Mtv Apocalypse

Dissertation. Module Title

15,000 word Dissertation

Abstract

An investigation into depictions of pop music as a moral threat in two ‘consumer dystopias’ written in 1985 and 1991 respectively, which in turn provides a critique of the theories of Jean Baudrillard and Frederic Jameson

Title

MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

MHRA Citation 17, 259 Words

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

MTV Apocalypse: visions of pop in two dystopian novels introduction ‘I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time’ (Richard Hell and the Volvoids, ‘Blank Generation’ 1977) This essay is about recent dystopian literature, and the complexities of its relationship to the cultural context in which it was written1. The context under analysis here, changes in pop music culture in the eighties and early nineties, may seem rather trivial. However the essay argues that these changes have fundamentally altered Western conceptions of the aesthetics of art, often causing moral outrage. This is why pop music has played a particularly prevalent role in dystopian fiction. In fact while pop might appear an innocuous cultural form when laid against the evils of the wider world, it has actually contributed to the grandest of all dystopian visions: fantasies of apocalypse. The connection between pop music and dystopia is a product of the 1980s, but must be understood as a U-turn in pop’s political lineage. Pop music has attracted moral censure throughout its fifty-year history. An argument could be made, in fact, for controversy being the entire basis of rock ‘n roll. From the filming of Elvis Presley from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 to the Sex Pistols’ hijacking of the Queen’s Jubilee in 1977, pop (here incorporating rock, dance, hip hop and other derivatives) is historically aligned with counterculture2. It is defined through a binary opposition against the ‘official’ culture propagated by governments, multinational corporations and other forms of ideological state apparatus. As such, pop music generally promotes political liberalism and sexual liberation. If in reality pop has always been part of commodity culture, with the purchase of records, appropriate clothing and associated paraphernalia, it is at least a counter-hegemonic and counterideological act of consumption. Devouring pop, as Pamela Thurschwell has observed, traditionally locates ‘a liberatory politics within the very terms of late capitalism’ (1999, 287).

2

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

During the Reagan and Thatcher regimes of the eighties these conditions were reversed by two phenomena. There was a proliferation of pop music within everyday life, and there was an increasing convergence of pop music and corporate power systems. The proliferation of pop is emblematic of phenomenal increases in communications tenchonology in the post-war era, and accelerated in the eighties due to the opening of new markets. The sound of the suburbs (progressive rock, punk and all manner of regional boy and girl groups) was superseded by the mass conformity of the global village, with its ubiquitous megastars Madonna and Michael Jackson. As Jon Savage, the definitive chronicler of punk, disapprovingly observes: The thing about pop is that it has penetrated all parts of life and become this huge industry, too large to be run in the old chaotic way that it did. In 1977 it was chaos, really. They were flinging money at it, drugs were everywhere and it was a glorious mess [. . .] Now, everything is niched and market research runs everything (in Gorman 2001, 342) New technologies resulted in pop sounds and images saturating everyday consciousness to an extent that no other art form has ever achieved. The appearance of the personal stereo (Walkman) and music television (MTV) in 1979 and 1981 respectively are particularly responsible for pop permeating every moment of waking life, and the latter is a major contextual focus of this essay. During the eighties many of rock ‘n roll’s leading exponents put aside antiauthoritarian posturing in favour of the new transatlantic ideals of monetarism and market forces. This was most noticeable in the rhetoric of über-commercial new pop acts such as Spandeau Ballet, Culture Club and the almost openly Thatcherite Duran Duran. In the all-pervading music culture not only did corporate capitalism infiltrate rock ‘n roll, but rock ‘n roll came to infiltrate corporate capitalism. Naomi Klein has charted the rise of the ‘rock ‘n roll CEO’ who treats entrepreneurship as a form of teenage excess. Take Virgin’s Richard Branson, who launched a London bridal store in a wedding dress, rappelled off the roof of his new Vancouver megastore while uncorking a bottle of champagne and then later crash-landed in the Algerian desert in his hot-air balloon – all during the month of December 1996 (2000, 81) The tremendous cultural influence of corporate pop even subsumes politics. As one character remarks in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, ‘Donald Trump is a big U2

3

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

fan’ (1991, 137). John Harris has already outlined the relationship between Britpop bands such as Blur and Oasis and the election of New Labour in 1997, with its Fender Stratocaster-weilding frontman Tony Blair. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Bill Clinton has been described as the first ‘MTV President’ due his unprecedented identification with pop music culture; his campaigning on MTV and his infamous admission to smoking marijuana (Marcus 2000). Pop has come to influence the Foucauldian process whereby all social formations are constructed through institutions of power. It is a striking transformation. Most engagement in fiction with the subject of corporate pop has taken place within the genre, to coin a phrase, of the consumerist dystopia3. Consumerist dystopian fiction is an embittered response to the conditions of late capitalism. It extends Lukacs’ observation that ‘the problem of commodities [is] the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects’, by suggesting that commodity has moved beyond economics to cause a semantic crisis in social life itself (Levin 1980, 5). Consumer-dystopian fiction came into existence in opposition to the New Right, depicting the anomie engendered by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. It extrapolates to nightmarish extremes trends surrounding consumption: advertising, branding and especially the encroaching of mass media into the domestic sphere. Consider Ellis’s American Psycho (1995), Martin Amis’s Money (1984) and the majority of Don DeLillo’s oeuvre. On film see Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites (1994) and Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). Where dystopian fiction in the middle of the twentieth century had mainly located threat in the considerable power of totalitarian governments, in its closing decades this threat shifts instead to the sinister influence exerted by corporations4. The consumerist dystopia instils in its inhabitants a crisis of identity. It causes a quest for self-worth in a world where all social relations have been reduced to buying or selling. These texts critique the way in which drives for material wealth have destroyed social conscience and ‘family values’. Maintaining the credo that the only difference between a utopia and a dystopia is the author’s point of view (see anon 2004c), they are often affluent societies in which the protagonists have every imaginable physical comfort, from the plush apartment and jet-setting lifestyle of the unnamed star of Fight Club (1999) to the spectacular technological indulgences of the teenage drug dealer in Sam Mendes’s American Beauty (1999).

4

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

This type of fiction and the sociological analysis by which I have identified it are both clearly indebted to Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. The world’s two leading thinkers on topics of commodity and consumption, both Baudrillard and Jameson’s work is developed from the Marxist traditions of the Frankfurt School. For Marx, the commodity causes ‘a definite social relation between men [to assume], in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (in Thurschwell 1999, 286). This notion derives from Marx’s view of political economy as a simple equation:

POLITICAL ECONOMY =

+ Use Value (an object’s utility)

Economic Exchange Value (an object’s price)

(diagrammatised from outline in Makaryk 1993, 247)

The equation presupposes a complete division between the consumed object and the consuming subject. Baudrillard and Jameson, however, suggest in slightly different ways that the pragmatic division between use and exchange value does not effectively describe the political economy of late capitalism. The solution offered by Baudrillard during his main phase, in the 1960s, is based upon the sign exchange value that commodities such as pop music exert upon human consciousness in any exchange:

POLITICAL ECONOMY =

Exchange Value Use Value + Economic value – A functional logic of value (worth based can be exchanged for something else upon use) or money (as a commodity)

Sign Exchange Value + A sign for others, + substitutable and a part of a particular sign system (fashion, wealth etc.)

Symbolic Exchange Value An ambivalent object with personal significance, often of occasion, place or time

(diagrammatised from combination of Makaryk 1999, 247 and Horrocks 1996, 31) Pop music, when considered as part of the myriad of signs produced by mass media and informational systems in Baudrillard’s framework, confers particular social traits upon the consumer. As Thurschwell points out: Pop records are arguably one of the most intimately experienced commodity forms [. . .] pop music wafts through the background of people’s lives on the radio, in dance halls, in supermarkets, becoming attached in random formations to personal meanings [Baudrillard’s ‘symbolic exchange value’] There is no realm of the human separable from the repeated fantasmic acting out of identity,

5

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

and fantasies of identity take place in and through, as well as against, commodity culture. Humans consume and are consumed by pop music (Thurschwell 1999, 288) For Jameson, meanwhile, the era of corporate pop is part of a new postmodern age of capitalism. This is a dialectical extension of two preceding stages, of ‘market capitalism’ (associated with realist literature) followed by ‘monopoly’ or ‘imperialist’ capitalism (associated with modernist literature) (Groden and Kreiswirth 2004). In his initial essay on the subject, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, Jameson suggests that the cultural products of postmodern age, such as consumer dystopian fiction will, ‘replicate – reproduce – reinforce the logic of late capitalism’ (1998b, 19). By his revised version, ‘Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ he has reached a more nuanced definition of the art-context relationship, arguing for art as a symbolic act which seeks to ‘intervene in a concrete social situation or problem and attempts to arrive at some sort of response or solution’ to it (Hardt 2000, 9). This essay will examine the relationship between two sample texts and the social context of corporate pop: Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991). Both are debuts set in Californian consumer dystopias, and each is a Bildungsroman for its first-person narrator. The essay investigates the construction of the self through pop music: the subjectivity engendered against a perpetual background of music videos, in which any oppositional stance to the dominant culture is precluded by the all-pervading influence of commerce. It will consider the semiotic position of pop music within the novels, with strong reference to Baudrillard’s Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) and his Simulations (1983). The essay contends that Ellis and Coupland depict popular music as a force which invariably pollutes subject-construction. The dissolution of the reified, autonomous bourgeois subject is of course a central tenet of twentieth century thought ranging from Horkheimer to Lacan. Jameson’s dialectical use of theory precludes him from coming to his own stance on the problematic of subjectivity (see 1998b, 6), but for Baudrillard the late twentieth century subject is reduced to a moving point of differences within the consumptive process, a shifting equation of different signs and objects (Levin 1981, 10). Commodity relations render the human subject a powerless object. Less Than Zero supports this view in rather alarmist terms. It suggests that the ‘corrupting’ influence of sign exchange value is so great it erodes the individuation processes of the reified self, creating a blank,

6

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

homogenised consumer mass. For Coupland, in a similar but slightly less pessimistic vein, the overload of signs is a cynical, socially-imposed mechanism to cause people to operate as unfulfilling stereotypes. The essay will suggest, however, that by embracing Baudrillardian postmostmodernsim – which was particularly voguish in the era that Ellis and Coupland wrote – they produce rather distorted portraits of the sociological influence of pop music which (for all their satirical nous) amount to a form of hysteria. A common criticism of Baudrillard’s work is that it exaggerates the influence that mass media really has upon people in Western societies, and this is replicated Ellis and Coupland’s presentation of homogenised groups, which generally overlook differences of class, race and other forms of marginality.

1) MTV and the death of subjectivity Turn up the TV, no one listening will suspect Even your mother won’t detect it, so your father won’t know Everything is less than zero (Elvis Costello, ‘Less Than Zero’ 1977)5 Few careers in recent publishing history have matched the commercial success, moral outrage and balance between high praise and abject condemnation raised by Bret Easton Ellis. As critics were alarmed to report upon the publication of Less Than Zero, the young man from Sherman Oaks had written his debut novel at the age of twenty, allegedly typing it over a mere month on his bedroom floor at Bennington College (Freese 1990, 68). Less Than Zero consists of the deadpan first-person narrative of Clay, an eighteen year old Los Angeleno who has returned home for Christmas following his first term at college in New Hampshire, reacquainting himself with the thrill-seeking lifestyle of his childhood friends. On its surface the novel contains little plot beyond a cycle of identical parties and uncomfortable family occasions. There are few twists or even kernels, just the blank flow of Clay’s consciousness which nonjudgementally takes in his surroundings. The only forms of progression are the escalating depictions of violence and the novel’s central mystery: what is up with Clay’s friend Julian? Using this basic framework Ellis investigates the preoccupations of eighties America: indulgence, violence, sexual excess and consumerism. As Elizabeth Young suggests, however, Less Than Zero is only ‘deceptively simple’ (1992, 21). Her essay on the novel, ‘Vacant Possession’, is pathbreaking in its Baudrillardian argument that 7

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Ellis’s disinclination to invest character with meaning is a reflection of a society overloaded with the endlessly circulating signs and signifiers of consumerism which are themselves devoid of meaning and doomed to revolve forever without substance or hope of signification (1992, 30) This section of my essay will validate Young’s hypothesis through a new analysis of the strategies by which corporate pop music culture is depicted as a cause of anomie in Less Than Zero. It will investigate the ways in which specific bands are referenced (an area in which Young is uncharacteristically weak, treating Ellis’s quoted song lyrics in an entirely decontextualised manner). First Less Than Zero’s Los Angeles setting will be identified as a consumer dystopia. Ellis’s strategies for referencing the abundance of pop music in this landscape will then be identified, as will the role of MTV as a cause of deindividuation and violence. Lastly, this section investigates a deindividuation of the novel itself, an effect which has passed by even the eagle-eyed Young. This is created by an innovative interdiscursive relationship to Ellis’s later novel American Psycho. Los Angeles is the natural setting for consumer-dystopian fiction. Its gated communities and regular demonstration of the divide between rich and poor by means of physical violence provides abundant opportunities for portraying the ills of consumption. Ellis writes in the tradition of a ‘Hollywood anti-myth’ (Fine 1984, 2) in which L.A. is a setting for disillusionment. This has come to be as culturally significant as the California dream against which it rails through the pervasive work of Nathanael West, Joan Didion and David Lynch. In Less Than Zero the urban pollution and oppressively hot desert are suffocating6. Baudrillard’s ideal image of American culture is appropriately desert, and this explains the conformist nature of Ellis’s characters. America is the original ‘hyperreal’7 environment. Having skipped the ‘second-order’ simulation that occurred in Europe during the era of mechanical reproduction, Americans are precluded from possessing the oppositional faculties for political change (Poster 2001, 169). The jaded adolescents of Less Than Zero are in fact the children of Ronald Reagan’s decreases in direct taxation, the main benefactors of the prevailing politic. As Clay tells Rip during the rather cloying denouement they ‘have everything’ from expensive cars and clothes to a vast array of narcotics (as a particularly acerbic reviewer put it in The New Republic, ‘readers with a degree in pharmacology may find the chemcial catalogue diverting’ 1985, 42). Taking a condemnatory line, Less Than 8

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Zero viciously satirises the eighties notion that consumerism can lead to utopia. Continuing a tradition dating back to Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas it suggests that humanity’s utopian dream is faulty in itself, replacing the unhappiness of frustrated desire with absolute boredom (Abrams 1999, 205). Possessing no social function these characters repeatedly assert their indifference, even towards life and death issues. When Daniel phones Clay and asks if he should call Vanden, a girl he has impregnated, about her abortion, Clay is mildly astonished (a highly emotional act for him) at his own indifference: ‘I’m surprised at how much strength it takes to care to urge him to do so’ (55). The French moniker for Generation X, Génération Bof, seems appropriate. Los Angeles is an exemplar of the post-sixties world which Baudrillard terms ‘affluent society’. Here all culture is defined by the dynamic of consumption (Connor 1997, 44; Horrocks 1996, 50). By focusing on a sole homogenous class, Less Than Zero highlights Baudrillard’s (some would say inaccurate) argument that postindustrial capitalism has exchanged class struggle for conflict against the new order of simulation (Horrocks 1996, 25). For conformists like Clay’s friends everything is judged in terms of its connotative value, its place in the system of sign exchange based upon ideas of prestige or cool, rather than its denotive value (what it actually does). When Clay meets somebody he always introduces them not by describing their disposition or physical features but by the connotations of their clothing: ‘the tear on my gray argyle vest [. . .] seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale blue T-shirt [. . .] I bring Daniel to Blair’s party that night and Daniel is wearing sunglasses and a black wool jacket and black jeans [. . .] “Hey, Clay”, Trent says, a red-andgreen-plaid scarf wrapped around his neck [. . .] My psychiatrist’s wearing a red V-neck sweater with nothing on underneath and a pair of cut-off jeans’ (1, 4, 5). You are what you wear, what you watch, what you consume. As such, these characters are no longer volitional subjects. Instead, to use one of Henri Lefebvre’s notions that particularly influenced Baudrillard, contemporary life is no longer ‘subjective’ (individual subjects making judgements) but ‘objective’. Opinion is imposed through social organisation (Horrocks 1999, 8). One such form of organisation is The Face, a magazine that appeared in 1980 and strongly influenced the development of corporate pop with its mixture of music, fashion and culture. In Less Than Zero the magazine’s

9

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

readership are satirised in Benjamin, a character who is entirely the object of its caprices: ‘The Human League are out. Over. Finished. You don’t know what’s going on, Kim.’ Kim shrugs. I wonder where Dimitri is; if Jeff is still holed up with some surfer out in Malibu. ‘No I mean, you really don’t,’ he goes on. ‘I bet you don’t even read The Face. You’ve got to.’ He lights a clove cigarette. ‘You’ve got to’. ‘Why do you have to?’ I ask. Benjamin looks at me, runs his fingers over his pompadour and says, ‘Otherwise you’ll get bored.’ (86) For Benjamin this imposed lifestyle is involuntary law: ‘You’ve got to’. His unconvincing excuse that The Face prevents boredom suggests that teenagers can do nothing to amuse themselves without media instruction. The dynamics of consumption even consume erotic life. Clay’s thirteen year old sister mockingly considers an attractive boy with the comment ‘I wonder if he’s for sale’ (16, 164, 171). Her words repeatedly weave their way though Clay’s consciousness, mantra-style. The erotic-economic combination is ultimately the nadir of Julian’s fall from grace too, in his becoming a prostitute. Jameson similarly claims that in these postmodern conditions there has been ‘a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’8 (in Hardt 2000, 216). It is important to note, however, that in Jamesonian terms Ellis’s condemnation of consumer society is both reactionary and nostalgic. Jameson sees the semiotic relationship between culture and capitalism developing thus: 1) BOURGEOIS CAPITALIST SOCIETY Reification of social relationships into inert and frozen objects

2) ‘HEROIC’ CAPITALIST SOCIETY Separations –

Signified (referent) 3) MODERNIST SOCIETY Controlling element (subject)

Separations intensify – Economic Life

Social Use Value

Signifier Social Life

(this is a new separation)

Controlled element (object)

Controller (subject)

Exchange Value

Labour

Controlled element (object)

Capital

10

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Cultural Life

This new separation allows for critique and for utopian thinking

4) POSTMODERN SOCIETY Signs are entirely relieved of their function of

Modernism’s prized space of autonomy is lost (diagrammatised from Connor 1997, 46-7)

As Young has already noted, Ellis desires ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ and rejects the hyperreal (1992, 33). By Jameson’s schema he condemns the postmodern play of signification in strictly modernist terms. His argument that social life has been impoverished by the infiltration of consumer capitalism is based upon a notion of separable social and cultural spheres which can adequately comment upon one another (Connor 1997, 46). In fact, as will be explained later, the very texture of Ellis’s novel is itself caught up with commodity. Less Than Zero’s convergence of culture and consumption is emphasised by its Christmas setting, also notable in Generation X. As Sahlin argues this is not a time for family gatherings but ‘abandonment and depersonalisation’ (1991, 27-8). Daniel doesn’t know if his parents are in Aspen or Japan for the vacation while Kim can only locate her mother by consulting Variety. When Clay first returns home there is no family welcome: ‘Nobody’s home [. . .] There’s a note on the kitchen table that tell me that my mother and sisters are out, Christmas shopping’ (2)9. The festival can only be enjoyed ironically, contrasted against ‘rebellious’ behaviour through Blair’s party invitation ‘Let’s Fuck Christmas Together’ (3) and a cruel film producer telling Kim

11

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

to ‘Have a Happy New Year, cunt’ (75). The other significant aspect of Clay’s homecoming is the appearance of a ‘New Maid’. The presence of such unnamed maids at the margins of the novel constitutes Ellis’s broadest social statement. Serving the same function as the backdrop of New York’s ‘ugly old homeless’ 10 in American Psycho (1995, 5), they foreground the economic conditions necessitated by the existence of the super-rich. Trent’s maid, for instance, provides a glimpse of the economic base of violence and exploitation that allows L.A. to keep functioning: ‘Mom feels guilty since [the maid’s] family was killed in El Salvador, but I think she’ll fire her sooner or later’ (44). Human compassion is sadly negated by economic considerations. Less Than Zero portrays the social consequences of Reagan’s withdrawal of state benefits: a world in which individuals must make their own provisions for poverty, sickness and old age. The weak and marginal are consequently persecuted11. At Kim’s party the accent of ‘Orientals’ is mocked, and U.S.C. is derided as ‘Jew.S.C’ (5-6). When Clay attends a gig by punk rockers X he reports that ‘Rip comes up to me and the first thing he says is, “There are too many fucking Mexicans, here, dude” ’ (172). For Baudrillard this racism is a sign that the characters belong to a culture which cannot accept radical alterity, and is thus also an element of the hyperreal (Gane 2000, 14). Rip’s statement is particularly ironic since a song by the band whose concert he is attending portrays the oppressive city turning its inhabitants into racist bigots: She had started to hate, Every nigger and Jew, Every Mexican that gave her lotta shit, Every homosexual and the idle rich (X, ‘Los Angeles’ 1980) Not for the first time in the novel, a character has misread one of the pop culture texts in which he is immersed. The same thing happens when Clay becomes disturbed by the lyrics of Randy Newman’s ‘I Love L.A.’. Clay can tell that the incongruous presence of a bum on his knees undermines Newman’s celebration of the city, but one of his friends claims that ‘the bum was so grateful to be in the city instead of someplace else’ (180). Less Than Zero’s eighty-one specific references to real life songs or artists suggest that the conditions of corporate pop are particularly responsible for polluting subject-construction. The references must first be understood as reminders of the

12

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

sinister ubiquity of mass media, however. Reflecting the aforementioned conditions of corporate pop, music has invaded Clay’s life to an extent that would have been impossible in any previous historical era. On the first page he makes a paranoid observation about ‘the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves’ (1)12 and a perpetual soundtrack continues at parties, over car radios and through ghetto blasters13. The act of referencing pop songs fulfils the second of Jameson’s criteria for defining postmodern art: an effacement of the boundaries between high (literary writing) and low cultures. Reflecting Baudrillard’s conditions of postmodern semiosis music is simply one of universalised commodity relations alongside videos, magazines and computer games (Levin 1981, 5). These are voraciously consumed in order to block out the external world: I get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran Duran coming out of my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on the large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off (66) Note the convergence of pop and pornography. Music is also associated with the numbing effects of narcotics. Ellis is prone to emphasising such ideas through overdetermined vignettes, in this case Trent’s roommate’s ownership of a guitar not for the transcendental pleasure of creating music but for smuggling the Desoxyn he deals (100). The same connection is made in Generation X. Here characters mainly listen to rock music when their corporate careers are in full swing and they find themselves on ‘a depressives diet [. . .] a total salad bar of downers and antidepressants’ (34). The surfeit of music is a cause of anxiety. Walter Benjamin has famously investigated the way in which art objects are increasingly experienced only through technological reproductions, and in Less Than Zero there is a very real danger that this endless replication14 may send characters mad: We get into Blair’s car and she puts in a tape that she made the other night and Bananarama starts to sing and Trent asks her where the Beach-Mix tape is and Blair tells him that she burned it because she heard it too many times. For some reason I believe this and unroll the window and we drive to After Hours (108) The creation of mix tapes expands the value of pop music from Baudrillard’s ‘sign exchange value’ (the abstract connotations of ‘cool’ that are applied to different scenes) to ‘symbolic exchange value’ (personal connotations, especially memories, 13

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

metonymically related to the song). The burning of the tape is an aggressive rejection of Blair’s relationship with the unfaithful Clay. It does not suggest that pop has an affective function, however, but that Blair has been living in a simulation of an authentic relationship. She had built her impression of Clay’s love through the endless repetition of images associated with the oft-replayed tape. Equally, characters cannot adequately assess their ‘real’ surroundings because their identifications with rock’s nihilistic posturing. When Clay meets a would-be punk ‘with pink hair and roller skates slung over her shoulders’ (91) she namechecks several musicians, causing Clay to respond: I don’t ask who Bandarasta is; instead I ask her if she’s a singer. ‘Oh, you could say, I’m a hairdresser really’ (92) This girl (whose name Ronette is itself a reference to Phil Spector’s L.A. girl group) desperately connects herself to the rock world not because she is interested in music but because it offers the opportunity to exist at the level of the media’s all-validating image machine. She leaves by ostentatiously pointing out oh gosh, that reminds me. I left my art over at Devo’s house. I think they want to use it in a video. Anyway . . . (92) The protagonists’ lives are not shaped by the ideological state apparatus of government, family or school (Daniel does not know if it is termtime or not) but by the micro-structures of pop music culture, of release dates and the positioning of posters of stars around their homes. On the beach, ‘Alana has brought a portable tapedeck and keeps playing the same INXS song, over and over; talk of the new Psychedelic Furs album goes around’ (65). Just as Patrick Bateman exasperatedly declares in a video store ‘There are too many fucking movies to choose from!’ in American Psycho (108), characters in Less Than Zero are overwhelmed by breadth of musical styles on offer. This causes Clay insomnia: I turn MTV off and the radio on, but KNAC won’t come in so I turn the radio off and stare out across the Valley, and look at the canvas of neon and florescent lights lying beneath the purple night sky and I stand there, nude, by the window, watching the clouds pass and then I lie on my bed and try to remember how many days I’ve been home and then I get up and pace the room and light another cigarette and then the phone will ring. This is how nights are when it rains’ (105)

14

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

An impression of monotonous routine is created simply through the repetition of ‘offon-off’ within the expanded action ‘off-on-in-off-out’. The flow of music is indispensable, however. When it is switched off Clay finds himself in stasis. Less Than Zero’s pop references also serve as an ironic comment upon the superordinate level of plot action. When Clay is searching for Julian he encounters a girl requesting ‘backstage passes to the Missing Persons concert’ (81), while the grim experience of affluent youth is embodied by a ‘calm and cautious’ pair who have formed a punk band called Western Survival15. Julian’s plight is symbolised by an obsession with an old Tom Petty song that he used to enjoy with Clay (‘Straight into darkness, we went straight into darkness, out over that line, yeah straight into darkness, straight into night’, 40) while Clay’s anxiety is directly reflected in the lyrics that seep through his sisters’ bedroom wall: The music is loud and the songs sound like they’re being sung by a little girl and the drum machine is too noisy, and insistent. The little girl voices sing out, ‘I don’t know where to go / I don’t know what to do / I don’t know where to go / I don’t know what to do / Tell me. Tell me . . .’ (102) In a novel where internal thoughts often derive from the mass media, it is unsurprising that pop lyrics directly appeal to the unconscious. This continues in American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman justifies his aggression by repeating a Madonna line: ‘life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone’ (1995, 359). As Thurschwell has noted, music in Less Than Zero allows characters to detach themselves (1999). Clay’s repetitive obsession with the phrase ‘people are afraid to merge’ emphasises that there is something missing from social relationships. This reflects Baudrillard’s idea that consumer capitalism has created the pinnacle of ‘alienated society’ (Gane 2000, 8). Clay repeatedly isolates himself from the surrounding frenzy by immersing himself in music. At Kim’s party he is able to avoid the friendly gaze of a U.S.C. student because ‘luckily someone turns up the volume and Prince starts to scream’ (26). Pop is a surrogate for the expression of ‘real’ emotions. Though Clay has obviously hurt Blair greatly by ignoring her once he leaves for college and refusing to even acknowledge their relationship she never confronts him. Instead, at Kim’s party Clay reports that Blair dances over to me, singing the words to ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ probably stoned out of her mind, and she says that I look happy and that I look good’ (23). 15

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Blair can only express emotion through the double mediation of narcotics and pop lyrics. The choice of a Culture Club song is particularly apposite, since Boy George’s sexless androgyny mirrors Clay’s apathetic willingness to sleep with anybody while never displaying the least desire. It also demonstrates the invasive nature of corporate pop. ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me’ was #1 in over twenty countries for several months (Buckley 1999, 240; Roberts 2003, 138) and as such it is unsurprising that it has become a staple of these characters’ emotional lexicon. Pop only meaning when considered nostalgically. Clay may be a hip young thing with an encyclopaedic knowledge of local punk bands but he identifies most strongly with the L.A. groups of his pre-disillusioned youth: The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac16 and the Beach Boys. He has only come home because he heard an Eagles song in a New Hampshire waiting room. The significance here is not the music’s emotional affect. It is instead an index of how much things have changed: ‘I’d wander around the house at night and listen to old records I used to like and sit in the courtyard and drink what was left of the champagne’ (italics my own, 51). Ellis’s condemnation of corporate pop runs strongly through his depiction of punk rock, a movement which loses its political power through the mediation of commodity culture. As the home of the music industry there is an inherent conflict between Los Angeles and punk’s anti-establishment values, and the movement took far longer to take off there than in New York or London (Bessy 2000, 12). Biographically-minded critics have pointed out that Ellis was directly involved, playing keyboards in a New Wave band as a teenager. Clay is similarly an expert on this tight-knit, homegrown scene, noting at one party ‘The new Icicle Works single comes on and a couple of The Go-Gos are there and so is one of the Blasters’ (127). Punk a staple of his conversations: ‘We talk about new music and the state of L.A. bands and the rain’ (125). Clay attends concerts at real venues, such as The Roxy, and engages in its underground spirit by attending guerrilla venues such as the New Garage: actually a club that’s in a four-story parking lot; the first and second and third floors are deserted and there are still a couple of cars parked there from the day before. The fourth story is where the club is (127) For once characters create their own entertainment without the mediation of a television screen. The New Garage has a similar atmosphere to original L.A. punk 16

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

venue The Masque, a graffiti-strewn basement. It shares The Masque’s dangerously cathartic atmosphere, as Clay notes ‘the entire floor smells like beer and sweat and gasoline’ (127). Unfortunately punk’s oppositional potential is thwarted by an immediate convergence with the mainstream. Kim attends the New Garage not for the music but so that she can say that she ‘spotted John Doe [songwriter and bassist of X] and Exene [X vocalist] stood by the DJ’ (127-8). For her they are just another celebrity couple, a form of what Baudrillard calls the ideal models propagated by the media (Gane 2000, 37)17. In postmodernity consumer demand has shifted away from goods to experiences (Connor 1997, 177), and by coming here Kim has simply bought into the punk aesthetic. James Annesley points out that ‘the characters in Less Than Zero might pull on punk clothes and listen to punk music, but there is no sense in which they might be called punks’ (1998, 100). Little wonder that Exene said in a recent interview that X’s ‘legacy to future generations is [. . .] hairdos. That’s all they keep’ (Bessy 2000, 93). Demonstrating Baudrillard’s idea of commodity as a metonymic, these characters do not consume punk music but its place within a system of objects, a position which is deemed fashionable (Levin 1981, 5)18. Pop music culture silently erodes the pluralities it supports. Hence the Bananarama-listening Blair can consider forming a punk band following a suggestion made to her in the notoriously exclusive clothes boutique-cum-celebrity-hangout Fred Segal (as with all of Ellis’s references, the store is real) 19. The homogenisation of youth cultures ultimately makes it impossible to differentiate between groups: ‘Trent changes the subject and tells me should go with him to a party someone’s having for some new group at The Roxy. I ask who’s giving it and he tells me he’s not too sure. ‘What group is it for?’ I ask ‘Some new group.’ ‘Which new group?’ ‘I don’t know, Clay’ (43-44) ‘Some’ becomes a vital adjective in Less Than Zero. This is a world in which there is no specificity – it doesn’t matter which new group are playing since they will just fit into a broad category of new bands towards whom the listener is already desensitised. When vitriolic West Coast punk is played alongside Adam Ant, Culture Club and Squeeze it loses all meaning. Hence characters can attend X concerts and not realise

17

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

that their lyrics are practically a dramatisation of the feast of the id that constitutes their lives, right down to the mistreated maids: you tell the maid To burn you on your virgin back With a curling iron Hotter than hot You say it's good enough You say your pain is better Than any kind of love (‘Sex and Dying in High Society’, 1980) Clay never gets to hear this song, though Trent assures him that it will be played ‘any minute now’. Instead of waiting around for potential enlightenment, in an incredible piece of irony, Clay and his friends go to gawp at a corpse in an alley and then travel to Rip’s apartment where he is holding a twelve year old girl for the purpose of sexually abusing her. Sex and dying in high society, indeed. Creativity is impossible within this dystopia. Consider again the rhetoric The Face reader Benjamin: ‘New Wave. Power Pop. Primitive Muzak. It’s all bullshit. Rockability is where it’s at. And I don’t mean those limp-wristed Stray Cats, I mean real rockabilly. I’m going to New York in April to check the rockabilly scene out. I’m not too sure if it’s happening there. It might be happening in Baltimore’ (86) As Connor has noted, referencing Jameson, ‘the cycle of inclusion, in which new forms and energies are incorporated, tamed and recycled as commodities, has accelerated unimaginably, to the point where authentic ‘originality’ and commercial ‘exploitation’ are hard to distinguish’ (1997, 207). Jameson regards this cycle as the result of a diversification of artistic forms under modernism. The absence of objective norms leads to precisely the pastiche he describes as ‘the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture’ (in Hardt 2000, 202). Instead of developing new forms the pop world nostalgically reshuffles older styles creating a ‘perpetual present’. Benjamin consciously imitates the fifties setting in which rockabilly emerged with his cowboy hat and pompadour. His search for ‘the real rockabilly’ is however futile: the genre is a hybridisation, of rock ‘n roll and country music, which has been appropriated in turn by punks such as X under the monicker ‘psychobilly’. Jameson argues that there are capitalist imperatives behind ‘planned obsolescence’ and ‘an ever more rapid rhythm 18

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

of fashion and styling changes’: they accelerate consumption. Consumerism subsumes all creativity. As Rip declares when he discovers that Clay is taking a music course ‘Hey, I got some lyrics. Write some music. We’ll make millions’ (24). The depiction of punk in Less Than Zero evokes both Jameson and Baudrillard’s conditions of postmodernity. The development narrative of rock music is, for Jameson, postmodern. Each cycle of rebellion is followed by canonisation and incorporation. Punk railed against stadium rock and studio sophistication, and has itself been succeeded by the diversification of grunge, hip hop and house (Connor 1997, 66). Where modernism was inherently oppositional, Jameson bemoans the fact that the most offensive forms of [postmodern] art – punk rock, say, or what is called sexually explicit material – are all taken in its stride by society, and they are commercially successful, unlike the productions of high modernism (1998b, 19) Punks can do little more than irritate, as when Clay’s sisters demand that the song ‘Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage’ by Killer Pussy is turned up after their mother refuses to buy them a video game. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts play over the jukebox in Fatburger20 while The Specials are reduced to a T-shirt slogan. The ‘semiotic imperialism’ described by Baudrillard decontextualises the British racial conflict of their music (Gane 2000, 17). This is all characteristic of Baudrillard’s third-order simulation, in which ‘the dominant forms of resistance become ironic modes of conformity and withdrawal’ (Gane 2000, 19). L.A. punk was after all a simulation itself, not only of preceding punk scenes also of imagery from fifties industrial films, surf culture, blaxploitation and bondage (Bessy 2000, 84). Like the myriad scenes with which punk repeatedly changes places in the fashion cycle, its modes have become copies of copies, to the extent that meaning has been lost and musicians ‘foment revolution for the hell of it’ (Bessy 2000, 6). Characters respond to these conditions with the same disaffection that Baudrillard identifies: radicality passes from the alienated subject and instills itself in the objective passion of the object. Here the subject chooses to adopt a fatal silent strategy of hyper-conformity, a new post-revolutionary form of resistance (Gane 2000, 16) The abundant semiosis of the mass media, then, has rendered these protagonists blank. The critical consensus of Less Than Zero upon its publication was that it heralded a worrying new trend, the arrival of the ‘MTV novel’. Both Ellis’s

19

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

champions and detractors suggested that he had somehow captured the precise social conditions of his generation. For the mainstream news weeklies, at that point the preserve of Baby Boomers at the height of their careers, this new generation was a cultural void. Coining the derogatory term ‘Brat Pack’ to connect Ellis with Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz, they criticised the new breed’s lack of originality. Michiko Kakuni claimed that Ellis’s ‘descriptions of Los Angeles carry a few too many echoes of Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion and Nathanael West’ (in Sahlin 1991, 24). But the suggestion that Ellis was entirely derivative contradicts their second suggestion, that by focusing on popular culture and describing its ‘undesirable’ forms he was doing something new and irreparably damaging to literary culture. Though critics rarely elaborated, they repeatedly dropped the name ‘MTV’. In the four years between MTV’s launch and the appearance of Less Than Zero the cable TV channel had notched up 22 million viewers across America (Kaplan 1987, 2). Its rejection of conventional programming in favour of non-stop music videos and commercials created such a furore that it was later described by Laurence Grossberg as ‘the new snake in the cultural garden’ (1989, 262). By taking the new generation of MTV viewers as his subject Ellis brought upon himself every negative stereotype associated with the channel. He was accused of being derivative, repetitive and contributing to the supposed phenomenon of ‘short attention span youth’. USA Today dubbed Less Than Zero ‘Catcher in the Rye for the MTV generation’ (Freese 1990, 85) while Film Comment’s John Powers entitled his article about the filming of Ellis’s book and Jay McInerney’s Bright Light, Big City ‘The MTV Novel Arrives’ (1985, 44). The New Republic conflated the extremely different ideologies of MTV and punk in its railing: Written in the inarticulate style of a petulant suburban punk, this novel strains to capture the genuine despair in some rich kids’ lives, but ends up only superficially reporting their tedious hedonism. Reading it is like watching MTV. Each of the brief videoesque vignettes that make up the book hints at depths never explored. There’s a glimpse of real feeling: then, click, it’s onto the next episode of ennui. (1985, 42) In a similar vein, Newsweek’s David Lehman claimed that while both Less Than Zero and Ellis’s follow up The Rules of Attraction have a plot, ‘it’s as incidental as in a rock video on MTV’ (1987, 72). The idea that reading Less Than Zero ‘is like watching MTV’ has been perpetuated many times in the years since the novel was

20

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

passed from the hands of journalists to academic critics. In actuality however, close analysis reveals that Ellis has more in common with his detractors than the generation he portrays. Rather than unconsciously replicating MTV’s stylistic features in his own writing, Ellis argues strongly that the channel is a moral threat which requires attention. Less Than Zero makes fifteen references to characters watching MTV, and there are numerous other instances of associated rock video culture. To a greater extent than any other media form in the novel it allows characters’ to detach themselves. When a phone conversation with Blair becomes too intense, creating the possibility that she may unlock the good memories of their relationship Clay decides to: ‘Light a cigarette and turn on MTV and turn off the sound’ (63). When Trent has some kind of (unarticulated) argument with his mother he does not confront her but ‘takes a swallow at the orange juice he’s holding and stares at MTV’ (45). Rather than engaging with any particular emotional problem, characters will always opt for MTV instead. Julian and Muriel, the teenagers who descend to the novel’s lowest depths, both appear consuming MTV at the height of their heroin addiction. The image of Julian when Clay finally tracks him down is a dramatisation of his descent into the simulacrum. He is ‘lying on his bed in a wet bathing suit watching MTV. It’s dark in the room, the only light coming form the black and white images on the television’ (93). The barrier between representations and reality has become indistinct. As Jameson’s sometimes editor E. Anne Kaplan has noted, ‘MTV […] manifests the phenomena outlined by Baudrillard’ (1987, 44). Its celebrates surface textures, decentred address and the self as commodity. This televisual detachment has increased during the adolescent’s lifetimes, contrasting Clay’s idyllic flashbacks of team sports and family gatherings. The process is almost literally recounted during his flashback of a romantic week with Blair away in a beach house at Pajaro Dunes in Monterey. Initially the televisual image is discarded in the distant presence of ‘an old movie theatre in need of paint’ (51) while the young couple make love in Jacuzzis, ‘watch our shadows, illuminated against the white walls’ and ‘try to swim in the rough surf’ (52). They soon grow tired of one another, however, and become disoriented in a haze of alcohol. This leads to a typically dystopian image: the couple sit on opposite sides of the living room and ‘all we did was watch television, even though the reception wasn’t too good’ (52). Ellis suggests that this response is institutionally imposed. When Clay wants to discuss his problems with his psychiatrist, the man will only 21

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

engage in a conversation about Elvis Costello. He is as lost in MTV as the adolescents: ‘He’s in Europe now, I guess. At least that’s what I heard on MTV. Like the last album?’ (112). MTV has a numbing effect on its viewers. It functions as a perpetual background – characters switch it on when they are doing something else so as to keep the images of the mass media in front of them. Absurdly, music videos are often watched without sound indicating that the string of images is far more important than the actual music they illustrate: ‘Blair’s smoking a cigarette and watching MTV, the sound turned down low’ (49). As with pop music in general, the station is often connected to narcotics. The abundance of the images that MTV provides around the clock, along with its lack of any kind of chronological narrative, means that it often has a nauseating effect upon the addicted viewer. As Clay describes one dark moment, ‘I turn on MTV and tell myself I could get over it and go to sleep if I had some Valium and then I think about Muriel and feel a little sick as the videos flash by’ (4). When Trent’s afformentioned El Salvadorean maid doesn’t do any cleaning but sits ‘with this dazed look on her face, watching MTV’ (44) it is difficult to ascertain whether her stupor is due her being stoned or the fault of the TV channel. Trent’s response indicates the latter, that she is so brainwashed by televisual images that they dictate her emotions: ‘Wanna watch Alien?’ Trent asks, eyes closed, feet on the glass coffee table. “Now that would freak her out completely” ’ (46). This depiction of MTV supports Baudrilard’s conviction that America is the most ‘hyperreal’ society. Instead of having experiences these teenagers are fed spectacles through the literal ‘control screen’ of the television (Poster 2001, 218). Clay actively seeks MTV stupour: ‘I once heard that if you stare at the television screen for a long enough time, you can fall asleep’ (31). Ellis’s depiction of MTV places the idea that ‘people are afraid to merge’ in a new light. Characters are already indistinct because the channel, as the flagship form of oppressive media, has eroded their individual identities into a homogenous consumer mass21. Ellis’s rather alarmist stance here can be tied to a specific social context. In 1985, the year of Less Than Zero’s release, MTV was very publicly boycotted by stars such as David Bowie who refused to allow their videos to be played until black artists received airtime. MTV had excluded black people, along with ‘sexually explicit material’ because it felt their presence would drive away the white viewers who were more lucrative to advertisers (see Kaplan 1987, 15). For Ellis 22

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

the combination of this exclusion and MTV’s propensity for transforming reality into images through its fragmentary, repetitive structure prevents viewers becoming wholesale characters. Distinguishing between protagonists such as Trent and Daniel or Kim and Alana is therefore difficult. This creates a strangely transient reading experience. The reader feels a kind of disaffection towards the characters’ fate which is not dissimilar to the disaffection of the characters themselves. The impression of an unthinking, conformist mass pervades Less Than Zero, as it does dystopian fiction in general. When Clay attends Blair’s party he notices three boys from U.S.C. who are ‘all tan and blond’ (6) and move not as individuals but as a pack: ‘Suddenly the three boys from U.S.C. and Jared laugh loudly, in unison’ (9). Clay’s distinctiveness is frowned upon, since he has been East he has no sun tan and is repeatedly told that he ‘looks pale’. He is recommended an ‘Uva bath’, a skin dying technique which will erode his individuality and (enforcing the impression that characters are unaware of their own conformity) is one of those universal secrets that is revealed to Clay in numerous one-to-one confessionals. This clinical conformity extends to Clay’s father. Wealth and technology have eroded the aging process: ‘He’s completely tan and has had a hair transplant in Palm Springs, two weeks ago, and he has pretty much a full head of blondish hair’ (34). This vain conformity reaches its pinnacle in one of Clay’s one-night stands. He picks up a girl at a party whose identity is lost following a moment of confusion: somewhere along the line, Blair leaves with Rip or maybe with Trent, or maybe Rip leaves with Trent, or maybe Rip leaves with the two blond girls sitting next to Trent or maybe Blair leaves with the two blond girls (109) When Clay reports in the same sentence that he then ‘ends up dancing with this girl’ it is impossible to ascertain whether she is the drunk sixteen year old he spoke to at the beginning of this segment, the ‘beautiful blonde girl’ who came in with Griffin, one of the two blond girls who may have left or a new girl completely. Like the inability to differentiate heralded by the prevalence of the word ‘some’, here Clay indicates a lack of individuality by using the imprecise article ‘this’. At her place ‘this’ girl will not have sex with Clay (‘I put my hands on her shoulders and she tells me to stop’, 110) but insists that they masturbate in front of one another using Bain De Soleil suntan lotion. The idea that ‘people are afraid to merge’ is further enforced in her making Clay wear a pair of Wayfearer sunglasses during the experience. Having mutually

23

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

climaxed, ‘this’ girl demonstrates once and for all that the media has superceded social relationships: Bowie’s on the stero and she gets up, flushed, and turns the stereo off and turns on MTV. I lie there, naked, sunglasses still on, and she hands me a box of Kleenex. I wipe myself off and then look through a Vogue that’s lying by the side of the bed. She puts a robe on and stares at me [. . .] She lights a cigarette and I start to dress (111). There is no chance of Clay staying the night when there’s MTV to be watched. Roland Barthes has described televisual apparatus as a version of Lacan’s Imaginary identification, through which the subject differentiates him or herself (as an ‘ideal image’) by establishing the existence of an Other. For Kaplan MTV emphasises split subjectivity, the moment of discovering that pre-Imaginary identifications with the image have in fact been misrecognitions (1987, 42). This episode demonstrates the opposite. ‘This’ girl is inherently narcissistic. She opts to satisfy herself sexually rather than seek communal satisfaction with Clay (a refusal to acknowledge his separate existence). The shift of her desire from her own body to MTV suggests that she does not distinguish herself from the image onscreen. The girl’s identification is a search for pre-Imaginary plenitude, the totality that Barthes derives from the filmic image: The image is there before me, for my benefit: coalescent (signifier and signified perfectly blended), analogical, global, pregnant; it is a perfect lure. I pounce upon it as an animal snatches up a ‘life-like’ rag. Of course, the image maintains that (in the subject that I think I am) a misrecognition attached to the ego and to the imaginary. In the movie theatre . . . I glue nose, to the point of disjointing it, on the mirror of the screen, to the imaginary other with which I identify myself narcissistically (in Kaplan 1987, 43) MTV is a form of deindividuation because it undermines the viewer’s conception of his or her reified self, within Lacan’s subsequent ‘symbolic order’. In Baudrillardian terms, individuals no longer judge themselves as a unique site in the abundant semiotic network. Less Than Zero depicts a society that has moved beyond the traditional entrepreneurial capitalism that gave rise to individualism (see Jameson 1998a, 95). Society returns instead to Jameson’s conditions preceding the bourgeois era diagrammatised earlier. The infinite play of signifiers has created a collapse in differentiation since ‘everything in the cultural realm becomes identified with the socio-economic’ (Connor 1997, 46). A rare achievement of the dire 1987 movie

24

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

adaptation of Less Than Zero is its satirising of these narcissistic identifications, especially in its staging of Blair’s party. Here the partygoers are able to watch themselves on bank after bank of television sets which are even hung in Christmas trees: (10:11)

(10:24)

25

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

(10:36)

(12:15)

(12:21)

26

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

(12:25)

From the 10:11 frame Clay narcissistically enjoys closed circuit TV footage of himself, flickering between cable channels. 10:36 is accompanied by the classic line ‘Do you girls know you have television sets between your legs?’ just as Clay’s own image appears on one of the screens-within-a-screen (as Kaplan notes, this is a typical music video technique for the decentring of the image 1987, 33). In the novel deindividuation extends to a point at which even gender becomes indistinct. The teenagers’ widespread polygamy leads to a four-way conversation on the subject of who Alana should take to Kim’s party, a lengthy exchange which explicates their loss of identity in a comic manner: ‘I don’t know who to go with,’ Alana says suddenly. ‘Oh, God, I don’t know who the fuck to go with.’ She pauses. ‘I just realised that.’ ‘What about Cliff,’ Kim says, looking at Blair. ‘Oh, that’s right,’ Blair says. ‘Well if you’re going with Cliff, I’ll go with Warren,’ Alana says. ‘But I thought you were going out with Warren,’ Kim says to Blair. I glance over at Blair. ‘I was, but I’m not “going-out” with Warren’, Blair says, missing a beat. ‘You were not. You fucked. You didn’t “go-out,” ‘Alana says. ‘Whatever, whatever,’ Blair says, flipping through her menu, glancing over at me, then away. ‘Did you sleep with Warren?’ Kim asks Alana. Alana looks at Blair, and then at Kim and then at me and says, ‘No. I didn’t.’ She looks back at Blair and then at Kim again. ‘Did you?’ ‘No, but I thought Cliff was sleeping with Warren,’ Kim says, confused for a moment. ‘That might be true, but I thought Cliff was sleeping with that creepy Valley-turned-Punk, Didi Hellman,’ says Blair. ‘Oh, that is not true. Who told you that?’ Alana wants to know.

27

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

I realise for an instant that I might have slept with Didi Hellman. I also realise that I might have slept with Warren also. I don’t say anything, they probably already know. ‘Didi did,’ says Blair. ‘Didn’t she tell you that?’ ‘No,’ Kim says. ‘She didn’t.’ ‘Me either,’ Alana says. ‘Well she told me,’ Blair says. ‘Oh, what does she know? She lives in Calabasas for God’s sake,’ Alana moans. Blair thinks about it for a moment and then says slowly, evenly, ‘If Cliff slept with Didi, then he must have slept with . . . Raoul.’ ‘Who’s Raoul?’ Alana and Kim ask at the same time. I open my menu and pretend to read it, wondering if I slept with Raoul. Name seems familiar. ‘Didi’s other boyfriend. She was always getting into these disgusting threesomes. They were ridiculous,’ Blair says, closing her menu. ‘Didi is ridiculous,’ says Alana. ‘Raoul is black, isn’t he?’ Kim asks after a while. I haven’t slept with Raoul. ‘Yeah. Why?’ ‘Because I think I met him at a backstage party at The Roxy once.’ ‘I thought he O.D’d.’ ‘No, no. He’s really cute. He’s like the best-looking black guy I think I’ve ever seen,’ Blair says. Alana and Kim nod in agreement. I close my menu. ‘But isn’t he gay though?’ Kim asks, looking concerned. ‘Who? Cliff?’ Blair asks. ‘No. Raoul.’ ‘He’s bi. Bi.’ Blair says, and then, not too sure, ‘I think.’ I don’t think he ever slept with Didi,’ says Alana. ‘Well, I really don’t either,’ Blair says. ‘Then why did she go out with him?’ She thought it was chic to have a black boyfriend,’ Blair says, by now bored with the subject. ‘What a sleaze,’ Alana says, shivering in mock disgust. The three of them stop talking and then Kim says, ‘I had no idea Cliff slept with Raoul.’ ‘Cliff has slept with everyone,’ Alana says, and rolls her eyes up, and Kim and Blair laugh. Blair looks at me and I try to smile and then the waitress comes and takes our order. (19-21) As is conditional of hyperreality the girls cannot appreciate their own condition. Their judgements of ‘Valley girls turned punk’, and other peoples’ polygamy are entirely hypocritical. Ellis keeps upping the absurdist ante. The revelation that the girls have gone out with different boys as though relationships occur on an infinitely interchangeable axis (even boys have reached the commodity status of sign exchange value) is heightened by the discovery that this interchangeability operates regardless

28

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

of gender (‘I thought Cliff was going out with Warren’), and again with the revelation that our narrator is as involved as everybody else. They are horribly pragmatic about the lack of difference between partners: ‘if you’re going with Cliff, I’ll go with Warren’. The only differentiation, as with MTV, occurs on racial grounds. Clay’s decision that ‘I haven’t slept with Raoul’ is presumably based upon the fact that he has only slept with blonde, tanned white people. Deindividuation reaches a stage at which characters cannot even identify their own friends at parties: I wonder how Trent can mistake a black teenage boy, not anorexic, for Muriel, but then I see that the black boy is wearing a dress’ (13) The problem is heightened by character’s tendency to disappear for long rehabilitation sessions. As Trent declares to one friend ‘Teddy! I thought you were in a coma!’ (109). This is prefigures the pathological deinidividuation of American Psycho, where everyone ‘looks pretty much the same’ (249) as everybody else and therefore cannot respond adequately when individuals are murdered. Clay comes to desperately seek differences in the teenagers who surround him. Watching a local TV show which depicts rock videos played on a screen in front of a crowd of dancing fans (‘the images dwarfing the teenagers’), Clay fixates on those who do not fit into the mass: ‘I’d concentrate on the teenagers who didn’t mouth the words; the teenagers who had forgotten them; the teenagers who maybe never knew them’ (182). The most striking moments in Less Than Zero involve Clay’s own individuation. As Clay becomes increasingly self-aware he, paradoxically, begins to panic about his lack of identity: ‘I’m this eighteen-year-old boy with shaking hands and blond hair and with the beginnings of a tan’ (57). Note again the use of ‘this’. The most terrifying scene occurs towards the end of the novel when Clay accompanies Julian to an evening at which he is working as a prostitute. At this point, raising the possibility that Clay could end up in the same state as Julian, Clay has his strongest realisation that he is indistinguishable from his friends: ‘I can make out my reflection, blondhair cut too short, a deep tan, sunglasses still on’ (155). Having followed Clay for the entire novel sharing his observations of the superficiality of everybody that he meets, the final pages of the novel contain a ‘Do it to Julia!’-style twist, Blair’s declaration: ‘You’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it’. This occurs during a frank discussion in which incommuncation and vacuity are revealed as faults that are as ingrained in our narrator as in the society that he observes:

29

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

it was like you weren’t there. Oh shit, this isn’t going to make any sense [. . .] I don’t know if any other person I’ve been with has been really there, either . . . but at least they tried . . . You never did. Other people made an effort and you just . . . It was beyond you.’ She takes another sip of her wine. ‘You were never there. I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. (192) The impression of absence connects to the ominous billboard above Clay, with its slogan ‘Disappear Here’. The billboard has featured throughout as one of his mantras, the defining statements about contemporary existence that repeat themselves through his consciousness. It is a rare use of figurative language which enacts what Baudrillard sees as the dissolution of the subject within abundant semiosis. The subject literally ‘disappears’ inside the billboard and the strings of discourses it intersects. The conditions of corporate pop, and MTV in particular, have rendered Clay negative space. Since characters cannot establish a division between representations and ‘real’ experience they carry the deracinated subjectivity of video over into external social relations. Video consequently becomes inextricably linked to real life violence. Clay and his friends are initially obsessed with representations of violence. One night Clay reports that ‘I don’t watch a lot of the movie, only the gory parts’ (88) while Muriel admires Clay’s vest because ‘It looks as if you got stabbed or something. Please let me wear it’ (73). Increasingly, however, Clay fixates upon representations of violence in the news rather than fiction, listing atrocities as the normal background of contemporary life: Before I left, a woman had her throat slit and was thrown from a moving car in Venice; a series of fires raged out of control in Chatsworth, the work of an arsonist; a man in Encino killed his wife and two children. Four teenagers, none of whom I knew, died in a car accident on Pacific Coast Highway. Muriel was readmitted to Cedars-Sinai. A guy, nicknamed Conan, killed himself at a fraternity party at U.C.L.A. And I met Alana accidentally in the Beverly Center (183) The drift between fictional representations and real life is already apparent in the plight of Conan, whose nickname presumably refers to the 1982 ‘video nasty’ Conan The Barbarian. The drift takes on a more alarming turn however in the appearance of the ultimate form of video nasty, a snuff film at Trent’s party. These teenagers have become so desensitised to the constant flow of images provided by MTV that only the most extreme mixture of sex and violence imaginable can hold their interest. Clay

30

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

describes the abhorrent images in his trademark blank style, but he is repulsed enough to reach one of his most anxious reflections about being part of this amoral mass: There are mostly young boys in the house and they seem to be in every room and they all look the same: thin, tan bodies, short blond hair, blank look in the blue eyes, same empty toneless voices, and then I start to wonder if I look exactly like them (140) Like ‘this’ girl Trent identifies narcissistically with the images onscreen. He associates himself with the torturer (another black character sinisterly confined to the margins of the novel) to the point of sexual arousal. This validates Baudrillard’s description of consumption as some kind of pathological obsession, an opportunity to regress to fulfil the most basic dictates of the id (Horrocks 1996, 28). Humanity has been actively ‘mutated’ by the conditions of late capitalism: modern life is structured in terms of objects rather than fellow subjects and therefore any kind of preventative empathy is removed from their persecutions. The snuff video also appeals to the protagonists’ search for meaning in a world where ‘everything means less than zero’. In a sea of artificial representations it creates a rare connection between a visual signifier and concrete signified, an irreversible act in the external world. They enjoy its sheer authenticity: ‘I mean, like, how can you fake a castration? They cut the balls off that guy real slowly. You can’t fake that’ (143). Violence is connected to deindividuation through the exact repetition of an act of self harm at the beginning and end of the novel, when Daniel and Dimitri cut their hands on glass in New Hampshire and L.A. respectively. The second time, Clay loses interest in specificity, taking Dimitri ‘to some emergency room at some hospital’ (128). Dimitri’s injury is strongly reminiscent of a classic scene in Victorian literature: he sticks his hand through the window, getting the skin stuck on the glass, and as he tries to pull his hand away, it becomes all cut up, mutilated, and blood begins to spurt out unevenly, splashing thickly onto the glass (128) Is it a coincidence that Ellis’s violent scene about the loss of identity echoes the moment of Lockwood’s haunting in Wuthering Heights, when it becomes impossible to distinguish between different generations of Catherines, or does Ellis write from a more ‘literary’ background than his detractors give him credit for? A rather heavy-handed connection is made between video and immorality when Rip and Spin imitate the snuff video by capturing and abusing a twelve year old

31

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

girl in their apartment. The boys have been so caught up in simulacra that they no longer differentiate between images of violence and actually perpetrating it themselves. The importance of their act, as with the video, is that it is an opportunity for voyeurism: ‘You can watch if you want’ (176). Rape is defined as the ultimate form of consumerism, advocated by Rip using the kind of self-empowerment jargon more often found in commercials: ‘What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it’ (177). His statement is a response to Clay’s only judgement in the novel, that their behaviour is ‘not right’. Sahlin has observed the irony in Rip misunderstanding the word ‘right’ as a statement of privilege rather than morality (1991, 31). The logical conclusion of their actions is suggested in the local myth of another ‘blonde and good looking guy’ (178) who has raped, then murdered and mutilated a girl in a hedonistic frenzy during a party. This again lays down the social basis for American Psycho, in which Bateman’s most violent acts are followed with laconic pieces of adult-oriented-rock criticism. Echoing Rip and Spin’s filmic self-perception, Bateman finds greater satisfaction in his murders once he has begun to videotape them. As Annesley has judged, these are ‘crimes for which an increasingly commercial and materialistic society must take ultimate responsibility’ (1998, 13). Reagan’s return to the laissezfaire economics of the previous century, not to mention Margaret Thatcher’s focus on ‘Victorian values’ has led society back into the heart of darkness, a pursuit of wealth that disregards any sense of common humanity. Elizabeth Young has used Jameson’s technique of ‘utopian thinking’, the practice of locating a dialectic whereby the ‘reality’ portrayed in a text is compared with possible alternatives which would result in a better world, to locate a reactionary impetus behind this dystopia. If society could transcend these deviations it would lead to ‘a more wholesome dominant culture’ (1992, 19). The idea that pop has become a Foucauldian form of control, a cultural movement which enforces prevailing ideology, is enhanced by Ellis’s suggestion that it has overtaken religion in people’s lives. In the gaps between the pop songs and videos religious voices assert themselves, displaying similar brainwashing strategies to those of corporate pop. In one of the most apocalyptic scenes in the novel (heightened by a reference to H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds), Clay can hear mysterious strangers breaking in downstairs and imagines werewolves on a murder rampage: 32

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

I can also hear the dog barking out in back and KROQ is playing old Doors songs and War of the Worlds is on channel thirteen and I switch it to some religious program where this preacher is yelling ‘Let God use you. God wants to use you. Lie back and let him use you, use you.’ ‘Lie back,’ he keeps chanting. ‘Use you, use you.’ (69) Religion has come to use the same route as the corporations to impose social control, the mass media. Its message is too blatant to function as anything more than a tonal effect however, increasing Clay’s portentous fear. The notion that belief in pop has superseded God is made explicit several pages later, when Clay briefly switches from MTV to find two embittered priests on another channel: I’m sitting in my room watching religious programs on cable TV because I’m tired of watching videos and there are these two guys, priests, preachers, maybe, on the screen, forty, maybe forty-five, wearing business suits and ties, pinktinted sunglasses, talking about Led Zeppelin records, saying that if they’re played backwards, they ‘possess alarming passages about the devil.’ One of the guys stands up and breaks the record, snaps it in half, and says, ‘And believe me, as God-fearing Christians, we will not allow this!’ The man then begins to talk about how he’s worried that it’ll harm the young people. ‘And the young are the future of this country,’ he screams, and then breaks another record. (78) That Clay can neither work out the priests’ denomination nor their ages suggests that secular society is enveloped in a cult of youthful images. The demonisation of Led Zep, a band no self-respecting teenager would have been caught dead listening to in the early eighties, makes their campaign horribly outdated. Even Clay seems to have picked up on the irony of the statement that ‘the young are the future’ when he is living in a futureless, nostalgic fashion cycle. The final appearance of religion occurs when Clay stares out of the window of The New Garage at a silent Cathedral. Religion is again a gothic tonal effect, a haunting reminder of power systems past: From where I’m standing, I look out the window and out into the night, at the tops of buildings in the business district, dark, with an occasional lighted room somewhere near the top. There’s a huge cathedral with a large, almost monolithic lighted cross standing on the roof and pointing toward the moon; a moon which seems rounder and more grotesquely yellow than I remember. I look at Kim for a moment and don’t say anything (128) The idols adopted by these teenagers are the posters of rock stars in which they place numinous authority. Clay’s Elvis Costello poster has a kind of sublime power. It is associated with religious language in its slogan ‘Trust’ and that of a similar poster at

33

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

his psychiatrists’: ‘Elvis Costello Repents’ (another assertion that punk vitriol in fact means ‘less than zero’). Rip worships at the altar of the most self-destructive of all L.A. groups, The Beach Boys (‘There’s an old, expensively framed poster of The Beach Boys hanging over Rip’s bed and I stare at it trying to remember which one died’, 42) while Kim finds solace in the Biblically named Peter Gabriel (‘There’s only a big mattress on the floor and a huge, expensive stereo that takes up an entire wall and a poster of Peter Gabriel and a pile of clothes in the corner’, 136). The godlike Costello serves as Clay’s Lacanian ego ideal (Fink 1997, 140), the symbolic point from which he feels he is watched and therefore orientates himself accordingly: ‘you can see his eyes, which are slightly off centre. The eyes don’t look at me, though. They only look at whoever’s standing by the window, but I’m too tired to get up and stand by the window’ (3). The final aspect of Less Than Zero requiring investigation is the impact of the novel’s actual structure upon subject-construction. There is slight credence to the aforementioned idea that ‘reading it is like watching MTV’. Clay’s narrative is recounted in fragmentary, episodic segments rather than chapters, which are given definition by the opening few words (normally either a judgement or prepositional phrase). These segments range from small paragraphs to a few pages, but rarely exceed a page and a half. They create the impression of snapshots of a life rather than a continuously developing plot. As the novel progresses these segments are interspersed with italicised analeptic segments which nostalgically recount Clay’s childhood. The latter could be described as dehistoricising, like MTV, but the use of interwoven present and flashback narratives is hardly new. Overall the case for Less Than Zero following the stylistic features of MTV is overstated. If Ellis writes as though he is producing television rather than a novel, this is simply a reflection of the emphasis on surface rather than depth in contemporary culture. He is also tapping into the literary identity of his native L.A., writers from all over America and Britain having arrived there in the thirties in response to the demand for talkie movie scripts (1984). Ellis grew up surrounded by the film business in the same manner as Clay, who sees nothing remarkable in Blair’s father being ‘this movie producer’ (8) or that at Chasen’s ‘another man my father knows, some guy from Warner Brothers, comes over to the table and wishes us a Merry Christmas’ (58). Less Than Zero’s intertextuality has a far greater impact on subject-construction than any appropriation of MTV stylistics. The novel repeatedly points outside itself to 34

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

brand names, stores, films (all trends expanded in American Psycho) and especially to pop music. Pop songs here are more than mere referents. They are what Gerard Genette terms ‘hypotexts’, secondary pre-existent texts which are sources of signification for the main text. To fully interpret Less Than Zero requires prior knowledge of these references. Elizabeth Young has remarked that Less Than Zero was successful with younger readers because ‘it concerned a world they knew, one of drugs and clubs and MTV’ (1992, 3). The converse is also true, however. At its time of publication Less Than Zero would have excluded older readers who could not have appreciated the connotive values of the referenced songs. Ellis also utilises a more radical form of intertextuality, which links Less Than Zero to his subsequent novels. He introduces characters from his earlier novels into later ones, connecting texts which are not sequels and are often stylistically disparate. This technique has been used by J.D. Salinger (an instance in which Less Than Zero’s comparisons to Catcher in The Rye are actually accurate), Irvine Welsh and Quentin Tarantino. Patrick Bateman is the brother of Sean, one of the main narrators in The Rules of Attraction who appears briefly in American Psycho to show off his catchphrases (‘rock ‘n roll’ and ‘deal with it’) in a different context. Less Than Zero’s Rip and Vanden also make appearances in American Psycho, the latter as one of Bateman’s potential victims. These transtextual references subtly recontextualise each novel with the other. Clay’s brief appearance as a narrator in The Rules of Attraction allows Ellis to suggest that the horrors he had hoped to escape in L.A. are actually present in the East. The fact that the despicable Rip can move to New York after committing atrocities, meanwhile, is a tantalising prefiguring of Bateman’s actions and a demonstration of the grotesque moral failings of New York’s high society. This strategy is a contrast to Ellis’s general focus on deindividuation. It gives individual characters lives beyond the reified boundaries of separate novels, extending the scope of his imaginative world. Nevertheless the technique is also utterly tied up with commodity culture. It is a form of the franchise building that so characterised the eighties and nineties. It allows Ellis to enforce his own canon, to express the marketable validity of his minor texts by introducing characters from his major ones, and to use his characters as though they were real life celebrities. The technique has a direct equivalent in corporate pop, that of the celebrity duet or song ‘featuring’ another star, exemplified by the Run DMC and Aerosmith video ‘Walk This Way’, which epitomised MTV’s homogenisation of different music cultures in the eighties. 35

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Less Than Zero is even deindividuated as a novel, through an interdiscursive technique used at the end of American Psycho, a novel written six years later. As Patrick Bateman reaches the height of his madness and depravity three segments from Less Than Zero are repeated almost verbatim. For any reader who is acquainted with the earlier novel the effect is shocking and disorienting. In addition to reintroducing characters that have existed abstractly as formations within earlier novels’ langue, Ellis has replicated actual parole (see Allen 2000, 17-18). The first instance occurs on pages 346-7 of American Psycho, linking Bateman’s narrative to Clay’s on page 49 of Less Than Zero: I’m lying in Blair’s bed. There are all these stuffed animals on the floor and at the foot of the bed and when I roll over onto my back, I feel something hard and covered with fur and I reach under myself and it’s this stuffed black cat. I drop it on the floor and then get up and take a shower. After I’ve towelled my hair dry, I wrap the towel around my waist and walk back into her room, start to dress. Blair’s smoking a cigarette and watching MTV, the sound turned down low. ‘Will you call me before Christmas?’ she asks. ‘Maybe.’ I pull on my vest, wondering why I even came here in the first place. ‘You’ve still got my number, don’t you?’ she reaches for a pad and begins to write it down. ‘Yeah, Blair. I’ve got your number. I’ll get in touch,’ I button up my jeans and turn to leave. ‘Clay?’ ‘Yeah, Blair.’ ‘If I don’t see you before Christmas,’ she stops. ‘Have a good one.’ I look at her a moment. ‘Hey, you too.’ She picks up the stuffed black cat and strokes its head. I step out of the door and start to close it. ‘Clay?’ she whispers loudly. I stop but don’t turn around. ‘Yeah?’ ‘Nothing.’ (Less Than Zero, 49-50) I’m in Courtney’s bed [. . .] I roll off her onto my back, landing on something hard and covered with fur. I reach under myself to find a stuffed black cat with blue jewels for eyes that I think I spotted at F.A.O. Schwarz when I was doing some early Christmas shopping. I’m at a loss as what to say, so I stammer, “Tiffany lamps . . . are making a comeback”. I can barely see her face in the darkness but hear the sigh, painful and low, the sound of a prescription bottle snapping open, her body shifting in the bed. I drop the cat on the floor, get up, take a shower [. . .] After towelling my hair dry I put on a Ralph Lauren robe and walk back into the bedroom, start to dress. Courtney is smoking a cigarette, watchng Late Night with David Letterman, the sound turned down low. “Will you call me before Thanksgiving?” she asks.

36

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

“Maybe.” I button up the front of my shirt, wondering why I even came here in the first place. “What are you doing?” she asks, speaking slowly. […] “Listen, Patrick,” she says, with effort. “Can we talk?” “You look marvellous.” I sigh, turning my head, offering an airkiss. “There’s nothing to say. You’re going to marry Luis. Next week, no less.” “Isn’t that special?” she asks sarcastically, but not in a frustrated way. “Read my lips,” I say, turning back to the mirror. “You look marvellous.” “Patrick?” “Yes, Courtney?” “If I don’t see you before Thanksgiving . . .” She stops, confused. “Have a nice one?” (346-7) I look at her for a moment before replying tonelessly, “You too.” She picks up the stuffed black cat, strokes its head. I step out the door into the hallway, heading down it toward the kitchen. “Patrick?” she calls softly from her bedroom. I stop but don’t turn around. “Yes?” “Nothing.” (American Psycho 346-7) Ellis’s technique is audacious, deliberately contrived and open to accusations of brazen authorial laziness. It is deindividuating, of course, in that it implies that Clay and Blair’s malaise is in fact the universal condition of relationships in the late twentieth century, shared by West Coast adolescents and East Coast financiers alike. No matter where or how old they are, it is suggested that disaffected women like Blair or Courtney will always leave subtly placed items reflecting their ‘inner child’ for cold lovers to discover. It also suggests an ‘inevitable’ direction for Clay and Blair’s personal futures: Blair blocking her misery with antidepressants (an analogue to her mother’s alcoholism), Clay’s inability to communicate leading to a life of meaningless affairs and, perhaps, his obsession with violence resulting in the same kind of carnage performed by Patrick Bateman. Less Than Zero’s orientation of the East Coast as a haven, a differentiated place of escape, is broken down by the discovery that deindividuated misery is pandemic. This ties in with Elizabeth Young’s brilliant analysis that the sequence of Ellis’s novels produces an ever-spreading sense of disillusionment, the college life that is offered as an escape in Less Than Zero being obliterated by the malaise found in The Rules of Attraction, whose location of hope in adult life is similarly snatched away by the atrocities of American Psycho (1992, 98). The technique also emphasises what Baudrillard sees as the infinite interchangeability of sign exchange value: the function of MTV is not the videos it plays but the stupefying effect it produces in viewers, an effect produced in older viewers by David

37

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Letterman chat shows instead. The interchangeability of commodities is the main subject of American Psycho’s next interdiscursive segment, which follows immediately after the first: Trent suggests that we go to Fatburger and eat something. He says he’s hungry, that he hasn’t eaten anything in a long time, mentions something about fasting. We order and take the food to one of the booths. But I’m not too hungry and Trent notices that there’s no chilli on my Fatburger. ‘What is this? You can’t eat a Fatburger without chilli.’ I roll my eyes up at him and light a cigarette. ‘Jesus, you’re weird. Been up in fucking New Hampshire too long,’ he mutters. ‘No fucking chilli.’ I don’t say anything and notice that the walls have been painted a very bright, almost painful yellow and under the glare of the fluorescent lights, they seem to glow. Joan Jett and the Blackhearts are on the jukebox singing ‘Crimson and Clover.’ I stare at the walls and listen to the word. ‘Crimson and clover, over and over and over and over . . .’ I suddenly get thirsty, but I don’t want to go up to the counter and order anything because there’s this fat, sad-faced Japanese girl taking orders and this security guard leaning against another yellow wall in back, eyeing everyone suspiciously, and Trent is still staring at my Fatburger with this amazed look on his face and there’s this guy in a red shirt with long stringy hair, pretending to be playing the guitar and mouthing the words to the song in booth next to ours and he starts to shake his head and his mouth opens. ‘Crimson and clover, over and over and over . . . Crimson and clo-oh-ver’ (Less Than Zero, 12-13) Sitting in a booth at Smith and Wollensky [McDermott] notices I haven’t ordered the hash browns after dinner has arrived. “What is this? You can’t eat at Smith and Wollensky without ordering the hash browns,” he complains. I avoid his eyes and touch the cigar I’m saving in my jacket pocket. “Jesus, Bateman. You’re a raving lunatic. Been at P & P too long,” he mutters. “No fucking hash browns.” I don’t say anything. How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. Frank Sinatra is somewhere, singing “Witchcraft.” I’m staring at the walls, listening to the words, suddenly thirsty, but our waiter is taking orders from a very large table of exclusively Japanese businessmen, and someone who I think is either George MacGowan or Taylor Preston, in the booth behind this one, wearing something by Polo, is eyeing me suspiciously and McDermott is stills taring at my steak with this stunned look on his face and one of the Japanese businessmen is holding an abacus, another one is trying to pronounce the word “teriyaki,” another is mouthing, then singing, the words to the song, and the table laughs, an odd, not completely foreign sound, as he lifts up a pair of chopsticks, shaking his head confidently, imitating Sinatra. His mouth opens, what comes out of it is: “that sry comehitle stale . . . that clazy witchclaft . . .” (American Psycho 348-9). 38

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

There is no difference between a Fatburger and a steak at an exclusive restaurant. Both produce bizarre devotion in their clientele, who passionately feel that there is a prescribed manner of eating there which must be adhered to. Equally, there is no difference in the stranger’s responses to Joan Jett and Frank Sinatra records, both of which the first person narrator finds baffling. Work or college, anything which allows somebody to deviate from conformity is a threat: ‘Jesus, you’re weird. Been up in fucking New Hampshire too long’ / ‘Jesus, Bateman. You’re a raving lunatic. Been at P & P too long’. Racial paranoia, another kind of fear of nonconformity, also exists identically on the West and East coasts. Ellis could, however, have drawn these parallels without reproducing verbatim text from one novel to another, and as such the most striking part of his interdiscursive strategy is the structural effect it produces. Foregrounding American Psycho’s own textuality, characters seem shocked at the involuntarily nature of the words they are saying, especially when the source text cannot be smoothly appropriated. Take Courtney’s unwieldy comment “If I don’t see you before Thanksgiving [...] . . . Have a nice one?”. The reader, like Courtney “stops, confused” at this unconvincing reformulation of Less Than Zero’s Christmas saying. This decontextualisation and the disruption it causes to Less Than Zero’s narrative chronology (the repetitive frequency of the novel’s events beyond its boundaries removes the impression that it is a contained, coherent story) is highlighted in the final indiscursive segment, in which Bateman’s senile mother directly appropriates the dialogue and appearance of Clay’s mother, even though they do not fit the scene at all: My mother and I are sitting in a restaurant on Melrose, and she’s drinking white wine and still has her sunglasses on and she keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they’re shaking. She tries to smile when she asks me what I want for Christmas. I’m surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her. ‘Nothing,’ I say. There’s a pause and then I ask her, ‘What do you want?’ She says nothing for a long time and I look back at my hands and she sips her wine. ‘I don’t know. I just want to have a nice Christmas.’ I don’t say anything. ‘You look unhappy, she says real suddenly. ‘I’m not,’ I tell her. ‘You look unhappy.’ She says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, bleached, blondish, again. ‘You do too,’ I say, hoping that she won’t say anything else.

39

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

She doesn’t say anything else, until she’s finished her third glass of wine and poured her fourth. ‘How was the party?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘How many people were there? ‘Forty. Fifty.’ I shrug. She takes a swallow of wine. ‘What time did you leave it?’ ‘I don’t remember.’ ‘One? Two?’ ‘Must’ve been one.’ ‘Oh.’ She pauses again and takes another swallow. ‘It wasn’t very good,’ I say, looking at her. ‘Why?’ she asks, curious. ‘It just wasn’t,’ I say and look back at my hands (Less Than Zero 10-11) My mother and I are sitting in her private room at Sandstone where she is now a permanent resident. Heavily sedated, she has her sunglasses on and keeps touching her hair and I keep looking at my hands, pretty sure that they’re shaking. She tries to smile when she asks what I want for Christmas. I’m not surprised by how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her. I’m wearing a two-button wool gabardine suit with notch lapels by Gian Marco Venturi, cap-toed leather lace-ups by Armani, tie by Polo, socks I’m not sure where from. It’s nearing the middle of April. “Nothing,” I say, smiling reassuringly. There’s a pause. I break it by asking, “What do you want?” She says nothing for a long time and I look at my hands, at dried blood, probably from a girl named Suki, beneath the thumbnail. My mother lips her lips tiredly, and say, “I don’t know. I just want to have a nice Christmas,” “I don’t say anything. I’ve spent the last hour studying my hair in the mirror I’ve insisted the hospital keep in my mother’s room. “You look unhappy,” she says suddenly. “I’m not,” I tell her with a brief sigh. “You look unhappy,” she says, more quietly this time. She touches her hair, stark blinding white, again. “Well, you do too,” I say slowly, hoping that she won’t say anything else. She doesn’t say anything else. I’m sitting in a chair by the window, and through the bars the lawn outside darknes, a cloud passes over the sun, soon the lawn turns green again. She sits on her bed in a nightgown from Bergdorf’s and slippers by Norma Kamali that I bought her for Christmas last year. “How was the party?” she asks. “Okay.” I say, guessing. “How many people were there?” “Forty. Five hundred.” I shrug. “I’m not sure.” She licks her lips again, touches her hair, once more. “What time did you leave?” “I don’t remember,” I answer after a long pause. “One? Two?” she asks. “It must have been one,” I say, almost cutting her off. “Oh.” She pauses again, straightens her sunglasses, black Ray-Bans I bought her from Bloomingdale’s that cost two hundred dollars.

40

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

“It wasn’t very good,” I say uselessly, looking at her. “Why?” she asks, curious. “It just wasn’t,” I say, looking back at my hand, the specks of blood under the nail on my thumb (American Psycho 351-2) One subtle change is hugely revealing in this comparison. Where Clay comments that ‘I’m surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her’, the experience of an older character like Bateman is that ‘I’m not surprised by how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her’. Where Clay at least appreciates that there is something wrong with his relationship to his mother, a character in his twenties regards this as the typical state of existence. From Bateman’s mother’s perspective it doesn’t matter that it is the middle of April, the dominance of the Christmas consumer-fest renders it an appropriate topic of conversation, and a haunting reminder of the family unity that has been lost. Nor does the existence or not of a particular party matter, simply that parties are always disappointing. The scene has taken on an almost Dadaist quality, aided by the twin staples of twentieth century absurdism: insanity and psychobabble. The pathological desire to wear sunglasses indoors, to keep a distance between oneself and the external world (in Generation X Dag wonders if ‘sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes’, 35) has become an explicitly pathological act carried out in the context of a mental institution. Madness, in the Foucaldian sense of elements which are deemed ‘other’ by a society’s prevailing ideology (1977), permeates the text on three levels: in its subject matter (Bateman’s insane mother), in the characterisation of its first person narrator (Bateman is himself mad, and as such his narrative becomes increasingly fragmentary and inconsistent) and in the structure of the novel itself (the switch between the present narrative and an older, extra-textual one equates to textual schizophrenia). This technique adheres to Jameson and Baudrillard’s most important theories. In Jamesonian terms the technique is both pastiche and a commentary upon pastiche. Its ‘flat’ multiplication of styles, enforcing the idea that the novel is a collage rather than original invention opposes the expressive aesthetic and unique styles that characterised modernity. Instead Ellis offers the postmodern suggestion that a text cannot be anything beyond the random play of signifiers. There is no creation: only the reshuffling of pre-existent discursive fragments. Rather than defining Less Than Zero as an inventive art object, Ellis deliberately uses his later work to situate the

41

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

novel within the meaningless sign exchange of commodity. It is, to borrow his style, just ‘some’ novel. For Baudrillard this type of writing demonstrates the very latest form of simulation in which contemporary society has become enveloped. The practice of a wholesale appropriation of passages from an earlier text would clearly have been an affront to the ‘first-order’ simulacra that Baudrillard identifies in the preindustrial era. Here art is judged by the Marxian concept of use value, whereby ‘simulation entails postulating an original work or object of which the copy is its counterfeit’ (Gane 2000, 16). Ellis’s interdiscursive strategy extends beyond even the third-order simulation under which most of his work can be categorised. Instead, it demonstrates the features of the most radical ‘fourth order’, the so-called ‘fractal stage’ at which objects are ‘simply and indifferently proliferated and dispersed into the void’. Here even baseless reproduction is no longer conceivable, everything is rendered ‘virtual’ through a foregrounding of the randomness through which preconceived signification processes occur. The dissolution of the subject in abundant semiosis is complete.

2) semiotic heresies of pop ‘Damn that television ... what a bad picture!’ ‘Don’t get upset, It’s not a major disaster’. ‘There’s nothing on tonight’, he said, ‘I don't know what’s the matter’! ‘Nothing’s ever on’, she said, ‘so ... I don’t know why you bother.’ (Talking Heads, ‘Found A Job’ 1978) Perhaps the only contemporary author to surpass Bret Easton Ellis’ grasp on the zeitgeist is prolific Canadian novelist, visual artist and journalist Douglas Coupland. Rarely has a newspaper headline of a strange new phenomenon passed without Coupland responding to it in fictional form. The Hale-Bopp comet, Columbine High School massacre and internet pornography have been among his recent subjects. Reviews of Generation X repeatedly connected Ellis and Coupland, coming to the conclusion that the latter had more accurately captured the spirit of the age22. Like Ellis, however, Coupland is far more than a literary opportunist. As this section will argue, in Generation X he exchanges Ellis’s blank terror for comic irony and creates an exaggerated but compelling portrait of the conditions of corporate pop. He suggests

42

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

that its overload of signs is a cynically imposed mechanism to cause people to operate as unfulfilling stereotypes. Like Chuck Palahniuk, a fellow consumer-dystopian novelist and obsessive of pop culture curios, Coupland is guilty of what he himself terms Obscurism: the practice of peppering life with obscure references (forgotten films, dead TV stars, defunct countries etc) as a subliminal means of showcasing both one’s education and one’s wish to disassociate from the world of mass culture (192). Coupland’s novels are therefore saturated with pop music references. His latest book is called Eleanor Rigby23, while his 1998 novel Girlfriend in a Coma makes numerous references to the work of The Smiths. Generation X engages with music less directly. Explicit statements about the commodification of pop are only found at its margins, in one character’s fantasy of living ‘on top of the RCA building’ and the narrator Andrew Palmer’s admission that ‘the most valuable thing I owned was a fairly extensive collection of German industrial music dance mix EP records’ (64). Instead Generation X condemns corporate pop music culture through its unconventional layout of text, icons and glossary-style word definitions which replicate the sensory impact of abundant semiosis. This section of the essay will define Generation X as a consumer dystopia, then examine its respective critiques of MTV aesthetics, the tyranny of the Baby Boomers and the threat of living through nostalgia. In interviews Douglas Coupland has repeatedly expressed dismay at being identified as ‘The Voice of A Generation’, claiming that Generation X is just about my own life. It didn’t purport to be any groundbreaking treatise on a collective experience (Smyth 1992) However the novel itself belies this claim, displaying all the facets of social overview which are characteristic of dystopian fiction. Generation X is a Marxist exercise in the tradition of Friedrich Engels. It sets out to portray typicality by classifying three distinct groups: the Baby Boomers24 who have commodified their countercultural ideals, their unpaid and repressed progeny ‘Generation X’25 and the succeeding generation of aggressively corporate ‘Global Teens’. Its three central characters Andy, Dag and Claire (plus occasional hangers-on) become representatives for an entire generation. When he describes his friends he appropriately begins ‘time for case studies’ (20). A biker gang are described as ‘Zsa Zsa types’ while the yuppie Tobias is

43

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

immediately pigeonholed by Dag’s assessment that ‘You can only minimise the damage with his type’ (95). Career types are even depicted as Lichtenstein-style graphics at the bottom of some pages:

(22) The major difference between Coupland and Ellis’s social portraits is that where Ellis’s teenagers ‘have everything’ Coupland regards youth (or at least the twentysomethings who populate Generation X) as a new underclass. America’s 19 million Gen Xers have been disenfranchised at the hands of the 72 million Baby Boomers who preceded them (Anon 2004f). The Boomers took all of the best jobs and, since bourgeoisie expansion has significantly slowed, these characters have been handed down a consumption-scarred society ‘like so much skid-marked underwear’ (98). Despite the postmodern irony Coupland’s approach actually harks back to Victorian social problem literature and even Sketches By Boz. His essayistic style reveals the original intention of his novel, which was commissioned as a non-fiction handbook of Gen X behaviour and attitudes. This intention frames the novel in its epigrams from real life interviewees and the appendix ‘Numbers’ which contains 19 different statistics demonstrating the economic and spiritual plight of Generation X. Both of these paratexts connect the novel to an external ‘real’ world in a much more straightforward manner than Ellis’s work, with its interdiscursively-induced metafiction. The epigrams suggest that Coupland has drawn his characters from existing social types. A 27-year old woman prefigures Claire by speaking with admiration about somebody whose dress sense is a mismash of historical styles, while the 52-year old woman who describes her adult children still living at home prefigures Andy’s mother. Although Coupland focuses upon the disenfranchised rather than a homogenous affluent group, his consumer dystopia is still very similar to that of Less 44

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Than Zero. Set one-hundred-and-ten miles east of Los Angeles in a retirement community in Palm Springs (the site of many of Clay’s most idyllic childhood memories), Andy and his two friends have fled to the desert and exchanged their depersonalising corporate careers for ‘McJobs’ (‘a low-pay, low-status, low-benefit no-future job in the service sector’, 6). Directly opposing Baudrillard’s symbolism, Andy initially appears to have escaped the numbing effects of hyperreality by retreating to find ‘natural’ existence in the desert: We live on the periphery. We are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we’d have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Write-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better (114) In the desert Andy and friends tell highly allegorical tales about the consumer dystopia they have left behind. This is a world in which junior marketing executives work in ‘veal fattening pens’ (‘named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry’, 24), Japanese publishing magnates locate transcendent meaning in pornographic photos of Marilyn Monroe and – like American Psycho – yuppies ‘snap like wolverines on speed when they can’t have a restaurant’s window seat in the nonsmoking section with cloth napkins’ (25, ‘wolverine’ uses the same canine imagery for predatory consumption found in the werewolf/coyote analogue of Less Than Zero, mentioned later). That this is specifically a consumer dystopia is also explicitly stated, when Claire satirically praises Andy’s dogs for their lack of materialism: You don’t have to worry about having snowmobiles or cocaine or a third house in Orlando Florida. That’s right. No you don’t. You just want a nice little pat on the head [. . .] You wouldn’t want to worry yourself with so many things. And do you know why? [. . .] Because all of those objects would only mutiny and slap you in the face. They’d only remind you that all you’re doing with your life is collecting objects. And nothing else (14) Even exiled in Palm Springs, Claire cannot avoid elderly people who ‘gobble’ up perfume and jewels like ‘hundreds of greedy children who are so spoiled, and so

45

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

impatient, that they can’t even wait for food to be prepared’ (11). Andy’s dogs meanwhile feed on yuppie liposuction fat from ‘the dumpsters out behind the cosmetic surgery center’ (4). Lipofat is a staple of consumer-dystopian fiction, an update of the trope of ‘living off the fat of the land’ for a newly bloated, over-affluent society: see also the soap-making chapters in Fight Club. It is a fabulous symbol of the waste produced by contemporary society, not to mention a metaphor for the diminution of the self. Like the L.A. of Less Than Zero, this dystopia embodies features of thirdorder simulation. Lived experience is either an echo of a prior representation or an attempt to recreate the representational in the physical world. As Andy explains, Dag came to California from Toronto, Canada . . . a city that when I once visited gave the efficient, ordered feel of the Yellow Pages sprung to life in three dimensions, peppered with trees and veined with cold water’ (22) Toronto is not ‘natural’ but a simulation of the unnatural purity found in its promotional material. Its verdure is too ‘ordered’ to create the intended paradise, instead evoking the Yellow Pages’ attempt to impose order upon chaos. Equally, ignoring the global strife that surrounds them Andy’s parents, ‘believe in a greeting card future’ (128). Coupland suggests, as in Less Than Zero, that pursuing the ideals presented in the media is utterly damaging. Dag complains that ‘I seemed unable to achieve the animal happiness of people on TV’ (35) while the neologism ‘Teleparablising’ defines that practice of appropriating morality from TV sitcom plots (138). As befits a novel depicting old fashioned inequality rather than the universal affluence described by Jameson and Baudrillard, Coupland posits that there are economic preconditions to ‘global’ pop music culture that Ellis completely ellipts. Cable television, which was necessary to receive MTV in America during the eighties and early nineties, was far from ubiquitous. Andy is priced out of MTV. In fact, a crucial aspect of his and his friends’ status as archetypal eighties dropouts is that none of them own a television set. Cable television increased from 43.7% of American households in 1984 to 68% by 1999 (Toto 2000, 8) and supporting this statistic Coupland’s ‘MTV Generation’ are much younger than Ellis’s. They are embodied by Andy’s younger brother Tyler, an adolescent neo-yuppie who nicknames his tall twin friends ‘The World Trade Center’ (120) and is as brazenly corporate as the rock videos

46

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

he obsessively watches (Coupland takes this generation as the subject of his less successful second novel Shampoo Planet). Where Ellis’s MTV viewers take up countercultural posturing despite their indoctrination, Tyler makes the MTV generation’s corporate nature explicit. He chastises Andy for contemplating a ‘hippy’ name such as Harmony or Dust: You’re mad. Andrew looks great on a resumé – what more could you ask for? Weirdos named Beehive or Fiber Bar never make middle management’ (155) By focusing entirely upon economic goals Tyler has found a solution to the spiritual malaise embodied by Andy and by Clay. He is a living embodiment of Jameson’s claim that with the arrival of postmodernity the economic has come to infiltrate all aspects of cultural life. Like Less Than Zero the argument that Generation X is structured like MTV has been overstated, but the novel does construct and then break down an opposition between

MTV’s

‘synthetic’

characteristics

(repetition,

fragmentation,

decontextualisation) and ‘authentic’ orally-transmitted storytelling. The sign ascendancy through which pop has pervaded everyday life is ridiculed. Take the depiction of ‘loaded’ Armand who ‘owns the marketing rights to those two little buttons on push-button telephones – the star and the zero. That’s like owning the marketing rights to the moon’ (177). More specifically, Dag’s brother Matthew ‘the jingle writer’ (34) introduces a form that blatantly fragments pop into a series of consumerist imperatives. As with the protagonists of Less Than Zero, the bricolage regurgitated by the media creates the impression that invention is impossible, and causes a Bloomian sense of belatedness. Naomi Klein has described this feeling in her own childhood as an Xer: To us it seemed as though the archetypes were all hackneyed by the time our turn came to graduate . . . Crowded by the ideas and styles of the past, we felt there was no open space anywhere’ (2000, 63) The act of dropping out of corporate pop is therefore reactionary. Andy’s group attempt to re-locate the distinctly unpostmodern concept of meaning: objective, ethical values and ‘authentic’ representation. This crucially involves a recapturing of narrative chronology, of cause-and-effect dynamics rather than fashion cycles. As Claire tells the others, ‘it’s not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool

47

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

moments. Either our lives become stories, or there’s just no way to get through them’ (10). This project places Andy and his friends in opposition to the aesthetic effect of Generation X’s layout. The novel throws disembodied slogans at the reader from beneath the body text, which imitate the motivational nonsense of advertising and express the meaninglessness of contemporary existence:

(102, 144, 168)

No matter how close the characters come to real emotional attachment, they will always exist within the context of these bursts of nebulous official language. While every chapter of the novel is a chronological development of the last, each opens with an identical and ambiguous graphic:

Is this a dot matrix rendering of the sky, up to which characters apocalyptically stare? Is it the mouth and nose of an obscured human face, representing the unfashionable humanity that they come to appreciate? Is it simply a block of static, like the dead air between television broadcasts? It is clearly a floating signifier, a kind of typographical Rorschach Test that conveys infinite possible meanings, like the repetitive symbolism of rock videos and commercials. Its infinite reproducibility is also, of course, a reference to pop art and Andy Warhol. As in Less Than Zero the integration of these signs with everyday life renders complete opposition impossible. Andy sometimes lapses into advertising jargon, for instance: ‘I absent-mindedly stare at the ridges in my fingernails and wonder if I’m receiving sufficient dietary calcium’ (34). The protagonists construct their stories from the tools available to them, and as such they 48

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

often bear resemblance to rock videos. Most are incredibly short, ‘The Young Man Who Desperately Wanted to Be Hit By Lightning’ (201) is barely longer than its title. Andy’s death vision is particularly rock video-esque: I want to lie on the razory brain-shaped rocks of Baja. I want to lie on these rocks with no plants around me, traces of brine on my fingers and a chemical sun burning up in the heaven. There will be no sound, perfect silence, just me and oxygen, not a thought in my mind, with pelicans diving into the ocean beside me for glimmering mercury bullets of fish. Small cuts from the rocks will extract blood that will dry as quickly as it flows, and my brain will turn into a thin white cord stretched skyward up into the ozone layer and humming like a guitar string (202) The idea that his death will be completely silent is belied by the closing reference to rock instrumentation. Even these visions of pantheistic transcendence are infused with rock ‘n roll melodrama. Like Less Than Zero, MTV becomes a dystopian vision of social control. For Baby Boomers like Andy’s father the channel’s depoliticising effect is positive, an opportunity for young people to give themselves a direction in life. Like the depiction of MTV as opiate in Less Than Zero, it allows viewers to detach themselves from social problems. Watching ‘an angry mob of protesting young men rioting somewhere in the world’ (165) Andy’s father declares Just look at those guys. Don’t any of them have jobs? Give them all something to do. Satellite them Tyler’s rock videos – anything – but keep them busy. Jesus. (165) The disposessed across the world can be placated with music videos. Political opposition is reduced to ‘MTV Not Bullets’ (163). The irony, of course, is that Andy’s father’s generation is responsible for the young men’s unemployment. The same generation that protested so hard for Civil Rights and against Vietnam will not allow the same right of protest to their impoverished offspring. Instead, the idea of social programming so prevalent in dystopian fiction is raised once again. Where Less Than Zero depicts MTV programming viewers to consume to a point at which they commit acts of pathological violence, Generation X depicts the station programming corporate automatons (Andy and his brother Dave have even considered hiring a deprogrammer for their career-minded sister Susan). When yuppie ‘control freak’ Tobias finally abandons Claire he disavows any hope of finding meaning in the world. Instead he announces that his life will solely be spent making money, inspired by the succession 49

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

of fragmented images in his imagination. Profit and image-building are also, of course, MTV’s two main drives. Tobias’s images are based upon nihilistic indulgences in sex and violence, through a quick succession of decontextualised moments: I like my job here in the city. I like the hours and the mind games and the battling for money and status tokens, even though you think I’m sick for wanting any part of it [. . .] I don’t want dainty moments of insight. I want everything and I want it now. I want to be ice-picked on the head by a herd of angry cheerleaders, Claire. Angry cheerleaders on drugs [. . .] I want to be radiator steam hissing on the cement of the Santa Monica freeway after a thousand-car pile up – with acid rock from the smashed cars roaring in the background. I want to be the man in the black hood who switches on the air raid sirens. I want to be naked and windburned and riding the lead missile of a herd heading over to bomb every little fucking village in New Zealand [. . .] We’re all lapdogs; I just happen to know who’s petting me. But hey – if more people like you choose not to play the game, it’s easier for me to win.’ (185) This is a passage of superlatives. As in music videos the abundant Freudian symbols are barely repressed, all naked men straddling missiles and ice-pick penetration fantasies. Tobias’s corporate ideal enmeshes Eros and Thanatos, sex and death, to sublimate desire in its entirety towards the most destructive contests he can imagine: war, car racing and an oddly emasculating reference to American team sports. This celebration of the synthetic may be full of Pythonesque humour, but it also demonstrates the way in which corporate thought cannot allow for any kind of ideology beyond its boundaries. For capitalist values to validate themselves there can be no conceivable counter-culture. Tobias sees his winning the corporate game as a victory over Claire, but he cannot articulate what he has ‘won’. This marriage between domesticated rock aesthetics and the institutions of official power (wealth, class, governance) is most chillingly recounted in American Psycho: In the elevator Frederick Dibble . . . starts humming along to the Muzak station – a version of what could be ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ that plays throughout the elevators in the building our offices are in (1991, 61). One of the saddest moments in Generation X occurs during Andy’s reassertion of spirituality on Christmas day, when he lights candles from a string of different religions for his family: Votive candles, birthday candles, emergency candles, Jewish candles, Christmas candles, and candles from the Hindu bookstore bearing peoploid cartoons of saints. They all count – all candles are equal’ (163)

50

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

In this secular state each member of Andy’s family responds to the spectacle in terms derived from their respective generational discourses, the closest that each can come to articulating the ‘magic’ of the scene. As Andy describes it, this light ‘is making the eyes of my family burn, if only momentarily, with the possibilities of existence in our time’ (171). Andy’s mother is able to use hippie jargon about self-empowerment, which may be ineffectual but at least demonstrates a hope in the potential of human imagination: Do you know what this is like? It’s like the dream everyone gets sometimes – the one where you’re in your house and you suddenly discover a new room that you never knew was there. But once you’ve seen the room you say to yourself, ‘Oh how obvious – of course, that room is there. It always has been.’” (171) Tyler the Global Teen however, trapped in the simulacrum, cannot conceive the experience in terms of numinosity or the unconscious. Instead, he chooses to articulate his appreciation by suggesting that reality has achieved the higher value of simulation: ‘It’s a video, Andy […] a total video’ (171). For Coupland - unlike Ellis or Baudrillard - all meaning has not quite been lost to the infinite play of images, but MTV is the process’s most pervasive inroad into everyday life. Where Ellis suggests that the consumers of corporate pop are the authors of their own destruction, Coupland’s work is pervaded by an underlying strand of humanism. In Generation X the majority of characters, even the most vile, are eventually revealed sympathetically to be victims of the Baby Boomers’ imagemachine. In a strange isolated instance Andy’s brother Tyler confides that he shares the escapist fantasies of Gen X, and for all of his corporate rhetoric he does feel a genuine emotional bond to his brother: I worry about you. That’s all. You seem like you’re only skimming the surface of life, like a water spider – like you have some secret that prevents you from entering the mundane everyday world. And that’s fine – but it scares me. If you, oh, I don’t know, disap-peard or something I don’t know if I could deal with it . . . You promise to give me a bit of warning? I mean, if you’re going to leave or metamorphose or whatever it is you’re planning to do [. . .] I just get so sick of being jealous and everything, Andy – [. . .] And it scares me that I don’t see a future. And I don’t understand this reflex of mine to be such a smartass about everything. It really scares me. I may not look like I’m paying any attention to anything, Andy, but I am. But I can’t allow myself to show it. And I don’t know why’ (172-3)

51

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Shockingly, Tyler has no qualms about abandoning his consumer lifestyle if the possible of real escape ever arrived. Though he cannot understand Andy’s form of dropping out, he breaks Jameson and Baudrillard’s logic by being able to step aside from his own condition and comment upon it: ‘I may not look like I’m paying any attention to anything, Andy, but I am. But I can’t allow myself to show it. And I don’t know why’ (172-3). Like Andy, he searches for real meaning beyond knee-jerk irony. There is even a ‘genuine’ side to the odious Tobias. He joins in the storytelling to recount a nostalgic childhood memory which brings some all-important historicity to his life, suggesting a more innocent age: Every summer back in Tacoma [. . .] my dad and I would rig up a shortwave radio that he had left over from the 1950s. We’d try out all of the bands, and if the radiation in the Van Allen belt was low, then we’d pick up just about everywhere: Johannesburg, Radio Moscow, Japan, Panjabi stuff. But more than anything we’d get signals from South America, these weird haunted-sounding bolero-samba music transmissions from dinner theatres in Ecuador and Caracas and Rio. The music would come in faintly – faintly but clearly. One night Mom came out onto the patio in a pink sundress and carrying a glass pitcher of lemonade. Dad swept her into his arms and they danced to the samba music with Mom still holding the pitcher. She was squealing but loving it. I think she was enjoying that little bit of danger the threat of broken glass added to the dancing. And there were crickets cricking and the transformer humming on the power lines behind the garages, and I had my suddenly young parents all to myself – them and this faint music that sounded like heaven – faraway, clear and impossible to contact – coming from this faceless place where it was always summer and where beautiful people were always dancing and where it was impossible to call by telephone, even if you wanted to. Now that’s Earth to me (109) This is a stark reminder that the radio has not always been an arm of the homogenising mass media, but a wonderful link to a world which hyperreal America barely registers. Where corporate pop music imposes a globalising blanket of American and British pop music, Tobias is opened up to truly ‘global’ music cultures from a series of countries with enormous cultural differences to the USA. Several are impoverished, while Russia and South America provide a strong contrast to the USA’s consumer capitalism. These are the cultures which the white noise of mass media has come to block out, like the radiation of the Van Allen belt, and as such they offer a transcendental experience beyond the surface textures of the simulacrum: ‘this faint music sounded like heaven – faraway, clear and impossible to contact’. This view of globalisation is reminiscent of Jean-François Lyotard’s argument that national

52

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

identities have been superseded by the identity constructions of multinational corporations, for whom Tobias works (in Allen 2000, 182). The vignette sees natural imagery, the cricking of crickets, impose itself over the perpetual hum of power lines to achieve a rare unity of emotionally-connected human beings and landscape. For once a character has created his own images, of ever-beautiful people dancing in an exotic Elysium. This humanising anecdote follows the revelation that Tobias is actually too young to be a genuine yuppie, and has simply appropriated its aesthetic as just another pastiche: I’m too young. I don’t have enough money. I may look the part, but it’s only looks. By the time goodies like cheap land and hot jobs got to me they just sort of . . . started running out.’ (103) Like Andy he is ‘floating on the surface of life, like a water spider’ and as such Andy is able to identify him as ‘shin jin rui – X generation – just like us’ (104). There is no humanistic respite for the Baby Boomers, however, a generation supposedly interested in countercultural values of spirituality and free love, who have instead imposed corporate pop. At least in Less Than Zero the Boomers are victims of their own abominations. Clay’s estranged parents are clearly unhappy despite their wealth. His mother’s smiles are forced and her hands shake. His ‘neat and hard’ father is only able to make economic connections to his family, by writing them cheques on Christmas morning. In Generation X, however, the Baby Boomers are smug oppressors characterised by the slogan on one bumper sticker which particularly enrages Dag: ‘WE’RE SPENDING OUR CHILDREN’S INHERITANCE’ (5). Having vandalised the car in response, Dag explains that I don’t know, Andy . . . whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big – way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and stickers on bumpers . . . I feel insulted either way (6) An explicit connection is made between the fragmentary, achronological narratives of contemporary life and the Baby Boomers who set them in motion. Oral narratives are offered as the only way to impose some kind of order and sequence upon ‘the blips and chunks’ of modern experience. During Dag’s days in the lower echelons of the marketing business (the profession most associated with sign manipulation) he has a confrontation with a typical middle-aged Baby Boomer, his boss Martin. The 53

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

neologism at the foot of the page helpfully characterises him as a ‘Bleeding Ponytail: An elderly sold-out baby boomer who pines for hippie or pre-sellout days’ (25). For all his countercultural posturing Martin is a beast of corporate image-manipulation. He tells Dag that for one campaign he must ‘get the little monsters so excited about eating a burger that they want to vomit with excitement’ (24). Trapped within American hyperreality’s doctrine of economic success by any means, Martin is appalled when Dag calls in a health inspector about the poor office conditions: In Toronto [the inspectors] can force you to make architectural changes, and alterations are ferociously expensive . . . health of the office workers be damned, cash signs were dinging up in Martin’s eyes, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth (24) Just as Andy’s father has contracted a kind of historical amnesia towards hippie notions of political protest, this ex-hippie has entirely forgotten his own days of dropping out, declaring I just don’t understand you young people. No workplace is ever okay enough. And you mope and complain about how uncreative your jobs are and how you’re getting nowhere, and so when we finally give you a promotion you leave and go and pick grapes in Queensland or some other such nonsense (25) Where Baudrillard and Jameson regard Western postmodern societies as being homogenised through undifferentiated wealth, Coupland suggests that ‘affluent society’ is merely the experience of one specific generation who have exploited those who came before and after them (our intervening decade has weakened this hypothesis). The synthetic, surface-obsessed society described by Baudrillard is here only the condition of the yuppies. As Dag explains before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don’t exist, let’s just face facts: they do . . . Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It’s like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There’s nothing there. (25) Clay’s ‘Disappear Here’ billboard is again evoked, but at least here only the progenitors of corporate pop have been rendered ‘blank’ rather than the adolescents 54

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

who have grown up with it26. The use of the word ‘aura’ to describe their lack evokes Walter Benjamin’s idea of pre-mechanised art objects each possessing an aura to render them distinct (1937). In the era of third-order simulation, in which reproduction has transgressed even the restraints of mass production with its infinite flux of signs, the loss of an individuated art object’s ‘aura’ has extended to invalidate the possibility of creating individual, auratic human beings. The other interesting thing about this passage is the ‘bug barbecue’, an image which enforces a binary opposition between ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ which follows the same lines as the division between ‘authentic’ oral narratives and ‘inauthentic’ media ones. Coupland’s language often emphasises this division in a pantheistic manner. His preferred form of figurative language is simile, a technique which foregrounds artifice in a more explicit manner than metaphor, and which is used here as a kind of metaphysical conceit to emphasise the media’s increasing pollution of grand natural landscapes. So Andy looks over the San Andreas fault contemplating that ‘the sun will explode over that fault and into my day like a line of Vegas showgirls bursting on stage’. Reversing the simile’s transitivity, he imagines Dag ‘butting his head like a rutting elk almost immediately into the vegetable crisper of my Frigidaire, from which he pulled wilted romaine leaves off the dewy surface of a bottle of cheap vodka’ (4, 4, 6). For all of Andy’s friends’ rage towards the Baby Boomers, their attempt at dropping out is ultimately thwarted because they have become ensnared in the alluring ‘nostalgia modes’ that the Boomers have imposed. These are a consequence of their parents’ hedonistic lifestyles, lived with no concern towards establishing society’s future. As Andy puts it, ‘I want to tell them that I envy their upbringings that were so clean, so free of futurelessness’ (98). In Less Than Zero adults repeatedly act as though they are teenagers, demonstrating Naomi Klein’s assertion that in the consumer world of the eighties and nineties the ‘aspirational age’ was about seventeen (2000, 70). Blair’s mother is an alcoholic and an agoraphobic. When she gets ‘bombed out’ at a party it is up to the teenagers to look after her, in a direct reversal of parental roles: ‘I better go help Blair. Mummy’s going behind the bar’ (9). Clay’s father rides around with the top down on a brand new Ferrari playing a Bob Seger tape ‘as if this was some sort of weird gesture of communication’ (33). Rock music has moved from an oppositional stance to one of parental conformity, a failed attempt to connect the generations rather than differentiate them.

55

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

In both novels characters’ listlessness is portrayed as a direct result of their parents’ preceding indulgences. This has both an economic and aesthetic impact. Naomi Klein characterises her own plight as an Xer as ‘the meaningless of life when everything has already been done’ (2000, 63). Generation X questions the possibility of achieving genuinely countercultural status in such an environment, a form of dropping out that will not fall foul of the same trapping as befell the Baby Boomers. As Klein paints it, the problem is that all countercultural space has become co-opted by the dominant culture: the world stretched out before us not as a slate of possibility, but as a maze of well-worn grooves like the ridges burrowed by insects in hardwood. Step off the straight and narrow career-and-materialism groove and you just end up on another one, the groove for people who step off the main groove. And that groove was worn indeed (some of the grooving done by our own parents). Want to go travelling? Be a modern-day Kerouac? Hop on the Let’s Go Europe groove. How about a rebel? An avant-garde artist? Go buy your alterna-groove at the secondhand bookstore, dusty and moth-eaten and done to death’ (2000, 63) Andy and friends’ response is their unconventional relocation to Palm Springs. The retirement community is the equivalent of their parents’ hippie communes but this time ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ has been reconfigured as ‘turn off, tune out, drop out’27. Where MTV and commercials can be blocked out, the nostalgia that fuels corporate pop’s fashion cycles is more pervasive. As with Less Than Zero’s dehistoricising of punk, Coupland emphasises the ‘Decade Blending’ of postmodern existence (17). The nostalgia here is more explicit than that found in Ellis’s novel, openly signalling itself as the Jamesonian process of ‘the random cannibalisation of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’ (Jameson in Hardt 2000, 202). Andy and his friends are shamelessly caught up in the fashion cycle, criticising those who haven’t kept up with the latest developments: Elvissa […] is in a pleasant state and is wearing an ill-fitting 1930s swimsuit, which is her attempt to be hip and retro. In Elvissa’s mind this afternoon is her ‘time to be Young and do Young things with Young people my own age.’ She thinks of us as Youngsters. But her choice of swimwear merely accentuates how far removed she has become from current bourgeois time/space. Some people don’t have to play the hip game; I like Elvissa, but she can be so clued out […] The overall effect around the pool is markedly 1949, save for Tobias’s Day-Glo green swimsuit (102)

56

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

For once, the extra-textual graphic on this subject derives its humour at the expense of the main protagonists, not those who they satirise:

(101) Gen X can never resolve whether their inheriting of nostalgia is, in Jamesonian terms, a form of parody (imitation with satirical intent) or pastiche (blank imitation due to the impossibility of finding an authentic personal voice)28. The Xers are torn between two slogans, the first a declaration of faith in postmodernism’s infinite subjectivity, the second a cynical reflection of the way in which all meaning has been bled from their lives:

(46)

(175) Each character explicitly condemns ‘Legislated Nostalgia’ (46), the reliance they are forced to place on memories they are too young to have. When describing each other, however, it becomes clear that each actually relies on it to as great an extent as any of their drop-out strategies of storytelling and media avoidance. During an argument Andy shouts that Dag’s ‘entire sense of life begins and ends in the year his own parents got married, as if that was the last year in which anything could ever be safe’ (96-97). There is however a more sinister side to this fixation upon ‘the insensible colonisation of the present by the nostalgia mode’ (Jameson in Hardt 2000, 204).

57

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Coupland ties the well-trodden concept of ‘the end of history’ espoused by thinkers as diverse as Fukayama and Lefebvre to the specific economic policy of the Baby Boomers. This is embodied in the ‘mythic world’ of Texlahoma, which the protagonists have invented as a setting for their stories. This ‘sad Everyplace’ desperately clings to the illusory certainties of a world on the cusp of terminal decline: Texlahoma is an asteroid orbiting the earth, where the year is permanently 1974, the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew again. The atmosphere contains oxygen, wheat chaff and A.M. radio transmissions (46) For Coupland nostalgia is an aesthetic movement ultimately fuelled by economics. The onset of recession and industrial discontent, the conditions which caused the Sex Pistols to declare ‘No Future’, are guiltier of fixating society on an idealised past than the rise of pastiche blamed by Jameson. Though the Boomers have generally benefited from their own greed, they block out the damage they have done to their offspring and the wider world. Hence Andy’s parents live in ‘the house that time forgot’ (162), ‘staving off evidence of time’s passing’ (158) by pretending that they are still poor. Their detachment is so complete that Andy’s father even has ‘medication that makes him unable to secrete tears’ (164). Coupland contrasts the old concept of ‘History’ against contemporary nostalgia. His division matches Jameson’s. History is a conception of the past based around the organic genealogy of the bourgeois collective project […] , the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future (in Hardt 2000, 203) It has been replaced by ‘a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum’ (in Hardt 2000, 203). Claire’s free association on the subject of the sun literalises this process: Well, Dag. I see a farmer in Russia, and he’s driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight’s gone bad on him – like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine. And another strange phenomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life magazines instead, and the odor is killing his crops. The wheat is thinning as we speak. He’s slumped over the wheel of his tractor and he’s crying. His wheat is dying of history poisoning (9)

58

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

By which she means, in Jamesonian terms, ‘nostalgia poisoning’. Claire imagines a process whereby a historical figure is literally transformed into a text. The vision is both a photograph given life and a living scene that disintegrates when it is transformed into a static image. The media’s endless representations crush our understanding of history. From a typically pantheistic standpoint it is suggested that life-giving agriculture is polluted by the synthetic images with which society has become distracted. Tellingly, Coupland claimed in one interview that in the future history will be ‘a sentimental luxury’ (Wenger 1994). The end of history is most strongly condemned on the same page as the ‘nostalgia is a weapon’ slogan, on which Andy and Tyler visit a Vietnam memorial. Vietnam was the ultimate occasion for political protest by the Baby Boomers, and (opposing Jameson’s assertion that postmodernity is a post-World War II movement) for Coupland it marks the last point at which objective meaning existed, before the advent of the mass-media simulacrum. Tyler, the Global Teen who has never known anything but corporate pop music culture and is apt to ‘break out into spontaneous fits of song and dance […] at the Clackamas County Mall’ cannot understand Andy’s sentimental interest in the ‘psychic disintegration’ of the mourners. Andy however uses the memorial to vindicate his hope that there is something beyond the simulacrum: I’m hardly an expert on the subject, Tyler, but I do remember a bit of it. Faint stuff; black-and-white TV stuff. Growing up, Vietnam was a background color in life, like red or blue or gold – it tinted everything. And then suddenly one day it just disappeared. Imagine that one morning you woke up and the color green had vanished. I come here to see a color that I can’t see anywhere else any more […] they were ugly times. But they were also the only times I’ll ever get – genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool. And hey, it’s not as if I got to see much real history either – I arrived to see a concert in history’s arena just as the final set was finishing (175) Writing about Vietnam in Simulacra & Simulation Baudrillard has argued for it as a hyperreal event, a ‘technological and psychedelic fantasy […] a succession of special effects’ in which the importance of the fighting lies in the filmed assertion of America’s military might. Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now is therefore part of the war rather than a representation of it (Glaser 1994, 59). Baudrillard claims that the war is only important as a psychical process rather than a physical one: ‘ the

59

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

war “in itself” perhaps in fact never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and the tropics’ (1994, 59). For Coupland, however, there is something behind the TV images and memorial texts of Vietnam. He argues that historical events in the early seventies were affective experiences rather than the hollow ‘spectacles’ which constitute contemporary ‘history’. Generation X was published mere months after the first Gulf conflict. This was Baudrillard’s ‘Virtual War’ (Lane 2000, 93), which embodied the features of third-order simulation experienced in Generation X much more strongly than Vietnam. Relatively few American soldiers were actually deployed there, against an enemy who had withdrawn their elite troops before fighting had even begun, and in which CNN produced the ‘reality’ of combat for viewers from a perspective that was more heavily controlled by the military than camera crews in the earlier war had experienced (Lane 2000, 95-7). Coupland’s belief in a capital H ‘History’ that has simply been lost brings his characters down to earth when they become too caught up in postmodern irony. Dag’s arrogant assertion that ‘you can’t think of one person in the entire history of the world who became famous without a whole lot of cash changing hands along the way’ (29) is eventually cut down to size when a woman who has been dismissed as trailer trash softly tells him ‘Anne Frank’ (30). The appearance of Norman G. Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry nine years after the publication of Generation X, which argues that Anne Frank’s suffering has in fact been to the financial advantage of several corporations, is a final irony beyond Coupland’s hands. Coupland believes that individual, volitional human subjects do exist behind the obscuring semiosis of the consumer dystopia. To an even greater extent than Ellis, the utopian thinking behind Generation X is that a more fulfilling world would be possible with the removal of the two abiding features of corporate pop: the sign systems that pervade everyday life and the Baby Boomers who use countercultural rock ‘n roll rhetoric for aggressively capitalist ends.

3) corporate pop apocalypse I had a vision There wasn’t any television From staring at the sun (The Pixies, ‘Distance Equals Rate Times Time’, 1991)

60

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

The most significant similarity between Ellis and Coupland’s depictions of the conditions of corporate pop is that both ultimately lead, perhaps hysterically, to the end of the world. Postmodernism is indelibly associated with apocalypse. It incorporates various ideas about finality, from Gadamer’s end of valid interpretation to Barthes’s ‘death of the author’. As Jameson has observed, ‘postmodernity has most often been characterised as the end of something’ (1998a, 93). There is also a prevalent connection between the novel’s Californian settings and apocalypse, as part of the Hollywood anti-myth. Joan Didion claims in Slouching Toward Bethlehem that ‘the city burning is Los Angeles’ deepest image of itself’ (in Fine 1984, 15). The geography of California is particularly suitable – it is a small imaginative leap from the edge of a continent to the edge of the world. This impression is heightened in Less Than Zero with the naming of nightclubs such as ‘Nowhere Club, Land’s End [and] The Edge’ (95). David Fine has described Los Angeles’ climate in an apocalyptic manner: ‘the hot, dry Santa Ana winds – the kind Chandler and Joan Didion appropriate as the backdrop to violence – race through the canyons on their way to the sea, not only firing the tempers of Angelenos, but causing the dry chaparral to explode into flames’ (1984, 150). The centreless quality of L.A. has inspired dystopian fiction in William Gibson’s amorphous ‘Sprawl’, the setting for his cyberpunk novels. James Annesley regards apocalypse as the unifying characteristic of all eighties ‘blank fiction’. It is supposedly an expression of millennial angst, a feeling which Generation X as the ‘13th Generation’ (counting back from Benjamin Franklin) know all too well. Nicki Sahlin has produced a particularly detailed analysis of the apocalyptic elements of the Californian landscape in Less Than Zero. She notes the perpetual threat implied by Clay’s descriptions of earthquakes, mudslides and rainstorms in the ‘smog-soaked, baking Valley’ (1991, 27) not to mention a strong gothic strand. Clay has nightmares of being swallowed up and suffocated by L.A. mud. Fear is struck into his heart by a ‘huge skull leering at drivers from a billboard on Sunset, hooded, holding a pyx, bony fingers beckoning’ (96). Pop music proves to be Clay’s strongest route to understanding his impression of impending doom. Overheard lyrics once again offer a direct insight into his unconscious. Clay’s sense of menace is highlighted when he switches on the radio to hear ‘some little girls singing about an earthquake in LA: “My surfboard’s ready for the tidal wave” ’ (37). The final segment of the novel is Clay’s response to the aforementioned X song ‘Los Angeles’, which draws together several key apocalyptic themes: 61

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

There was a song I heard when I was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called ‘Los Angeles’ and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. The images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. These images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left. (195) A cursory listen to the song itself, a basic New Wave number distinguishable only by a set of character-study lyrics more reminiscent of The Kinks than The Clash, makes Clay’s momentous reaction all the more surprising. The song’s themes mirror Clay’s disorientation and sense of entrapment, but make no mention of apocalypse. Instead, a character is inspired to create his own images by a mass media object. This process creates the hope that, having left Los Angeles, Clay may actually be able to individuate himself: ‘the images […] were personal and no one I knew shared them’ (195). This segment is the only part of Less Than Zero to be recounted from an (unspecified) proleptic point. That Clay’s main remembrance, possibly the narrative which constitutes the preceding novel, has a pop song as its ‘only point of reference’ is highly significant. The image of ‘parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children’ is the pinnacle of a gothic pattern of imagery connecting consumption and apocalypse. Throughout Less Than Zero Clay is paranoid about coyotes, who he recalls seeing at night with domestic cats in their mouths. He even suspects that they are werewolves, the culprits for the collage of murders and disappearances which serves as a backdrop to his partying lifestyle (the idea is developed in a short story about L.A. vampires in Ellis’s The Informers). But when Clay actually encounters a coyote, driving in the hills with Blair, the reality is far different. The beast is not a predator but prey, the ultimate victim of corporate pop. Distracted by the pervasive inroad of pop into everyday life (‘on the radio is a song I have already heard five times today but hum along to anyway’) the characters are entirely desensitised to the natural landscape: ‘Blair turns the radio up. She doesn’t see the coyote’ (131). The coyote’s death is horrific, loaded with more pathos than is attached to any of the gory murders Clay has heard about through the media:

62

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

It’s lying on its side, trying to wag its tail. Its eyes are wide and frightened looking and I watch it start to die beneath the sun, blood running out of its mouth. All of its legs are smashed and its body keeps convulsing and I begin to notice the pool of blood that’s forming at the head. Blair calls out to me and I ignore her and watch the coyote. I stand there for ten minutes (131) Possessing all the innocence and vulnerability of the victims of snuff videos, the coyote dies slowly as Clay fulfils his media-imposed role of voyeur. By the time Clay reflects on the X song, the predation imagery has shifted from animals to the Baby Boomers. Clay has come to appreciate that the preceding generation’s rabid consumption is far more to blame for his suffering than any horror of the natural world. The imagery anticipates Patrick Bateman’s sublimation of his cannibalistic desire into product fetishism in American Psycho. It also has a direct analogue in Generation X where the sequencing of chapter titles defiantly barks ‘DON’T EAT YOURSELF’ / ‘EAT YOUR PARENTS’ (v). The theme is explored whenever Coupland’s characterisation recourses to that staple contemporary scenario, the plane crash survivor. The aggressive consumption of the Global Teens indicates that ‘were their AirBus to crash on a frosty Andean plateau, they would have little, if any, compunction about eating dead fellow passengers’ (122). The selfishness of yuppies such as Tobias, by contrast, is reminiscent of ‘a passenger on a plane full of people that crashes high in the mountains, and survivors, not trusting each other’s organs, snack on their own forearms’ (91). Most literally, when Dag wins a bet he subversively swallows his winnings, telling Andy ‘You are what you eat’ (21). Coupland presents apocalypse as a phenomenon that functions on two levels: firstly it is a threatening essence built into the consumer psyche, but secondly it is also a very physical consequence of an approach to the world which lauds the synthetic at the expense of nature. Claire’s family prove the former through their fixation upon ‘sex, gossip and end-of-the world nonsense’ (42) expressed in rants about Nostradamus and faultlines. The unease felt throughout the novel towards living in an ahistorical state is itself aestheticised, hysteria turns in on itself to fuel consumption: ‘I’m wearing a pillbox hat to the end-of-the-world party at Zola’s tonight. Like Jackie. Very historical’ (39). Andy describes their portentous rambling as a natural response to meaningless consumer sign systems, using imagery that reflects his own apocalyptic fears as well as theirs:

63

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years. But then their words so strongly captured the spirit of the times, and they remain in my mind (39) Significantly, the progenitors of corporate pop appear in the background actively propagating this fear. An anonymous member of Claire’s family reports that I saw a record producer in the parking lot. He and wifey were heading to Utah. They said this place was a disaster area, and only Utah was safe (40) The account is eerily reminiscent of Benjamin’s declarations about the movements of the rockabilly scene within the fashion cycle. Just as the music industry has capitalised upon teenagers’ crises of identity by deferring their desire in endless scenes, corporations at large have capitalised on the fear of apocalypse by suggesting that endlessly different sites offer sanctuary, from Palm Springs to New Zealand. Dag, the character who most clearly connects apocalypse and consumerism, is concerned about a very specific type of devastation: the Mutually Assured Destruction of a nuclear holocaust. He has evidentially spent the preceding decade anxiously staring at the skies in response to Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative (Star Wars) and, most significantly, the events at Chernobyl Power Station in April 1986. His story is one of three near-apocalypses in the novel, the dramatic climax to Section One. It takes place in the ‘Mental Ground Zero’ of a shopping mall, supposedly the preferred location where ‘one visualises oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb’ (70). The everyday setting and the ironic responses of ordinary people are reminiscent of a similar catastrophe in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. Unfortunately, Dag’s fantasy about the destruction of consumerism is actually a simulation of apocalypse apt for a simulated world. It begins with the narrator (Dag’s generalisation of himself into Everyman) falling out with a friend over a series of Baudrillard-esque conspiracies: ‘Deer Crossing’ signs are used to obscure the extinction of wild deer and Caribbean sea-shells now only exist in the collections of tourists who have pillaged them. Nature has been annihilated by the synthetic; there are only ‘ten thousand square miles of shopping malls’ (69) between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. The friend, typically, ignores these issues by immersing himself in the tapes and radio provided by the car stereo. The apocalypse itself is a weird disjunction between imagery found in disaster movies and metafictional glimpses of what would happen were these representations to actually end: ‘next to go is the Muzak, followed by a 64

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

rising buzz of conversation similar to that in a movie theatre when a film snaps’ (70). Ultimately, however, the apocalypse can only be conceived at the level of simulation. People respond as if they are in Disneyland, Baudrillard’s infamous exemplar of hyperreality (‘the parking lot is now about as civilised as a theme park’s bumper cars’, 71). A glutinous man achieves some degree of stateliness by refusing to look beyond the cultural logic of late capitalism, telling the cashier that ‘I always promised myself […] that when this moment came, I would behave with some dignity in whatever time remains and so, Miss – […] let me please pay for my purchases’ (71). The idea of the apocalypse as a mindgame continues in Dag’s other two apocalyptic incidents. First he tells the story of a man who alleviates his fear by discovering that nuclear explosions are much smaller than those depicted in the media, only to redouble it by realising the implications this discovery will have upon a society so complacent that they have allowed their homes to become shopping malls. This strange logic, at least for Dag, proves that Bomb anxiety is one of the few mental safeguards to prevent people from being completely swallowed by consumerism. The second incident is more ambiguous. In a chapter tantalisingly called ‘MONSTERS EXIST’ Dag brings Claire a jar of trinitrite beads, onceradioactive green sand, from a trip to the first nuclear test sites east of the Mojave Desert. When it spills all over the apartment it is never revealed whether the substance is harmless or whether Andy is being a ‘hell-bound P.R. Frankenstein monster’ (87) for claiming so. The psychological impact is entirely unambiguous, however: ‘should [Claire] ever come back to this bungalow, she’ll never be able to sleep there quite perfectly ever again’ (87). The most ominous harbinger of apocalypse in both Less Than Zero and Generation X is the California sun, for Clay an ‘orange monster’ and ‘gigantic […] ball of fire’. When discussing the sun in Generation X the apocalypse becomes a direct physical rather than mental threat. Lainsbury has suggested that the ‘burst of light’ that heralds Generation X’s apocalypse is the ultimate affront to the ontological status of the sun (1996, 231). In fact the novel portrays the sun as more powerful than any nuclear holocaust, as something which could cause impending destruction to wreak its vengeance for the various forms of pollution endemic to modern life. As one of Claire’s family asks

65

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

‘Hey . . . is it possible to damage the sun? I mean, we can wreck just about anything we want to here on earth. But can we screw up the sun if we wanted to? I don’t know. Can we?’ (40) Generation X suggests the affirmative. The opposition between the sun and the synthetic elements of everyday life is established in the opening chapter, introduced by the media slogan ‘THE SUN IS YOUR ENEMY’ (3). A teenage Andy avoids the package tours surrounding a total eclipse to lie in a corn field and make a pastoral connection with the agrarian world that will soon be lost. The sun instils a sense of historicising numinosity, ‘a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out’ (4). Andy first meets Claire when she is ‘talking to the sun and telling it she was very sorry if we’d hurt it or caused it any pain’ (44) while Dag’s stories include premonitions about a variety of skin cancers. Coupland’s concern is that consumerism has permanently scarred the landscape. As Dag reflects, looking at the plastic shopping products of the glutinous man ‘ten minutes of convenience; ten million years in the Riverside County Municipal Sanitary Landfill’ (70). In this respect nuclear power is the pinnacle of consumption, the first manifestation of human greed that has the potential to consume the world itself. Dag appropriately expresses the fact through a pop music reference: ‘Radiation has more endurance than even Mr. Frank Sinatra, Andy’ (125).

conclusion This essay has identified the sophisticated but alarmist responses of two novelists to changes in pop music culture in the 1980s and early 1990s. It has described the way in which these responses work within the traditions of dystopian fiction and West Coast literature. Most importantly it has argued that the main fear about corporate pop music lies in its damaging impact upon the volitional capabilities of the reified self, an idea tied to the theories of Jameson and Baudrillard. Whether Ellis and Coupland had specifically read these theorists is difficult to gauge. As a member of the ‘downtown’ scene of New York’s Lower East Side, with its bohemian intellectual magazines Bomb, Red Tape and Top Stories, Ellis could hardly have missed terms such as ‘simulacra’ and ‘hyperreality’ which Baudrillard had introduced to the voguish corners of the critical lexicon. Nor is Coupland likely to

66

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

have entirely avoided theory during his time at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver. However the safest conclusion to reach is that whether they had specifically read them or not, their texts demonstrate the heavy circulation of such postmodern ideas during this era. The hermeneutic problem thrown up by two novels that so stridently adopt postmodern theories is whether they can be read as direct responses to their cultural context at all, or merely as responses to other peoples’ ideas about this context. And what of corporate pop, the phenomenon that engendered such a vitriolic response? The global music machine kept chugging throughout the nineties, and in many ways still does, achieving what must surely be the saturation point of pop in everyday life. The specifically ‘corporate’ nature of music culture has not continued unabated, however. The phenomenal rise in piracy created by the internet suggests that the corporations may never have such a stranglehold over consumption ever again. Ever the zeitgeist-hugger, Coupland has a novel stencilled in for December 2005 entitled jPod which presumably examines these conditions. Additionally the trend for detailed analysis of the quotidian parts of everyday life, such as pop music, is characteristic of what Coupland terms in Generation X ‘Historical Underdosing: to live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen’ (9). Since the millennium capital H history appears to have returned. Reflecting this change Coupland is performing a one-man show this autumn with the Royal Shakespeare Company. As advertised, it will not tackle pop culture but his personal response to the events of 09/11/2001.

67

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

68

appendix: chronology of pop music culture in the eighties and nineties N.B. This chronology is an amalgam based initially on the chronology found in Frith, Simon et al ed. 2000 The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, but extensively supplemented with material and events relevant to this essay.

1977 1979

1980

1981 1982 1983 1984

1985

1986

1987

Slash fanzine appears, heralding the beginning of L.A. punk The Sony Walkman developed in Japan by Akio Morita, Masaru Ubuka and Kozo Ohsone. 186 million cassette Walkmans sold worldwide over next two decades (source: sony.net) Launch of Smash Hits in the UK – at launch boasted a circulation of 166,200, against 202,000 for the NME, 120,000 for Sounds, 149,000 for the Melody Maker and 107, 700 for Record Mirror (Source: Gorman 2001) Margaret Thatcher becomes British Prime Minister Launch of the The Face and i-D in the UK, the first ‘lifestyle’ magazines to incorporate music and fashion. John Lennon Shot in New York Ian Curtis (Joy Division) commits suicide X album Los Angeles released Ronald Reagan elected President of the USA MTV is launched in New York City AIDS virus first reported Michael Jackson’s Thriller sells 45 million units First CDs go on sale Arrival of video – first American Video Awards ‘Karma Chameleon’ by Culture Club By July-December 1984, Smash Hits selling over 500,000, NME circulation dropped to 83,398, Sounds 72,485, Record Mirror 72,485 and Melody Maker 68,217 (Source: Gorman 2001) ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood Band Aid ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ Sony Discman (CD Walkman) launched in Japan Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero published in the USA Live Aid Wham! play China Bruce Springsteen ‘Born in the USA’ sells 15 million units in America ‘Parental Advisory’ labelling begins First documented mention of the AIDS virus by Ronald Reagan (source: wikipedia) Accident at Chernobyl nuclear reactor Paul Simon – Graceland Beastie Boys License To Ill : first major white rap record Run DMC breath new life into Adidas products with their homage single ‘My Adidas’ The word ‘Walkman’ enters the Oxford English Dictionary MTV Europe launched – MTV globally now reaches 79 countries and 281.7 million households Less Than Zero movie adaptation released (directed Marek Kanievska)

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

1988 1989 1990 1991

1992

1994

1996 1997

1998 1999

2000 2001

M/A/R/R/S No. 1 ‘Pump Up The Volume’ – rise of DJ/sampler music Rhythm in Rhythm (Derrek May) – ‘Strings of Life’ – key moment in the rise of Detroit Techno Kylie ‘I Should Be So Lucky’ CD now outsells vinyl Dance culture’s ‘summer of love’ begins in the UK Ronald Reagan leaves office, George H.W. Bush elected President of the USA Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back Margaret Thatcher ousted, John Major becomes British Prime Minister Douglas Coupland’s Generation X published in the USA Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho published in the USA Brian Adams ‘Everything I Do I Do It For You’ [#1 16 weeks in the UK] Freddie Mercury dies of the AIDS virus CDs now outsell cassettes Bill Clinton elected President of the USA. Cultivated an image based around popular culture. Patronised McDonalds, admitted smoking marijuana and used soundbite rhetoric. Dubbed, prejoratively, the ‘MTV President’ for his appeals to Gen. X. (source: wikipedia) Launch of ‘lad’s mag’ Loaded in UK, followed by similar US success of Maxim Kurt Cobain commits suicide M People’s ‘Bizarre Fruit’ becomes the biggest-selling dance album in history UK ‘Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’ bans large spontaneous meetings at which ‘repetitive beats’ will be played Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ No. 1 in 22 countries Bill Clinton Re-elected by a landslide MP3 introduced – allows music to be transmitted over the internet Oasis Be Here Now sells 345,000 units in one day in the UK Tony Blair becomes Prime Minister of Britain following landslide election victory. In the role of ‘world leader as nation stylist’ (Klein 2000) he instigates the concept of ‘Cool Britannia’. Elections success rests partly upon the support of The Sun and the ‘Britpop’ stars currently dominating the rock scene, mainly from Blur and Oasis. (cf. Harris, John 2003 The Last Party) The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land No. 1 in 20 countries Elton John’s ‘Candle in the Wind’ US advance orders reach 7.8 million, 1.5 million units sold in the first week in the UK Napster appears, created by 18 year old heralds first wave of peer-to-peer music piracy over the internet. Actual impact on music sales remains hotly contested, but effectively marks the end of the ‘corporate pop’ era. Multinational corporations lose the reigns of pop music culture to software companies and pirates. Record companies establish copyright deals with internet music providers Attack on the World Trade Centre heralds the end of Coupland’s ‘historical underdosing’. Triggers chain of events including wars in Afghanistan (2002) and Iraq (2003).

70

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

2002

Apple iPod launches, downloaded music moves into the mass market. No reliable research exists to compare the levels of bought and pirated online music. Napster closed down following extensive litigation from Recording Industry of America. Numerous clone programs fill its place. Napster bought by Bertelsmann, one of the companies that had sued it. Following several resales Napster 2.0 emerges as a legal download service in 2004

71

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

bibliography N.B. As many of the concepts discussed in this essay, such as ‘Generation X’ and ‘Global Teens’, are too recent for inclusion in established reference texts unconventional research materials such as online ‘wikis’ and web pages have been used where there was no alternative, and are cited accordingly. Note also that the specification for the categorising of different types of materials in the UCL English Department style guide has also been disregarded. This division (which is already muddied in its merging of books and periodicals in the same category) becomes too complicated when, for instance, online versions of printed texts such as Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ are used. All-inclusive lists are advocated in the latest MHRA and MLA style guides, and the type of material referenced (book, web, film, CD album) is clear from the context in which it is cited.

Abcarian, Robin ‘Boomer Backlash’ Los Angeles Times 12th June 1991 Abrams, M.H. 1999 A Glossary Of Literary Terms: Seventh Edition USA: Hardcourt Brace College Publishers Allen, Graham 2000 Intertextuality London and New York: Routledge Annesley, James 1998 Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel London: Pluto Press Anon 10 June 1985 ‘Less Than Zero,’ New Republic New York; 142 Anon 2004 AMG All Music Guide http://www.allmusic.com Anon 2004a ‘Bill Clinton’ in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton Anon 2004b ‘Dystopia’ in Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dystopia Anon 2004c ‘Generation X’ in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X Anon 2004d ‘Jean Baudrillard’ in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard Anon 2004e ‘Baby Boomers’ in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Boomers Anon 2004f ‘Generation X’ in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X Bangles, The 1987 ‘Less Than Zero: Original Soundtrack’ Columbia Records — ‘Hazy Shade of Winter’ Barnet, Steve ‘Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture’ in Mortensen, Erik and Schmidt, Heike ed. The Bogus Tribute to Douglas Coupland http://coupland.dk

72

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Benjamin, Walter 1937 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ [Etext] Emerson University Set Texts http://pages.emerson.edu/Courses/spring00/in123/workofart/benjamin.htm [originally in Arendt, Hannah ed. and Zohn, Harry trans. 1999 Benjamin, Walter Illuminations London: Verso] Bessy, Claude; Morris, Chris; McKenna, Kristine; Carrillo, Sean; Cervenka Exene and Doe, John 2000 Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk Michigan: Smart Art Press Bowie, David 1983 Let’s Dance Virgin Records — ‘Let’s Dance’ Buckley, Jonathan; Duane, Orla; Ellingham, Mark; Spicer, Al ed. 1999 Rock: The Rough Guide London: The Rough Guides Bull, Michael 2000 Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life Oxford, New York: Berg Buscall, Jon 1999 ‘Pretty Vacant – MTV & De-individuation in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero’ in Tanskanen, S.K. and Warvik B. ed Proceedings from the 7th Nordic Conference on English Studies 1999 Connor, Stepen 1997 Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary: 2nd Edition London: Blackwell Costello, Elvis 1977 My Aim Is True Rykodisc — ‘Less Than Zero’ Coupland, Douglas 1996 Generation X London: Abacus [1991 USA: St Martin’s Press] Coupland, Douglas 1996 Microserfs London: Flamingo Cuddon, J.A. and Preston C.E. (revised) 1999 The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory Oxford: Penguin Culture Club 1983 Kissing To Be Clever Virgin Records — ‘Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?’ DeLillo, Don 1984 White Noise New York: Viking Penguin Deprez, Sophie F. April 14, 1991. ‘The Twentysomething Gang’ The San Francisco Chronicle Dube, Francine September 25, 1992 ‘Generation X’ The Ottawa Citizen in Mortensen, Erik and Schmidt, Heike ed. The Bogus Tribute to Douglas Coupland http://coupland.dk

73

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Ellis, Bret Easton 1986 Less Than Zero Picador: London (1985 Simon and Schuster: New York) Ellis, Bret Eason 1988 The Rules of Attraction Picador: London (1987 Simon and Schuster, New York) Ellis, Bret Easton 1995 The Informers London: Picador Ellis, Brett Easton 1991 American Psycho New York: Vintage Fincher, David dir. 1999 Fight Club Region 2 DVD (2000): Twentieth Century Fox Fine, David ed. 1984 Los Angeles in Fiction Albuquerque: Univ. New Mexico Press Fink, Bruce 1997 A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique UK: Harvard Univ. Press Finkelstein, Norman G.2000 The Holocaust Industry: Reflections On The Exploitation Of Jewish Suffering New York; London: Verso Foucault, Michael 1975 trans. Lane, Allen 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison Middlesex: Penguin Freese, Peter 1990 ‘Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero: Entropy in the ‘MTV Novel’? in Nischik, Reingard M.and Korte, Barabara ed. Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian and British Fiction Wurzburg: Konningshausen & Neumann Frith, Simon; Straw, Will and Street, John ed. 2001 The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Gane, Mike 2000 Jean Baudrillard: In Radical Uncertainty London and Virginia: Pluto Press Gensko, Gary 1994 Baudrillard & Signs: Signification Ablaze London and New York: Routledge Glaser, Sheila Faria trans. 1994 Baudrillard, Jean 1984 Simulacra and Simulation USA: Univ. Michigan Press Godwin, Andrew 1992 Dancing in The Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture Minneapolis: Univ. Minnesota Press Gorman, Paul 2001 In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press London: Sanctuary Groden, Michael and Kreiswirth, Martin 2004 ‘Jameson, Frederic’ in The John Hopkin’s Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/frederic_jameson.h tml

74

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Grossberg, Lawrence 1989 ‘MTV: Swinging on a (Postmodern) Star in Angus, Ian and Jhally, Sut ed. 1989 Cultural Politics in Contemporary America New York and London: Routledge Hardt, Michael and Weeks, Kathi 2000 The Jameson Reader Oxford and Massachusetts: Blackwell Harris, David ‘Generation X’ The Glasgow Herald December 19, 1992 Harris, John 2003 The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock London and New York: Fourth Estate Hell, Richard and the Volvoids 1977 Blank Generation (Sire Records) Homer, Sean 1998 Frederic Jameson: Marxism, Hermeneutics, Postmodernism New York: Routledge Horrocks, Chirs and Jevtic, Zoran 1996 Introducing Baudrillard New York: Totem Humphrey, Clarke June 30, 1991 ‘Books Briefly’ The Seattle Times:. in Mortensen, Erik and Schmidt, Heike ed. The Bogus Tribute to Douglas Coupland http://coupland.dk James, P.D. 2000 [1995] The Children of Men London: Faber and Faber Jameson, Frederic 1998a ‘Transformations of the Image in Postmodernity’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983 – 1998 London, New York: Verso Jameson, Frederic 1998b ‘Postmodernism in Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983 – 1998 New York: Verso Johnstone, Nick 1999 Melody Maker History of 20th Century Popular Music London: Bloomsbury Kanievska, Mark dir. 1987 Less Than Zero Region 2 DVD (2003): Twentieth Century Fox Kaplan, Ann E. 1987 Rocking Around The Clock: Music Television, Postmodern and Consumer Culture New York and London: Methuen Kellner, Douglas 1989 Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond Cambridge: Polity Press Kellner, Douglas ed. 1994 Baudrillard: A Critical Reader Oxford UK and Cambridge USA: Blackwell Killer Pussy 1982 ‘Teenage Enema Nurses in Bondage’ [7 inch single]

75

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Klein, Naomi 2000 No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies London: Flamingo Lainsbury, G.P. 1996 ‘Generation X and the End of History’ Essays on Canadian Writing (ECW) Spring; 58: 229-240 Lane, Richard J. 2000 Jean Baudrillard London and New York: Routledge Lehman, David 7 September 1987 ‘Two Divine Decadents’ Newsweek: New York, 72 Levin, Charles trans. and introd. 1981 Baudrillard, Jean For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign USA: Telos Press Logan, George M. et al ed. 1994 Moore, Thomas Utopia London: Everyman Makaryk, Irena R. ed. 1993 Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Literary Theory Canada: Univ. Toronto Press Marcus, Greil 1999 In The Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 New York: Harvard Univ. Press Marcus, Greil 2000 Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land of No Alternatives New York and London: Faber McCarthy, Larry 11 July 1985 ‘Less Than Zero’ Saturday Review: New York, 80 McLuhan, Marshall 1997 (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man London: Routledge Monaco, James 1998 How to Read a Film: the world of movies, media, and multimedia art, technology, language, history, theory Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press Neill, Michael & Matsumoto, Nancy October 14, 1991 ‘X Marks The Angst’ People Nestor, Pauline ed. and intro. 1995 Brontë, Emily 1847 Wuthering Heights Suffolk: Penguin Classics Newman, Randy 1983 Trouble In Paradise Reprise Records — ‘I Love L.A’ Orwell, George 1983 Nineteen Eighty Four Harmondsworth: Penguin Palahunik, Chuck 1997 Fight Club (1996 USA: Norton) London: Vintage Petty, Tom and the Heartbreakers 1982 Long After Dark MCA Records — ‘Straight Into Darkness’ Pixies, The 1991 Trompe Le Monde — ‘Distance Equals Rate Times Time’

76

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

Poster, Mark 2001 ed. and introd. Baudrillard, Jean Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Second Edition Cambridge and Oxford: Stanford Univ. Press Powers, John; December 1985 ‘The MTV Novel Arrives’ Film Comment: New York Roberts, David 2003 ed. 2003 British Hit Singles: Guiness World Records, in Association with The Official UK Charts Company 16th edn. London: Guinness World Records Sahlin, Nicki 1991 ‘ “But This Road Doesn’t Go Anywhere”: The Existential Drama in Less Than Zero’ Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 1991 Fall; 33(1): 23-42 Schirato, Tony and Yell, Susan 1996 Communication and Cultural Literacy: An Introduction Australia: Allen and Unwin Simmons, Cindy 25 January 1992 ‘Generation X’ United Press International Smyth, Michael January 21, 1992 ‘Generation X’ Calgary Herald in Mortensen, Erik and Schmidt, Heike ed. The Bogus Tribute to Douglas Coupland http://coupland.dk Story, John ed. and introd. 1998 Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Second Edition Georgia: Univ. Georgia Press Talking Heads 1979 More Songs About Buildings and Food Sire Records — Found A Job Thurschwell, Pamela 1999 ‘Elvis Costello as Cultural Icon and Cultural Critic’ in Dettmar, Kevin J.H. and Richey, William ed. 1999 Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics New York, Chichester: Columbia Univ. Press Tillotson, Geoffrey and Jenkins, Brian ed. and introd. 1971 Johnson, Samuel 1759 Rasselas: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia London: Oxford Univ. Press Toto, Dominic 2000 ‘Job Growth in Television: Cable Versus Broadcast 1958-1999’ in Monthly Labour Review Online http://stats.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/08/art1exc.htm Waterfield, Robin ed. 1998 Plato Republic Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press Wenger, Ty 07 February 1994 ‘Douglas Coupland is not the Voice Of Our Generation’ in Mortensen, Erik and Schmidt, Heike ed. The Bogus Tribute to Douglas Coupland http://coupland.dk X 1980 Los Angeles Rhino Records —‘Los Angeles’ —‘Sex and Dying in High Society Young, Elizabeth 1992 Shopping In Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction London and New York: Serpent’s Tail

77

MA Issues in Modern Culture MTV Apocalypse: Visions of Pop in Two Dystopian Novels

78

1

notes

On the surface such a relationship may appear relatively transparent. Current trends such as the ascendancy of New Historicism and the increasing popularity of literary biography have enforced the message that a text is the direct product of the author’s historical conditions. However, this approach too often points back to the Victorian assumption that fiction is merely a form of sociology. It tells us nothing about why Nineteen Eighty Four, for instance, is such a compelling and ominous novel that has held audiences in a fifty-year iron grip where countless lesser works informed by precisely the same contextual fears have not. Similarly, too much biographical criticism is hopelessly tautological – it explains one fictional narrative (the text) with another fictional one (what can only ever be a painfully linear reconstruction of the author’s life, derived from the myth-making sources of the author’s friends or journals). Instead this essay will focus upon the interpretative process through which context contributes to the stylistic features that recent dystopian novels hold in common. By doing so it hopefully utilises the best of both historicised approaches and grander theoretical doctrines. 2

Obviously, this argument is based upon generalisations. There have always been some pop acts oriented from the ideals of the dominant culture, but it is the rebellious stars that have proved most enduring. 3

In this essay ‘dystopia’ is used in terms of its precise etymology as a ‘place where things are not where they should be’ (anon 2004b). I reject the definition of the term in Abrams’s glossary - the academic standard - of worlds in which ‘certain ominous tendencies of our present social, political and technological order are projected in some future culmination’ (1999, 207). Putting aside the idea of distant futurity which has been applied to dystopian fiction by science fiction commentators, I instead adopt the more nuanced definition found in the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Dystopias are ‘almost chiliastic forecasts of the doom awaiting mankind’ (Cuddon 1999, 958). It is the forecasting of terminal aspects within contemporary settings which lends most consumerist dystopias their apocalyptic air. 4

See the presentation of the sinister unnamed ‘company’ in Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, a rare convergence of classic science fiction dystopias with contemporary consumerist ones. 5

The relationship between Less Than Zero and its Costello-penned namesake has been covered so thoroughly by Thurschwell that it is passed over here in favour of the referencing of other musicians who feature prominently in the novel. 6

Less Than Zero is oriented from a condescending East Coast stance. Composed from a vantage point in New Hampshire, Ellis looks back to his downtown and is appalled at the consumerist trappings that he has avoided. The novel’s ideological stance thus follows the geography of Clay’s journey, beginning with his return from an unnamed, cool New Hampshire college which is associated with nature rather than the advanced state of decline found in L.A. Clay steps out at LAX with his jeans still splattered with New Hampshire mud, placing an Edenic primordial setting just outside the boundaries of the novel. The east is verdant, associated with the ‘fresh and clean’ and ‘cold and loose’, and provides a unarticulated comparison to the stifling Californian heat. 7

Baudrillard: ‘a real without origin or reality’, the simulation of something that does not exist (in Poster 2001, 169). Young: ‘a free-floating chaos of signs, images, simulations and appearances’ (1992, 35). 8

This idea, as Young has noted, derives from the French Situationists (1992, 32). Baudrillard had a close relationship with the group at one point, though he opposed the May 1968 Revolt. 9

Clay’s lonely L.A. homecoming is one of the few scenes in the novel to be effectively recreated in the abominable 1987 movie adaptation of Less Than Zero. Soundtracked by L.A. punk-pop stalwarts The Bangles, Clay takes a brief taxi ride from the airport to his house. This forms the basis of a montage of L.A. stereotypes, including palm tree-lined boulevards (sometimes made overwhelming through Clay’s diminutive point of view), enormous houses and the Hard Rock Café adorned with a Cadillac:

(06:16)

(06:37)

Dystopian undertones are suggested by the slightly too explicit commentary created by matching the Bangles’ lyrics with the images onscreen. As James Monaco has noted, citing classic movies such as American Graffiti (1973) and The Big Chill (1983), ‘rock . . . offers filmmakers a repertoire of instant keys to modern ideas and feelings’ (2000, 216). This is what theorist Karel Reisz would term asynchronous, parallel and commentative music: it is extra-mimetic sound from outside the frame, which works alongside the images by commenting upon them (Monaco 2000, 214-5). That L.A. is deeply unnatural is suggested by the combination of the swelteringly hot landscape and Christmas decorations, and the lyrical comment that ‘it’s a hazy shade of winter’. As Clay (not ‘a beautiful boy’ of the novel but a preppy do-gooder) travels he clutches a dice key ring which is apposite since - like Luke Rhinehart’s Dice Man - his role in this society is utterly prescribed (The Dice Man being a novel with which Baudrillard himself specifically dealt in L’ Echange Impossible, 1999). The sense of Clay’s holiday as a rite of passage is combined with allegorical lyrics about the season dying, and his need to escape this environment since ‘it’s the springtime of my life’. Upon entering his family home (the Valley clearly visible through the windows), the depersonalised Christmas time of the novel is depicted using filmic techniques: (07:22) (07:40)

(07:31) (07:48)

(07:53)

(07:54)

Oriented from just behind Clay’s shoulder, the hollowness of the enormous living room is emphasised by his echoing call ‘Hello! Mom, are you home?’, and a continuous tracking shot which occasionally pans into empty space. The texture of the room is itself unwelcoming, the alluringly curvaceous sofa offset by thin, spiky iron-clad furniture and other ludicrous artefacts. Even the mat is placed diagonally to emphasise its corners. The graphic match between the crate of baubles in the bottom right-hand corner of the 07:54 frame and the gum balls on the table (07:59) serves to devalue Christmas to the level of sugary, absent-minded consumption. Nevertheless, the film does curtail the most radical elements of this scene in the novel (a continuous trend) with the result that Clay’s negative experience feels more like personal misfortune than social critique. in this version the explicit connection between absent family and Christmas (07:59) Since there is no note from his mother (08:01) consumption is not made. More importantly, the non-appearance of the novel’s ‘new maid’, who Clay ignores as though she is part of the furniture, denies the novel’s broader political ramifications. 10

Several critics have claimed that there is too little development in the novel for Clay’s vacation to be regarded as rites of passage. In fact Clay does change, displaying an increasing awareness of his surroundings as the novel progresses. Consequently the initially ellipted impoverished inhabitants of L.A. eventually make appearances on the periphery of the novel: City Café is closed and there’s an old man in ragged clothing and an old black hat on, talking to himself, standing in front and when we pull up, he scowls at us . . . We pass a poor woman with dirty, wild hair and a Bullock’s bag sitting by her side full of yellowed newspapers. She’s squatting on a sidewalk by the freeway, her face tilted toward the sky; eyes half-slits, because of the glare of the sun. Blair locks the doors (114, 131) 11

This sense of lawlessness may contrast traditional dystopian fictions’ overbearing governmental presence, but it is an even stronger contrast to traditional utopian visions. Utopias such as those by Thomas Moore and William Morris often place a premium upon the welfare state. The society of Less Than Zero, however, is the opposite of ideas of communal ownership found in texts such as Plato’s Republic. The same can be said for its relation to Moore’s visions of public property, free universal education and complete tolerance of other religions. 12

In a similar manner to the paranoia about ‘waves and radiation’ displayed in DeLillo’s equally zeitgeist-defining White Noise, Clay picks up several mentions of ‘waves’ in the lyrics of songs: ‘the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves . . . Some Blondie song comes on and Blair and Kim ask Alana to turn it up . . . Deborah Harry is asking, “Where is my wave”?’ (1, 65). These waves represent the new, unseen levels of reality which govern the mass media and therefore monopolise the day to day experience of teenagers like Clay. They carry the radio and television signals that entrance him and his peers (with the exception of MTV, of course, which is distributed via cable). They induce fear because they are intangible. 13

Taking into account the two song-based epigrams and the Elvis Costello-referencing title, pop music even has a significant pre-narrative orienting function. The use of pop quotes as epigrams, a form traditionally associated with Victorian texts sets Less Than Zero in a very specific cultural sphere. This is a world where general truths are derived from the mass media. The

media is responsible for a form of historical amnesia by replacing the ancient learning conveyed through classical epigrams with the faux mysticism of sixties rockers like Led Zep. 14

Reproduction and replication are popular themes in postmodern literature, see also Jonathan Coe’s novel What A Carve Up (1995) and Hideo Nakata’s movie Ring (1998) 15

Similarly, when Clay awakes to the song ‘Artificial Insemination’ on the radio he is only able to get through the morning, which involves a meeting with his father, by taking coke sold to him by Rip, who will later become a practitioner of artificial insemination in his own sick manner, by capturing and raping a twelve year old girl in his apartment. 16

By the late seventies, most of Fleetwood Mac’s members were Los Angelenos rather than British. 17

The cultural damage caused by obsessions with pop music celebrity is also satirised in Generation X. The yuppie Tobias recounts his ‘pilgramage’ to Jim Morrison’s grave at the Père Lachaise cemetary in Paris: “It was super easy to find. People had spray painted ‘This way to Jimmy’s’ all over the tombstones of all these dead French poets. It was great.” Poor France. (100) The location of the gravestone and the vandalism (including that of Oscar Wilde’s grave, a few hundred yards up the path) are real, just like Ellis’s cultural references. It is a typical demonstration of American hyperreality, an enforcement of cultural hegemony that disregards any sense of history. 18

Less Than Zero is full of the non-appearance of punk rock stars at parties held by Clay’s peers. Kim raises the possibility of a celebrity endorsement in order to compensate for a poor turnout at her second party: ‘We follow her downstairs to where there are only about twelve or thirteen people. Kim tells us that Fear’s supposed to play tonight. She introduces Blair and me to Spit, who’s a friend of the drummer’s’ (70). Towards the end of the novel, Clay’s increased perception of the Californian landscape is highlighted by another namedropping instance from his friends, whose quotidian obsessions he no longer follows: ‘Trent calls me up while Blair and Daniel are over at my house and invites us to a party in Malibu; he mentions something about X dropping by. Blair and Daniel say that it sounds like a good idea and though I really don’t want to go to a party or see Trent all that badly, the day is clear and a ride to Malibu seems like a nice idea’ (139) As is typical of Ellis’s interest in replication, the homogenised nature of consumer society is again enforced through the repetition of a preceding scenario. As at Kim’s place with Fear, this time ‘X is not at the party in Malibu. Neither are too many other people’ (140). This anxiety for celebrity endorsement, to have a personality from the media attend one’s party, is a form of validation. It brings meaning to the perpetual hedonistic cycle (a cycle based upon rock ‘n roll discourses that few can really endure, as the low turnouts indicate). The deferral of this hope across different parties - the stars never turn up - is a classic example of Lacanian desire. The important thing is to keep on desiring, to remain in the structures of the symbolic order by constantly finding something slightly out of reach. 19

Punk has also been depoliticised in both Generation X and American Psycho. In the former Dag identifies the prescribed bohemian codes of his time working in marketing: ‘I’d wear bow ties and listen to alternative rock and slum in the arty part of town [working in front of an] IBM clone surrounded by a sea of Post-It Notes [and] rock band posters ripped off of construction site hoarding boards’ (22-3) In American Psycho Patrick Bateman and his business associates go to a U2 concert and ignore the music in favour of commenting upon the band’s clothes. “The Edge is wearing Armani,” [Courtney] shouts, pointing at the bassist. “That’s not Armani,’ I shout back. “It’s Emporio.” “No,” she shouts. “Armani.” “The grays are too muted and so are the taupes and navies. Definite winged lapels, subtle plaids, polka dots and stripes are Armani. Not Emporio,” I shout, extremely irritated that she doesn’t know this, can’t differentiate, both my hands covering both ears. “There’s a difference. Which one’s The Ledge?”

“The drummer might be The Ledge,” she shouts. “I think I’m not sure. I need a cigarette. […] ” “The drummer is not wearing anything by Armani,” I scream. “Or Emporio for that matter. Nowhere,” “I don’t know which one the drummer is,” she shouts. (1991, 138-9) The Edge is, of course, the guitarist rather than the bassist and Courtney’s inability to even identify the drummer suggests that once punk is entirely eclipsed in the late eighties by arena rockers like U2, the ultimate corporate pop group, its political impetus is incontestably absent. 20

What may appear to be an Amis-style allegorical name is in fact, like all of Ellis’s references, real. Fatburger is a Californian restaurant chain that made its name as ‘the musician’s burger joint’ (www.fatburger.net) 21

Jon Buscall has already written a useful article on deindividuation in Less Than Zero, but his overstated argument about the novel being structured as a music video, and his failure to identify the structural process by which Clay becomes deindividuated requires a reformulation of this argument. 22

The Los Angeles Times declared that ‘Coupland, 29 . . . could teach the 27-year old Ellis a thing or two’ (Abcarian 1991), The Glasgow Herald that ‘Coupland’s dissection of the character of our times is more accurate than the lifestyle-laden novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis’ (Harris 1992) and People magazine that ‘the Xers, as Coupland portrays them, have a dark, self-aware humor not found in Bret Easton Ellis’s disturbing paen to their disaffected brothers and sisters’ (Neil and Matsumoto 1991). 23

A tradition of naming novels after Beatles songs has developed to coincide with the band achieving a ‘beyond pop’ status as figures of worldwide cultural heritage in the late eighties. It began with Japanese author Haruki Murakai’s Norwegian Wood (1987), and has continued with the likes of David Mitchell’s John Lennon-referencing Number9Dream (2000). 24

Somebody born during the post-World War II population surge, circa. 1946-1964 (Anon 2004e) 25

Generally speaking those born in the 1960s and 1970s, from Princess Diana to Britney Spears. Coupland popularised the term, having taken it from a sociology text by Paul Fussell (Anon 2004f) 26

The most grotesque of the exploitative Baby Boomers is found in Less Than Zero however, in the one-scene appearance of the ironically-named ‘Dead’. A sweaty, balding man in his mid-forties, Dead reclines in Bachanalian luxury in a harem of scantily clad young boys and girls: It seems that there’s always a party at Dead’s house and some of the people there, mostly young boys, look at the three of us strangely, probably because Rip and Spin and I aren’t wearing bathing suits. We walk up to Dead, who’s in his midforties, wearing a pair of briefs, lying in a huge pile of pillows, two tan young boys sitting by his side watching HBO, and Dead hands Rip a large envelope. There’s a blond pretty girl in a bikini sitting behind Dead and she’s petting the head of the boy who’s on Dead’s left (116) Dead is at the top of the narcotic food chain in which Rip operates. His influence is pervasive: ‘Dead is always around’ (116). He enforces conformity: Clay and company are looked at strangely for not wearing bathing suits. Significantly, the indoctrination of teenagers into both drug and cable TV culture are presented here as part of the same sequence. 27

In interviews Coupland has also described the Palm Springs of Generation X as possessing a broader dystopian function

as a vision of the future. You have a lopsided geritocracy - 60 percent senior citizens, enforced leisure, and no middle class. It’s like a condensed version of what 2010 could well be like’ (Abcarian 1991). 28

Claire is unable to enjoy visits to Disneyland at the age of twenty-seven, but the zeal of the rest of her family reflects a rather desperate kind of pastiche popular in the nineties zine Hermenaut, which Naomi Klein describes as Going to Disney World to drop acid in full knowledge of how ridiculous and evil it all is and still having a great innocent time, in some almost unconscious, even psychotic way (2000, 78)