human needs, desires and beliefs are now presented as commodities which have to be sold and consumed. Desires have transformed into signs which are promoted as tangible objects via advertising. The individual, as Baudrillard argues, consumes the ideals these objects construct without realizing that due to the reproducibility of these objects/ideas all real individual needs are either covered up or effaced. Eventually, the reproducibility of ideas disorients the individual, since it entraps it into a chaotic process of reproducible but superficial signs. In his theory, Baudrillard also touches upon the significant role of the brand. Advertising has made the sign/idea acquire a name so as to create the feel of a living personality with the intention to be sold. As he remarks, it is in this sense that we do indeed “believe” in advertising: what we consume in this way is the luxury of a society that projects itself as an agency for dispensing goods and “transcends itself” in a culture. We are thus taken over at one and the same time by an established agency and by that agency’s self-image. (166) Therefore, advertising constructs a name which is what motivates the consumer to buy a specific product and not its content. This means that the commodity value rests upon the name/image advertising constructs and not on the commodity itself. So attention should be paid to the powerful impact the brand language has on the consumers since it directs them towards the products to be bought. As a result, advertising dupes the consumers as it pushes them to believe in the false ideals the brand commodity names represent. In his next book entitled The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), Baudrillard further analyzes contemporary commodity-driven reality by focusing on representation. The new media-generated culture constructs and reconstructs TV messages so as to engineer the Ouzounoglou 3 consumers’ desires and needs. Baudrillard points out that “this technological process of mass communications delivers a certain kind of very imperative message: a message-consumption message, a message of segmentation and spectacularization, of misrecognition of the world and foregrounding of information as a commodity, of glorification of content as sign” (123, italics in original). As he explains, the individual has entered a technologically-driven culture which rejects both the subject and object as real. What it does instead is to promote the logic of consumption which is based on an image-driven consumerist lifestyle. As a result, the lifestyle the contemporary individuals lead mainly revolves around the objects media construct and promote. This point is further elaborated on in Baudrillard’s book Simulacra and Simulation (1981). Here, he claims that the borders between representation and reality have been abstracted. He talks about a subverted reality where what is visible is the non-real. In particular, the media bombard us not with authentic but with mere representations of reality. Baudrillard remarks that neither the object nor the subject dominates reality. They both dwell in a hyperreal world in which representation dominates. He refers to the emergence of hyperreality in which the subject/object has transformed into a simulated object which although it is a copy or a representation of a real thing, it appears to be more real than reality itself. In Baudrillard’s point of view, it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control ― and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational,
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