Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama

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)