Systemic insecurity, spectacular violence: Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama

Abstract

The apolitical terrorism performed by fashion supermodels in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Glamorama (1998) negotiates the epistemological and physical insecurities of a globalized world, and explores the hidden links between the systemic violence of a hyperreal empire of consumer culture and spectacular acts of symbolic, terrorist violence. As embodiments of the “society of spectacle,” the models’ bodies represent the locus where systemic and symbolic violence converge and where the belief system of politics is replaced by the market technologies of biopolitics. Constantly shifting between different levels of fictionality, Glamorama portrays the terrorist as a self that has become its own mediatized, violent Other in the self-destructive, total space of capitalism. Linking this logic to the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Guy Debord, I argue that Glamorama paradoxically locates the terror of the Other deep in our own cultural scripts of a global risk society.