Hyperreality and Loss of Identity in American Psycho and Escape from Tomorrow by Tyler Crawford a Thesis

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The American Nightmare: Hyperreality and Loss of Identity in American Psycho and Escape from Tomorrow by Tyler Crawford

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Wilkes Honors College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences With a Concentration in English Literature

Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University Jupiter, Florida May 2016

THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE: HYPERREALITY AND LOSS OF IDENTITY IN AMERICAN PSYCHO AND ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW

by Tyler Crawford

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate’s thesis advisor, Dr. Michael Harrawood, and has been approved by the members of her/his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Honors College and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Dr. Michael Harrawood

______Dr. Gavin Sourgen

______Dean Jeffrey Buller, Wilkes Honors College

______Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First off, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Michael Harrawood, for taking me on as a junior year biology student, because he could tell where my passions truly lay, for reading this thesis so inexcusably late in the midst of grading a million papers, and for being the most exciting and the most supportive mentor and friend. I want to thank my second reader, Dr. Gavin Sourgen, for his invaluable advice, edits, and support, as well as his reading of my thesis whilst grading his million papers. I want to thank Dr. Yasmine

Shamma for renewing my interest in poetry and forcing me to examine things, especially about NYC, a little differently. I acknowledge every teacher I have ever had the Honors

College, because each has brought a new idea to my head and a new choice to make, particularly my first advisor here, Dr. Chitra Chandrasekhar, and the most amazing lab instructor ever, April. Thank you for all your help (and your paper). Even after I left the science department, you were still there for me whenever I needed you, and I will remain grateful for that.

To my dearest friends, you know I love you all: The glue that held and holds us together, Rachel Turn--the smartest girl in the world and the kindest, the girl who helps you with your thesis formatting at 7 AM the day it’s due, whom you can tell your darkest secrets and never feel judged or alone; The party girl, Amy Stein—the girl you can cuddle with and watch a Disney movie, the generous one who is always ready to throw a great get-together together and use her dorm room (now apartment) as host site, the one who you can watch an endless parade of internet videos with and the laughter never dies;

The buddy, David Brothers, the one who you can always share a space with who is always ready to welcome you with open arms, a Cards Against Humanity box, and

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maybe Whose Line on instant replay, the guy who you can turn to and go see a random play or movie and he will always be up for it to hang out; The musical girl, Cathy Ray, who you can sit up all night with, read Cosmo, gossip and never stop laughing, the one who you can talk musicals with and never end up making a better critique then she does, because she’s awesome; The popular girl, Laccia Bromell, the girl who loved everyone and will forever hold a piece of my heart captive, because we had a crazy, but truly wonderful undergrad career together; The gentle giant, Chris Olbrych, who may always seem like he wants to talk about Rachel Turn or bowel movements, but will drive nearly

30 miles out of his way to pick you up for school because you don’t have a car; I would never have survived without you all. Your friendship and love is something I will always cherish and be so beyond grateful for, you cannot possibly fathom. Also, I want to note

Genesis B., Michelle D., Eli T., Ray, Kayla, Claire, Anna and Roger, and all the wonderful times we had. All of you are irreplaceable pieces of my life that I will back on with a wistful mind and a great big smile, because it happened, as they say.

Last, but certainly not least, I acknowledge my family: my father Eugene

Crawford, who always pushes me to do more and be better, because he knows I can; my mother, Melissa Crawford, who is always there with a gentle hand on my shoulder and a supportive word in the ear and willing to drop everything for me; my sisters, Tiffany and

Taylor Crawford, who always have my back and are ready to talk whenever I need them; my grandparents, David and Dottie Miller, and Grace Crawford, who are proud of me no matter what; my aunts and uncles, cousins, teachers and staff at Discovery Key

Elementary, who are all too numerous to name, but you know you are, and the Tracy family, for all their generosity, love, and support from the time I was in diapers.

ABSTRACT

Author: Tyler Crawford

Title: The American Nightmare: Hyperreality and Loss of Identity in American Psycho and Escape from Tomorrow

Institution: Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Michael Harrawood

Degree: Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences

Concentration: English Literature

Year: 2016

The renowned French philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, creates and defines the term “hyperreality” as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” Utilizing this definition, this thesis analyzes the text and film versions of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial postmodern classic, American Psycho, in conjunction with the anti-“Disneyfication” independent film, Escape from Tomorrow, as complex examples in fiction of the excess and ultimate consequences of American materialism that has developed since the 1991 publication of

Ellis’s novel about the over-indulgent “yuppie” culture of the 1980’s. I argue that the main consequence of the practice of blind belief in the endurance and reliability of material signifiers for the protagonists of these works, Patrick Bateman and Jim White respectively, is the sacrifice of their identity to the machine of homogenized corporate capitalism.

To Frances Ann Gould The wise woman 80 years young who will always be with me

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction to Hyperreality, American Psycho, and Escape from Tomorrow: the Theater of the American Nightmare…………………………………………………….1-7 Violence, Sexuality, Fatalism and Loss of Identity in the Hyperreal Environments of Bret Easton Ellis’ Manhattan and Randy Moore’s Disney World/Disneyland...... 8-28 Conclusion: Contemporary Implications of the American Nightmare and Further Reading…………………………………………………………………………29-31 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………32-35

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INTRODUCTION: Hyperreality, American Psycho and Escape from Tomorrow: The Theater of the American Nightmare

“Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography. From medium to medium, the real is volatized, becoming an allegory of death. But it is also, in a sense, reinforced through its own destruction. It becomes reality for its own sake, the fetishism of the lost object: no longer the object of representation, but the ecstasy of denial and of its own ritual extermination: the hyperreal.” ---- Jean Baudrillard (Selected Writings,

144-145)

“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Misérables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn’t seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.” ----- American Psycho (Ellis, 3)

“Walt Disney World is a tribute to the philosophy and life of Walter Elias Disney... and to the talents, the dedication, and the loyalty of the entire Disney organization that made

Walt Disney's dream come true. May Walt Disney World bring Joy and Inspiration and

New Knowledge to all who come to this happy place ... a Magic Kingdom where the young at heart of all ages can laugh and play and learn — together.” —Roy Oliver

Disney, October 25, 1971

“Bad Things Happen Everywhere.” ----- Tagline of Escape from Tomorrow

Baudrillard’s prophetic “allegory of death” is manifested in the very first words of Bret Easton Ellis’ seductive invitation into his version of the American Dream,

become nightmare. Set appropriately in the disorienting environment of neon- emblazoned 1980’s Manhattan, this backdrop would seem to be anathema to Roy O.

Disney’s sentimental beckoning to the American neo-bourgeoisie in his younger brother’s posthumously constructed Magic Kingdom. Indeed, such saccharine rhetoric is so pervasive and inherent, the dedication stands today as an iron-cast monument at the entrance to Disney’s idealized version of “Main Street, U.S.A.,” plainly in view of all guests as they pass through the electronic turnstiles. This thesis is an attempt to reconcile the disparate elements that make up the American Psycho narrative of the 1980’s and those of the standard story of Walt Disney’s company and its products carried over since his death; and demonstrate how those elements come together through the concepts of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, particularly those imagined in avant-garde underground director Randy Moore’s contemporary portrait of Walt Disney World in Escape from

Tomorrow. I endeavor to render clearer those socio- economic, political, and cultural paradoxes presented by Ellis and Moore, the very conundrums that continue to haunt us in our increasingly uncompassionate, void-of-meaning culture. Spurred on by an unchecked materialism not seen anywhere else in the world, the American preoccupation to accumulate assembly line tangibles likewise grows more terrifying.

Drawing a parallel between one of the most reviled, yet thoughtfully complex narratives in late 20th century postmodern literature (and its film adaptation at the dawn of the 21st century), American Psycho and its titular villain, Patrick Bateman, and Walt

Disney’s “Happiest Place on Earth” seems to be stretching the boundaries of the literary dictum to “only connect.” However, for many years after his death, Disney, and thus his empire, became primary examples of the epitomes of evil in a pro-Capitalist society left

unchecked: unabashed elitism, racism, and sexism. A neat conglomeration of critical opinions on the more problematic varieties of such uniquely formed American inequities can be found in the introduction to Neal Gabler’s well-received biography of the Man

Behind the Mouse. In the following passage, he relates the generally accepted intellectual position of the Disney empire via his own words and that of critic John Gardner, author

Max Apple, and others:

‘Intellectuals spoke of how he butchered the classics--from Pinocchio to Winnie the Pooh--how his wildlife pictures were sadistic and coy, how the World’s Fair sculptures of hippopotamuses, etc., were a national if not international disgrace.’ The bill of indictment was, indeed, a long one. He had infantilized the culture and removed the danger from fairy tales in the process of popularizing them for a mass market, providing, in novelist Max Apple’s words, ‘the illusion of life without any of the mess.’ He had promoted treacly values that seemed anachronistic and even idiotic in a complex , modern, often tragic world and that defined him as a cultural and political troglodyte. He had usurped each person’s individual imagination with a homogenized corporate one and promoted conformity, prompting one critic to declare, ‘The borders of fantasy are closed now.’ Like a capitalist Midas, he had commercialized everything he touched, reducing it all, in another antagonist’s view to ‘a sickening blend of cheap formulas packaged to sell…One feels our whole mass culture heading up the dark river to the source-that heart of darkness where Mr. Disney traffics in pastel- trinketed evil for gold and ivory.’ (Gabler, xviii)

Many years later, such comments were given voice in an unrestrained, visually arresting manner through the very medium that Disney himself had ironically sought to perfect: the feature film. In the shocking Sundance gem, Escape from Tomorrow (Jan. 2013), Full

Sail graduate Randy Moore’s opus of Disneyfied perversion, seduction, and grotesque fantasy violence, capitalizes on that sense of the “pastel-trinketed evil” Gabler mentions as part of the critique of “homogenized corporate” Disney and its related indicia. From

Moore’s imagined deadly caverns of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at the film’s

beginning to the blood-stained and conspicuously Mickey Mouse-themed hotel bathroom at its conclusion, viewers are reminded that what is supposed to be wholly American could just as systematically be envisioned as wholly demented. Disney Enterprises’ masterfully conceived control over the consumer as both its power source and its waste product to be exploited for pure capital gain by whatever means necessary becomes the true horror here. The complete domination of the park guest’s experience is manifest for the audience in the form of the film’s leading man, aptly given the transparent, generic name of Jim White. As the viewer is drawn deeper into the protagonist’s own private hell of a family vacation, the real and the imaginary become virtually inseparable, inviting comparisons to any of the traditional American family outings to the theme parks.

Reintroducing the danger of the fairy tale, and subsequently mass media, into a long-overdue outside interpretation of Disney’s Magic Kingdom is nearly incomprehensible when one considers the magnitude and scale of how such a park operates. In an environment that functions on its own privatized security company and medical staff; the principle that no one is allowed to die while on Disney property; and the policy that no costumed character is allowed to remove their metal-framed heads even in the most dire circumstances of the Florida heat for fear of “removing the magic,” among other things, suggests a desire to avert the checks and balances associated with an actual legal and moral society. Furthermore, the successful development of an exposé right under the Big Brother-like eye (which Moore also parodies in his film) of one of the most powerful and all-encompassing media empires in the world was something

audiences were completely unprepared for, prompting current HitFix.com critic Drew

McWeeny to declare:

It’s not possible this film exists. It is not possible that they shot long scripted sequences on the actual rides. It is not possible that I just saw a film in which it is suggested and then shown that the various Disney princesses all work as high- priced hookers who sell their wares to wealthy Asian businessmen. It simply cannot be true. I grew up in Florida, and I have been going to Walt Disney World my entire life. I worked at that park. I've been there as a child, as a teenager, as an employee, and as a parent. I've done Disney sitting on my father's shoulders, and I've done the Disney parks with my kids sitting on my shoulders. It is a huge part of my DNA, and I can tell you that there is no way Randy Moore pulled off what I saw tonight. It is a film that should not exist by any rational definition. And yet... not only does it exist, but it's fascinating. (McWeeny, Wikipedia)

The same conclusion was invariably applied to American Psycho upon its release, both in its literary and cinematic formats, in 1991 and 2000 respectively. While the novel was more thoroughly decried, at least initially, for its extended, explicit (some critics would use the term “pornographic”) descriptions of torture, sexual violence, and murder, the film adaptation, which also received its first run at Sundance, remained in development and ratings hell for several years. However, the movie was more immediately applauded than the novel from a body of critics working with the convenient gift of hindsight in terms of critical battles over the content of the plot. Still, nothing could compare with the epithets prematurely launched at Ellis upon its publication, from simple hate mail deeming him “racist”, “misogynist”, and a “hack” to detailed death threats promising him a gruesome end like one of his unfortunate characters. Ironically, the book was not accepted into schools of literary academia until after the publication of Elizabeth Young’s essay “The Beast in the Jungle, the Figure in the Carpet”, in which she suggests that far

from being supportive of misogynistic sentiments and practices or damaging to the

American reading public, it was instead a well-timed feminist and cultural satire, critiquing the upper class created under the intensely pro-Capitalist Regan administration that resulted in the crash of Wall Street in 1987. In the opening pages, she begins what unfolds into an eloquent and biting indictment of the naysayers of her profession:

It soon became impossible for anyone to focus on the novel at all, let alone pay attention whatsoever to ‘the language, the structure, the details’. Had they done so it would have forestalled many of their criticisms. Not since The Satanic Verses had a book been so poorly read. It was dismally revealing of the low quality of cultural commentary in England and America. Ellis himself was perfectly aware of the extravagant inanities of the media tirade. ‘Most of them haven’t read it and those who have, I think, have missed it in a big way.’ (Young, 88)

Cultural and literary elitism among the critical intelligencia against the likes of such politically incorrect “transgressive” fiction was of course the culprit here, dismissing it as

“the most loathsome offering of the season”, “the most appalling acts of torture, murder, and dismemberment ever described in a book targeted for the Best-Seller lists”, “a how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women,” among others (Young, 86). Young goes on to praise the book for its daring description of the yuppie culture that plagued the period, and suggests that perhaps its presentation of the avid consumer as deviant monstrosity was too great a personal indictment to be liked by the dominant reading culture, a culture that somehow devoured Ellis’s first offering, Less than Zero, that also contained explicit and disconcerting scenes of rape a mere five years prior.

American Psycho is of course a classic of the 1980’s. In a sense it is the 1980’s. It embodies the decade and all the clichés of the decade in the West˗ the rampant self- serving greed, relentless aggression and one-upmanship; the manic consumer overdrive, exhaustion, wipe-out and terror… The media had just started wildly signaling that it was over, that it was time to lower our moral hemlines and become gentle and caring for a bit. However, having been activated, the tread-mill

kept spinning. People have lives, not life-styles and they cannot be dismantled at the whim of the Sunday supplement. It was hardly surprising that a novel which unequivocally condemned a way of life to which many people had sacrificed their youth and energy was tepidly received; journalists were as much at the mercy of the status-driven conspicuous consumption of the eighties as anyone else and the froth over the book’s alleged violence may have concealed a hideous disquiet that the leotards and Agnès B. Leggings, the enormous mortgages and obscene restaurant bills were…just…not worth it. (Young, 88-89)

Violence, Sexuality, Fatalism and Loss of Identity in the Hyperreal Environments

of Bret Easton Ellis’Manhattan and Randy Moore’s Disney World/Disneyland

In New York, 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. It is difficult to see why a city as crazy as this one would keep its mad in the shadows, why it would withdraw from circulation specimens of a madness which has in fact, in its various forms, taken hold of the whole city. (Baudrillard, 19)

This passage is the centerpiece of one of Baudrillard’s most critical and acclaimed works, America, in which he devotes an entire chapter to discussing the hyperculture and subsequent moral and social upheaval in New York. Here, he envisions a landscape similar to a grossly extended, negligent insane asylum, where no one lunatic is distinguishable from another. Similarly, Patrick Bateman, the titular “American psycho”, seems to be indistinguishable from Marcus Halberstam or Mr.Smith or any other of a host of names of rich, attractive, and successful Wall Street investors he is associated with throughout the novel. This particular form of social conformism to dress, mannerisms, and daily routines is what makes him all the more dangerous, because he does not stand out among the hordes of other yuppies who fit the same description. Often,

Bateman is mistaken for another even by those he interacts with intimately or on a day- to-day basis. At times, the misnomers are delivered apparently by choice, as when the prostitute he arbitrarily deems “Christie” says: “You have a really nice place here…Paul.” (Ellis, 172) We can infer that he has ordered her to refer to him as such, since he relates in pages prior: “(I don’t know her real name, I haven’t asked, but I told

her to respond only when I call her Christie).” (Ellis, 169-170) Most of the time though, he has no control over his mislabeling, as in this scene earlier on in the story:

[Paul] Owen has mistaken me for Marcus Halberstam (even though Marcus is dating Cecilia Wagner) but for some reason it really doesn’t matter and it seems a logical faux pas since Marcus works at P&P also, in fact does the same exact thing I do, and he also has a penchant for Valentino suits and clear prescription glasses and we share the same barber at the same place, the Pierre Hotel, so it seems understandable; it doesn’t irk me. But Paul Denton keeps staring at me, or trying not to, as if he knows something, as if he’s not quite sure if he recognizes me or not, and it makes me wonder if maybe he was on that cruise a long time ago, one night last March. If that’s the case, I’m thinking, I should get his telephone number or, better yet, his address. (Ellis, 89)

From this passage too, we are offered the hint that Bateman has been involved in some unsavory circumstances prior to the events of this narrative and he is planning to confront

Mr. Denton about what he may know. Indeed, Bateman’s feelings of paranoia grow markedly as the body count begins to mount throughout the novel, but here those feelings are in the initial stages of psychosis where he still contemplates delivering harm. He is not yet as impulsive as he becomes in later chapters to slaughter without a thought.

One of Bateman’s most unthinkable acts of violence, the murder of a small boy at the Central Park Zoo, is perhaps his most impulsive crime in terms of the swiftness of action and disposal. Furthermore, though not necessarily notable for occurring in public, which happens several times in the novel, but significantly for the first time, this particularly heinous murder takes place in broad daylight next to the sheltered cove of a penguin exhibit:

The child spots me and just stands there, away from the crowd, slightly scared but also dumbly fascinated. I stare back. ‘Would you like…a cookie?’ I ask, reaching into my pocket. He nods his small head, up, then down, slowly, but before he can answer, my sudden lack of care crests in a massive wave of fury and I pull the knife out of my pocket and I stab him, quickly, in the neck. Bewildered, he backs into the trash can, gurgling like an infant, unable to scream or cry out because of the blood

that starts spurting out of the wound in his throat. Though I’d like to watch this child die, I push him down behind the garbage can, then casually mingle in with the rest of the crowd and touch the shoulder of a pretty girl, and smiling I point to a penguin preparing to make a dive. (Ellis, 298)

In terms of sensory perceptions, the coldness of the exhibit offers the feeling of a morgue and/or the physical manifestation of Bateman’s own “cold”, remorseless being overtaken by the near unconscious urge to perpetrate evil. The duality of the physical perception of location serves as parallel to the duality of Bateman’s character even as he stands in that space. Most significantly for the space though is the presence of the trash can, which operates on two levels as both sign and signifier. It performs both the literal function of serving as a dumping ground for the boy’s body and as the symbol for the boy himself in

Bateman’s gaze, a mere piece of disposable waste conveniently utilized as an outlet for his bloodlust and then just as neatly discarded. In a moment where Bateman lashes out in his most unpredictable stance in the novel’s entirety, readers are reminded of the unspoken, but ominously present danger that lurks in the smile of seemingly friendly strangers toward those members of society least to blame for its failings: unknowing and impressionable children. In this way, the scene reintroduces the common fairy tale device of deception with an alluring, if temporary reward found in classic examples, ranging from the Grimm Brothers’ “Hansel and Gretel” to Disney’s own landmark enterprise,

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Like the witches in these stories, his true, internal self will always be marred as hideous, something his superficial, appearance-driven personality cannot abide. Thus, in order to purge his surroundings of this constant humiliating reminder of “true” beauty, he murders and removes this human symbol of his greatest failure, another concept he abhors, from existence. He muses,

Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I’m suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child’s life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It’s so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child’s would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I’m automatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knife the boy’s mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slap her face harshly and shout for her to calm down. (Ellis, 299-300)

Bateman’s measure for value of life, therefore, is an economic one, in which quantity, not quality, matters. Ultimately, it is the overall lack of “history” and lack of participation in financial productivity that makes the child’s life worthless and violent end justifiable, because “nothing is really lost.” The realization that he has “failed” to do anything of consequence causes him to consider slaughtering the more “valuable” mother as well in order to make more of an impression, on the world at large it would seem.

In any era, especially in the current post-Sandy Hook and Columbine massacres

America, such a sequence of events to be detailed would seem beyond all cruelty, an evil act in and of itself simply to reproduce in fiction, especially with so chilling a philosophical explanation. However, as Alan Bilton tells us, “We learn nothing about the idea of evil, remain unpunished for our own prurience”, that is, in the act of reading such a chapter in the first place (An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction, Bilton,

208.) Baudrillard echoes this concern when he says that “we can no longer speak evil”, but rather,

all we can do is discourse on the rights of man-- a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocritical, its supposed value deriving from the Enlightenment belief in a natural attraction to the Good, from an idealized view of human relationships (whereas Evil can manifestly be dealt with only by means of Evil)…The ‘right to live’ is an idea that sets all pious souls atremble, but when this idea evolves into the

right to die, the absurdity of the whole business becomes obvious. For, after all, dying (and living too) is a destiny, a fate-- be it happy or unhappy—and certainly not a right. (Baudrillard, 85-86)

Therefore, the boy’s murder as recounted by Bateman is disturbingly sound in postmodern philosophical discourse. The “pathetic” nature of the erasure of the boy’s life in terms of the more “valuable” adult world with which he could not compete, namely against the appetites of a brazen, but intelligent killer who so quickly blends into the

“maddening crowd” of Baudrillard’s New York City descriptor, is Darwinian, evolutionary destiny at its zenith. Bateman has made it his unconscionable mission to mutilate, pillage, and ultimately destroy those whom he deems are “pious, weak, useless, and hypocritical”, in this instance the small boy and by extension his mother. He seeks to obliterate “idealized human relationships”, between parents and siblings, between himself and partners, as exemplified in his tortured relationship with his on-again, off-again fiancée Evelyn, who never is aware of his nightmarish indulgences (themselves portraits of his desire to cause destruction, both physically and emotionally, namely to the marginalized and disenfranchised, i.e. women, homeless people, and homosexuals).

Bateman’s killing spree is formulated from this philosophy of “the (absurdist) right to die” and even blatantly says himself that one of his chosen victims was destined to die in such a vicious and demeaning manner at the behest of his perverted pleasure, ripped from the pages of de Sade. In the development of perhaps the book’s most decried and admittedly abhorrent scene of sexual violence, involving a rat being forcibly inserted into the vaginal orifice of one of his more unfortunate victims via a Habitrail compartment,

Bateman muses on the whims of fate and the events leading up to the act:

I try using this power drill on her, forcing it into her mouth, but she’s conscious

enough, has strength, to close her teeth, clamping them down, and even though the drill goes through the teeth quickly, it fails to interest me and so I hold her head up, blood dribbling from her mouth, and make her watch the rest of the tape and while she’s looking at the girl on the screen bleed from almost every possible orifice, I’m hoping she realizes that this would have happened to her no matter what. That she would have ended up lying here, on the floor in my apartment, hands nailed to posts, cheese and broken glass pushed up into her cunt, her head cracked and bleeding purple, no matter what other choice she might have made; that if she had gone to Nell’s or Indochine or Mars or Au Bar instead of M.K., if she had simply not taken the cab with me to the Upper West Side, that this all would have happened anyway. I would have found her. This is the way the earth works. (Ellis, 328)

The first image we get in the excerpt is the destructive representation of the phallus as power tool, in this case a high-speed electric drill. Savagely mocking and recreating the oral sexual torture and humiliation that he will perpetrate on this girl later as he already has done to several victims in the novel, both before and after death, he stops simply because “it no longer interests him.” Then he turns to his own demented justification for these grotesque tortures, harkening to Baudrillard’s explanation of postmodern fatalism, simply that she would have “ended up lying [there]” anyway, suggesting not just a masculinist, narcissistic attitude that this girl would have chosen to come up to his apartment symptomatic of men in his socio-economic position, but that fate, as entity, is responsible for her sadistic torture and subsequent death, not him. He is merely a figure in the grand design of the all-encompassing destiny, one that unfortunately benefits him and provides fodder for the continuous manifestation of his deviant desires, which come to a unanticipated peak in the infamous rat scene. As one might guess, many of the complaints leveled against Ellis of misogyny often cited this scene as the center of their argument, (including the legendary Gloria Steinem), not just because of the graphic mutilation by vermin alone, but because of the association with the female genitalia as

food and habitat for vermin. The implication, therefore, is that the vagina, and by the extension the woman possessing it, is lower and more vile than the rat itself, and just as easily and carelessly discarded. The excitement that he receives from playing the masculine, dominant figure in terms of real physicality and the voyeur simultaneously by employing the then-advent of home video technology to virtually or digitally terrorize his unfortunate submissive has its origins in the descriptions of one of his many memorable

XXX video rentals. Indeed, his consistent over-consumption of pornography cited earlier in the book could very well play a key role in his modus operandi to begin filming his sexual indiscretions and murderous proclivities. The urge to force subsequent victims to indulge in his perverted idea of a quiet movie night at home is foreshadowed in

Bateman’s decisive inability to separate thoughts of the explicitly erotic and the banal surroundings he finds himself in while recounting memories of those thoughts:

Last night I rented a movie called Inside Lydia’s Ass and while on two Halcion and in fact sipping a Diet Pepsi, I watched as Lydia—a totally tan bleached-blonde hardbody with a perfect ass and great full tits—while on all fours gave head to this guy with a huge cock while another gorgeous blonde little hardbody with a perfectly trimmed blonde pussy knelt behind Lydia and after eating her ass out and sucking on her cunt, started to push a long, greased silver vibrator into Lydia’s ass and fucked her with it while she continued to eat her pussy and the guy with the huge cock came all over Lydia’s face as she sucked his balls and then Lydia bucked to an authentic- looking, fairly strong orgasm and then the girl behind Lydia crawled around and licked the come from Lydia’s face and then made Lydia suck on the vibrator. The new Stephen Bishop came out last Tuesday and at Tower Records yesterday I bought the compact disc, the cassette, and the album because I wanted to own all three formats. (Ellis, 98)

“I’m worried that I might be taping thirtysomething over Pamela’s Tight Fuckhole. A

Xanax fails to ward off the panic. Saks intensifies it.” (Ellis, 177)

The seemingly senseless mixture of the banal and the material with the pornographic is central to Bateman’s psychology about sexuality that he displays in his crimes, as well as

to the novel’s overarching theme of a constantly demanding, damaging, and violent hyperculture. Even a low, crude description of a pornographic scene is not complete and cannot be mentioned without references to en vogue products like “Diet Pepsi” and “the

New Stephen Bishop” or metropolitan shopping palaces like Saks. He tells us that just being in the place, Saks, intensifies his laughably absurd concern about having taped a sitcom over the porn video, so Bateman himself establishes the tense connection between excess of material and excess of bodily lust that manifests itself in an apprehension that cannot be calmed by mere pharmaceuticals like a headache or a panic attack. The material acts as a psychological triggering mechanism in his consciousness, too abstract to cure with any physical means. Functioning as bookends to the colloquialisms of conjugal interaction, the inclusion of the physical items in Ellis’s rhetoric plunge the reader and then just as abruptly remove them from Bateman’s libidinous musings back into his physical existence or at least his unreliable sense of whatever that is. (Ellis does this on multiple occasions.) The sex acts and details about the participants in the Lydia video also imply attributes of male certainty and confidence in sexual prowess and stamina about Bateman and the yuppie culture at large. These assurances are mirrored and supplemented by their abilities in fashion choice and athleticism, with the aid of financial power to pay for luxurious wardrobes and gym memberships and trainers. The only aspect of the male figure mentioned is his apparently large penis and his ejaculation on Lydia’s face (perhaps not coincidentally referred to in the pornography business as the

“money shot”, yet another reference back to the material at the very core of Bateman’s obsessive and destructive lifestyle), proof that the man has achieved the desired goal of orgasm and satisfactory, biological indicator of his testosterone-fueled virility and libido.

The fact that the rest of the man’s appearance, such as the pectoral muscles and the abdominals, seem to have no relevancy to the scene oddly undermines Bateman’s own expectations to maintain an overall “perfect” physique via daily two hour regiments in the upscale gyms or health clubs, noted in various chapters throughout the novel, such as when he tells the reader he has performed “two thousand abdominal crunches and thirty minutes of rope-jumping in the living room,…even though I worked out in the gym today for close to two hours.” (Ellis, 161) Here, the large and implied “powerful” phallus alone is the most central basis for measuring sexual stamina and overall masculinity. Interesting also is that while the real penis is involved in orally penetrating Lydia, the fake phallic object, the silver vibrator, is what penetrates her vagina, the stereotypical centerpiece of male sexual conquest, with the aid of another woman no less. However, the head-to-toe description of the women from a sexist misogynistic eye, which focuses on their reproductive organs, still objectifies them. Though the acts on a purely physical level are of a lesbian nature, they are created with a heterosexual male gaze in mind. Here, Patrick

Bateman reveals himself to be a believer in what is popularly referred to as the “porn myth”, which engineers male fantasies that to engage in certain behaviors such as ejaculating on a woman’s face or in her mouth or other orifices, as well as engaging in what could be construed as violent sex play, will appeal to and excite most women. The scene overall is a textbook example of this belief system and values, disturbing because

Bateman can so easily dismiss it to move on to thinking about yet another nonchalant shopping experience.

The implications of all of these scenes for the reader is that the “We”, the

American people, are guilty of an unacknowledged deviancy or perversion in our desire

to know what happens next. Each time a notice of some new horrific event is received in the media, it is quickly splashed across every news channel, CNN ticker, and newspaper.

Those individuals in control of these organizations are aware of the culture in which in they exist, a culture that thrives on the unmitigated gossip that surrounds violence and chaos. Indeed, such events in 2016 are denoted as “going viral”, rather like a social disease that cannot be contained. The unspoken aspect of a social hunger for calamity is enhanced by virtue of the fact that our culture has given birth to the rapid and rabid

“grab-it-and-go” lifestyle at work in the piece that then manifests chaos as some sort of warped offspring. In other words, failure and fatalities as a result of our failure to give to rise to communities that are based upon social tolerance, justice, and understanding becomes inherent in the very structure. The desire to amplify differences between the “haves” and the “have-nots” via each new product that emerges from of the mouth of the commercial capitalism machine sponsors elitism, bigotry, and jealousy, the degenerative aspects of American culture that Bateman and his ilk suffer from most in the novel and, indeed, foundational roots of all of his crimes. Bilton goes on to say that the

“desublimation” of life in and of itself in exchange for a hierarchal system that substitutes material as the essential makes Bateman a mere product of his culture already rooted in an economic tradition, and therefore most disturbingly, not so very different from

American society at large:

…in this brutal process of desublimation, contemporary culture is already ahead of him. Everything (and everybody) can already be bought, consumed, and disposed of- at a purely financial, rather than moral, cost. In a sense, there is no need to sublimate; Ellis’s New York wears its appetite on its sleeve. In fact, one could very well reverse these terms: it is the financial or the mercantile impulse which is genuine, and Bateman’s murders are but a visceral perversion of this. As John Walsh puts it, ‘In his murky vision, a skewed and suicidal materialism is the sole

currency of his young metropolitans, the only stuff of conversation, the single realm of thought, the measure of personal wealth and social health.’ Bateman’s actions represent the capitalist instinct sublimated into violence. (Bilton, 209)

The suggestion that Bateman’s bizarre crimes are analogous to the insatiable American appetite for wealth and all of the privileges that accompany those who possess that wealth is hardly something the reading public, regardless of the period, would reasonably be able to come to terms with easily. Nonetheless, to simply rebuke such an accusation would be a crime in and of itself, because it fundamentally rejects the larger problem that Ellis is trying to get at in his lurid descriptions of unthinkable acts: we as a collective in the

United States tend to only hold merit in material objects that certain people have the ability to stockpile, and yet have little time to hold acts of humanity in high regard. They get their brief clips at the end of the nightly news, a small, “feel good” notification on social media sites today we might say, but those quickly fade away into the higher rated stories of “murder, greed, corruption, violence, exploitation, adultery and treachery—all those things we hold near and dear to our hearts.” (Ebb et. al, Chicago) However, by ignoring these foundational leanings, our culture as a collective gives rise to an imperative rhetorical question Baudrillard presents in his Transparency of Evil: “How can we ever confront this new violence if we prefer to eradicate even the violence of our own history?”(Baudrillard, 85)

There is perhaps no more famous culprit of revoking the violence of American history in the name of commercialism then Walt Disney. As alluded to in the piece of

Gabler’s from the introduction to this essay, Disney had a penchant for conveniently erasing any potentially awkward or offensive moments in terms of racial, sexual, or ethical complexity that might tarnish the inspirational and/or nostalgic storylines he made

it his mission to tell. Disturbingly, that pattern seems to have imprinted itself upon those who visit his theme parks. Many visitors that were raised on overdoses of Disney

“magic”, what we will term that obsession of and for all things Disney-themed, and simultaneous ignorance of any discrepancies in themes or policies which might seem discriminating, especially in Florida, seem to have passed on that abnormally strong trait of longing to attend the Disney parks to the subsequent generations. Families with strong nostalgic ties to the parks attend several times throughout the year and marvel at spectacles they have seen a hundred times before, without questioning why as they grow older. Escape from Tomorrow writer and director Randy Moore describes his experience during filming with this odd, virulent cultural yearning for the wonders of childhood in an Indiewire interview conducted during the film’s Sundance release:

Moore: It's kind of madness. Everyone's saying, ‘Celebrate the magic, believe,’ that kind of stuff. There was a moment when we were at the [Fantasmic!] show in Orlando. It's at their [Hollywood Studios] park. At one moment in the middle of the show, there was this hail of pyrotechnics, and all of a sudden, Mickey [Mouse] just appears on the stage at the top of this mountain. There are lasers everywhere. Adults all around me literally gasped as if a god had appeared before them. This was genuine emotion. Somehow they had been brought back to whatever it was they felt when they were kids. At one point when we were shooting one day we were riding to the park and a mother was telling her kids, ‘Listen, for mommy, Disney World really is magic, so you guys have to behave.’ My director of photography and I were listening to this and thinking, ‘This is the weirdest thing we've ever heard.’ This woman has been just deeply affected. She believed the magic. (Kohn, IndieWire.com)

In the increasingly delirious second act of Moore’s film, he includes a subplot that plays upon the notion alluded to in the interview that the psychosis of these Disney super- fans is obsessive, even to the degree that their behavior can turn violent in the event of overexposure to or belief in Disney “magic.” After meeting what appears to be a random woman on one of the many benches that line the park’s streets, watching a young girl

who appears to be her daughter running around and playing nearby, Jim approaches the woman and encourages his son to play with the girl while he talks to the attractive lady on the bench. Shortly after, he has a sexual encounter with the woman who, in a twist on

Disney’s squeaky-clean and chaste attitudes towards any sort of intimacy in its films, mounts and rides the married father with aggression and ferocity, screaming out, “Yeah, fuck me, find my hidden Mickey!,” while their two children play just outside the door.

(The line is an ironic reference to a practice of Disney theme park aficionados to seek out hidden marks and details shaped like the head of Mickey Mouse carved into buildings, tent poles, statuary, and other structures or woven into textile materials such as carpets and draperies throughout the parks.) Just after the encounter, the woman goes on to tell Jim that the princesses in the Character Fairs are really high-priced prostitutes for wealthy businessmen, (and, assumedly, bored suburban fathers willing to pay the price who wish to take their own vacation in the midst of the family vacation) that utilize the

Fairs as a cover for their bizarre escort arrangements. Disturbingly, the Character Fairs are where small children are corralled to take pictures with the Disney princesses, reflecting the proximity of sexual indiscretion to impressionable, innocent children in the hotel sex scene itself. Noting that this scene was filmed on location in Disney’s iconic

Contemporary Hotel, presumably in close quarters with other families, brings a stark and grotesque realism to Moore’s story. The choice of environment also serves to fetishize the rejection of traditional family values, i.e. not making love to anyone but one’s spouse and certainly not where children could hear or see the act taking place, and on a broader scale, undermine the very conservative values that the entire corporation was founded upon in the first place. Admittedly though, these events seem to have little connection to

one another in terms of chronology, and consequently, become confusing for the audience, until the events at the film’s climax. The seductress reveals herself to be a witch who has cast a spell on Jim, modeled after Maleficent, the villain from 1959’s

Sleeping Beauty. When he discovers her secret, she reveals that she was once an actor at the park, portraying the Princess Aurora at the previously mentioned Fairs. As it turns out, she was fired after her love for inhabiting the role of the princess took a psychotic turn and she hugged one girl so tightly she nearly suffocated her, resulting in the child being pried out of the woman’s arms by a terrified mother. The image of a grown woman in a plastic tiara and a sparkling pink polyester gown seemingly in the act of crushing a six year old with a horrible smile that quickly grows into a disquieting grimace of effort to make her embrace tighter is perhaps the most horrifying image of the Disney character gone berserk shown in the film (that is, until the film’s final scene discussed later in the essay). It is an iconic moment of the grotesque in Disney culture that Moore develops throughout Escape from Tomorrow into an example of Baudrillard’s hyperrealism. The medium of photography (as noted in the introduction), both in the capturing of the film itself and in the choice of settings where pictures are taken nearly every second, is essential to Moore’s working in the hyperreal landscape that Baudrillard envisioned at the

Disney parks, just as it is when Ellis writes his scenes of Bateman capturing his crimes on film or indulging in pornographic entertainment, sometimes simultaneously. Here, the consistent themes of fantasy and nostalgia are perverted into a recognizable, but nonetheless grotesque, reimagining of Disney archetypes, namely the presentation of the

Disney princess as embodied in the Fairs.

Escape from Tomorrow, therefore, unfolds in an environment like Ellis’s which seeks to murder innocence and the relationships between adults and children. While it is true that the child in the zoo scene of American Psycho is actually murdered, and the unfortunate girl in Escape from Tomorrow is not, the girl can be thought of in some ways as a murder victim. Her childhood illusions as to the sanctity and security of a place like

Walt Disney World or in the arms of a princess have cruelly been ripped from her, stealing a part of her life mentally and emotionally, and therefore scarring her evermore.

The same, presumably, holds true for the mother, again reflecting the zoo scene in Ellis’s novel. Not only is this scene disturbingly reminiscent of the scene from American

Psycho, but scenes like this throughout the film are rooted in autobiographical anxieties.

The film’s director, Randy Moore, had a rather strange relationship with his father that consisted largely of trips to Disney World after his parents were divorced and his father settled in Orlando for work, consequently creating an odd tie with the Disney environment as well. After the two men had a tumultuous falling out, what had once been so simple to him now seemed somehow changed, including his memories of the theme parks. His first visit there with his own children quickly became disturbing as he looked around and saw parents and children repeating the same motions of “enjoying” the park as he had as a boy, an example of that “reduplication of the real” Baudrillard described.

Interestingly, Moore’s wife, a former nurse in the psychological ward of a hospital, while observing the Character Meet and Greet for the first time, turned to her husband and said

“this is worse than the psyche ward.” Prior to this instance, Moore had not voiced his feelings of uneasiness to her and the comment triggered the thought process that would develop into the film. The problematic nature of parenting and what it is traditionally

thought to represent, that is love, compassion, security, and familiarity with one’s surroundings, is therefore subverted by Ellis and Moore and consequently plays a vital role in the establishment of the violence and sexual material described in both stories.

Production and Consumption are one and the same grand logical process in the expanded reproduction of the productive forces and of their control. This imperative, which belongs to the system, enters in an inverted form into mentality, ethics, and everyday ideology, and that is its ultimate cunning: in the form of liberation of needs, of individual fulfillment, of pleasure, and of affluence, etc. The themes of expenditure, pleasure, and non-calculation (‘Buy now, pay later’) have replaced the ‘puritan’ themes of thrift, work, and patrimony. But this is only the appearance [emphasis added] of a human revolution. (Selected Writings, Baudrillard, 50)

Baurdillard’s discussion on the problematic nature of the “consumer society” (the name of the chapter from which this excerpt comes) reiterates the pervasiveness of the capitalistic corporate desire to control and then swiftly lays bare its end result and moral failing: for all that the corporate machine produces in a supposed effort to enhance human life, and give the cultural/societal illusion that it does so through the marketing of newer and generally more expensive solutions to the lack of whatever it is Americans “should have,” the excess of consumption by the purchaser/consumer ends up systematically destroying them. Corporate America’s successful subversion and transformation of the

“mentality, ethics, and everyday ideology” of typical American society, that is, the once admired qualities of “thrift, work, and patrimony,” into new packages of mass ideology that are manufactured on the assembly line, along with the desirable material objects for sale, are at the philosophical center of Disney culture, as well as Patrick Bateman’s murky Manhattan subculture of Americana. In both narratives, the “typical” is replaced with a new “type” in which the consumer is no longer an independent, “individually fulfilled” person, but a physical form without a definitive personality or identity. They

cannot be, because the cycle or system that Baudrillard describes prevents them from being so by its very nature. That potential for individual identity has been sacrificed to and thereby replaced with the omnipotent substance or essence of the brand name, the producer from which everything, including clothes, food, residences, etc. flows.

The realization of the loss of one’s identity and the inability and/or unwillingness to escape its consequences is at the dark heart of American Psycho’s psychological and ideological conundrums. Nearly at the conclusion of the novel, Ellis writes Bateman’s confession of his lack of being as a complete submissive to the material culture that engulfs him from every angle. It becomes a disturbing and transgressive swansong of contemporary, ideological death:

…there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and is persistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed. I still, though, hold on to one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed. Yet I am blameless. Each model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity. Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have, countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing… (Ellis, 377)

Just as the passage begins as a trailed-off thought, so too is Bateman. He is a mere concept, a bizarre philosophy of life without living. The essence of himself resides in

objects of the material world and, therefore, his ideological death is meaningless, seemingly like everything else about him. “You can shake [his] hand and feel flesh gripping yours,” but the implication here is that the action would be akin to gripping the hand of a corpse, because beyond the flesh, there is no feeling. One of the simplest statement that he makes, “There are no more barriers to cross,” is an acceptance of his

“death,” but it is also a refusal to turn back or even acknowledge that redemption is possible. His possessions, up to and including the women that he used and then disposed of in a manner consistent with the soullessness that he categorizes himself into, are replaceable, just like him. Armani, Ferragamo, and Calvin Klein are the marks of identity in his environment, the names that truly matter. Like the physical “fabric” utilized in the stitching of the ultra-sophisticated clothing designers, his identity is a fabrication.

Nothing of himself remains intact. As he says, lifestyle, i.e. that which relates people to the things they buy, is the only available means of comparison because that is how humanity, or the mass that resembles it, communicates in his world of corporatized material culture. There is a cruel irony in the passage that he claims to have lost his conscience, pity, and hopes (all the things that make one human) at an institution of higher education, the very place where all those elements are supposed to be developed to make up the personage one will inhabit for the rest of their lives. For Bateman, knowledge, outside of an encyclopedic one of designer products, is the enemy. It is what separates those who have the ability to think for themselves beyond the material, what

Bateman and his vainglorious ilk would classify as idealistic fools, and those who cannot.

People who have studied and can recognize marketing rhetoric for what it is, a ploy to purchase and not an almighty omniscient, are the people he wants to be trapped in his

private, well-decorated Hell with him, but are not because their power lies where he fails: the essence of the mind, that which delineates man from beast. As the killer who slaughters and disembowels without a thought, he manifests himself as the “beast in the jungle” Elizabeth Young wrote about. He is angry because he can have “no new knowledge of himself,” but his choice to reject the pursuit of new knowledge and accept what corporations tell him, that is, an amassing of money and material possessions is equivalent to ideological might, proves him to be a hypocrite. Perhaps though, this is not completely his fault. The sensory bombardment of Times Square alone is enough to drive anyone crazy. Baudrillard himself notes that “The world of objects and of needs would thus be a world of general hysteria,” and, therefore, everyone is driven mad by the neon billboards (Baudrillard, 45.) The difference is in how they manifest that madness. Some trample others on Black Fridays, some pay exorbitant prices for the cheapest made goods because of the brand name stamped on it, and some are driven to kill, because that is the only form of consumption left. Bateman’s crimes are never discovered, (the policeman whom he confesses all his horrific acts to at the novel’s climax laughs him off the phone) so like everything else it does not matter and he fades into nothingness just as he predicts he would.

The same fate befalls the Jim White character in Escape from Tomorrow, albeit in a very “Disney” manner where magic plays a crucial role in bringing the film to its conclusion. Upon reuniting with his family after the disappearance of the witch described earlier, Jim becomes sick and locks himself in the bathroom. Once inside, he sits on the toilet and begins to cough up blood and what appears to be hairballs. His screams become louder and more tortured, while the family tries to break down the door in an effort to

help. Shortly after trying to intervene, however, Jim’s wife and children are corralled by a team of officials wearing vests and caps with Mickey images imprinted on them. Made to look like Disney’s version of a SWAT team, they break down the door and the family screams in terror as they discover Jim in a pool of blood, staining the checkerboard floor and Mickey-head shower curtain (perhaps in homage to Albert Hitchcock’s magnum opus, Psycho, notably also a precursor of Ellis’ novel.) Jim’s appearance though as changed somewhat: he now wears the large, sickening grin of the Cheshire Cat, a bizarre and manipulative character who significantly appears and then disappears at will in

Disney’s own Alice in Wonderland. The culture of Disney has penetrated his very being and to the point of devastation. His smiling corpse and his family is carted off the property (to where, we are not told) as though they, like Bateman, as though they were

“simply not there,” just as another cheerful family enters the hotel. Like all other consumers of mass culture, they are easily disposable and replaceable.

It is generally understood that American Psycho, much like Hitchcock’s Psycho, has a long and bloody history of real serial killers that were utilized as models for Patrick

Bateman: Wisconsin killer Ed Gein (the model for Psycho), Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey

Dahmer (also from Wisconsin), who dabbled in necrophilia and cannibalism and was still fresh in the mind of Ellis and every other American at the time of publication.

Disturbingly, and generally unknown to many, the moment of fantasy-horror in the bathroom in Moore’s film has its origins in a rather unusual policy, best explained by

Jane Kuenz in Inside the Mouse: The Project on Disney:

Disney protects its borders. When problems occur, something that might require official mediation between inside and out, various cogs of the company’s machinery kicks into gear. The concern is to let nothing enter or

exit the property unregulated or uncontrolled. This includes apparently the dead and dying…It’s company policy: when asked at one of Disney’s pricey management seminars whether anyone ever died at Disney World, the group leader on cue from a supervisor sitting in the back of the room, said simply, ‘No.’ If guests have the nerve to die, they wait, like unwanted calories until they’ve crossed the line and can do so safely off property. We had a guy last summer who went to Epcot, stood in front of the golf ball, took a gun, and blew his head off. But he didn’t die. He stood right there in front of all those tourists and went ‘cluck’ and brains blew everywhere. But he didn’t die there. The medic told me that they are not allowed to let them die there. Keep them alive by artificial means until they’re off Disney property, like there’s an imaginary line in the road and they go, ‘He’s alive, he’s alive, he’s dead.’ (Kuenz, 115)

This policy, wherein the Disney corporation plays God and views the natural forces of human life as inconvenient or interfering with its daily business, is representative of the corporate machine at the zenith of its power. Life and death are not strict facts of humanity’s existence, but are able to manipulated as long the person dying is on the company’s property. As in Moore’s film, Disney “magic” becomes, for anyone who is privy to this narrative, an ominous manifestation of the consequences of a single institution’s control. The inner workings of a conglomerate the size of Disney understandably has to be competitive, ruthless even, in order to become so, but attempting to eradicate the inevitable, i.e. death, is an exercise in sheer audacity, not to mention moral and ethical vacuity. The choice of suicide, as it was in the case of the guest mentioned above, may or may not necessarily be the correct “moral” one, but in any event it is not within the rights of Disney to infringe upon that person’s rights to do as they choose. Moral judgment is not within the bounds of a company that makes a profit off of the past, a company that is able to erase the history of a person, or a culture for that matter, so completely.

CONCLUSION: Contemporary Implications of the American Nightmare

The words of Neal Gabler’s award-winning biography of Walt Disney provided a foundation of criticism for this paper to begin. Therefore, it is only fitting that they provide the foundation for the ending as well. In this excerpt, he details a famous critical response to the Disney exposition from The 1964 New York World’s Fair. It should be noted that this venue introduced the infamous Carousel of Progress and Hall of Presidents attractions, the two most attacked when it comes to the corporation’s tendency for rose- colored nostalgia and white-washed history:

But not everyone was enamored of Walt’s contributions [to the Fair]. Writing in Life shortly after the opening, the architect and architectural educator Vincent Scully wailed, ‘If This is Architecture, God Help Us.’ Fastening on the idea that Disney was now creating facsimiles of experiences that paled in comparison to the real thing and yet substituted for the real thing, Scully accused him of being a man who ‘so vulgarizes everything he touches that facts lose all force, living things their stature, and the “‘history of the world’” its meaning. Disney caters to the kind of phony reality--most horribly exemplified by the moving and talking figure of Lincoln elsewhere in the Fair—that we all too readily accept in place of the true. Mr. Disney, I’m afraid, has our number.’” (Gabler, 602)

That was in 1964. In 2016, not much has changed. Disney continues to produce films about beautiful white people for beautiful white people (i.e. the endless line of live-action remakes, including its own Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and the upcoming Beauty and the Beast) that perpetuate the history of cultural indifference at the company. They continue to cater to the culture of mass production and consumption by buying up every available franchise, and of course their lucrative merchandising rights, from Marvel

Comics to Star Wars, their most recent acquisition, with plans to have a new section of their Hollywood Studios park at Walt Disney World in Florida dedicated to the sci-fi blockbuster completed by the summer of 2018. None of this information will succeed in

preventing the Disney juggernaut from moving along as it has for nearly 80 years.

However, the fact that knowledge and criticism of the darker side of Disney, whether in film or on paper, exist is a testament to those who can think for themselves and seek out their own sources without falling into the traps that mass culture phenomena set for the uneducated.

Ironically, those traps that the purveyors of mass culture showcase as their most progressive, relevant, and important packages for Americans to consume were recently noted in an interview with Bret Easton Ellis about where his American Psycho, the ever- popular Patrick Bateman, could be now:

Would he be using social media—as a troll using fake avatars? Would he have a Twitter account bragging about his accomplishments? Would he be using Instagram, showcasing his wealth, his abs, his potential victims? Possibly. There was the possibility to hide during Patrick's '80s reign that there simply isn't now; we live in a fully exhibitionistic culture. Because he wasn't a character to me as much as an emblem, an idea, I would probably approach him the same way now and address his greatest fear: Would anyone be paying any attention to him? One of the things that upsets Patrick is that, because of a kind of corporate lifestyle conformity, no one can really tell the other people apart (and what difference does it make, the novel asks). People are so lost in their narcissism that they are unable to distinguish one individual from another (this is why Patrick gets away with his crimes), which ties into how few things have really changed in American life since the late '80s; they've just become more exaggerated and accepted. The idea of Patrick's obsession with himself, with his likes and dislikes and his detailing, curating—everything he owns, wears, eats, and watches, has certainly reached a new apotheosis. In many ways the text of American Psycho is one man's ultimate series of selfies. (Ellis, Town and Country Magazine.com, Feb.2016)

Ellis is still keenly aware of the culture he resides in. The ritualistic vanity of an

American culture that not just condones, but encourages, posting photographs (the favored medium of hyperreal spaces) of oneself on social media sites in various states of

dress or undress, participating in activities from the extraordinary to the banal (from graduations to a gym run,) is the new pinnacle of self-worship the American culture that

Bateman inhabited set the foundation for in the late 1980’s. The obsession that he describes in the appearance of oneself has, thanks to technology, spiraled even more out of control since Ellis’s 1991 publication, but the idea is the same. Baudrillard wrote that

“Life is so liquid, the signs and messages floating, the bodies and cars so fluid, the hair so blonde, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that you dream of death and murder, of orgies and cannibalism, to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane excess of light, to counteract the hypocrisy of everything here” (Bilton, 217.) We have become the nightmare that Baudrillard envisioned, and as far as Ellis or this author can tell, we will not have the courage nor the strength to step out of it anytime soon.

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