I first read Bret Easton Ellis’s 1998 novel Glamorama as a college student in New York City. It was a decade old by then, and I thought it already felt dated, what with all the supermodels and pagers and nightclubs. But this summer, I picked it up again on a whim. This time, I had the opposite reaction: I was struck by how prescient it seemed in our era of shallow politics, hot criminals, and trivial TikTok feeds. Exploring the way superficiality can become a vehicle for horror, it is very much a novel for our times.
The story follows Victor Ward, a vacuous and handsome male model swanning about Nineties Manhattan. Victor’s world revolves around the most inane concerns possible: clubs, paparazzi, celebrities. But soon, weird things start happening. People keep telling Victor they’ve seen him in places he hasn’t been: a hotel in Miami, a Calvin Klein show. Victor is offered an unusual new job: finding a girl he went to college with who has supposedly disappeared in London. He’s booked into a first-class cabin on the QE2, and here the narrative starts to veer sharply from the aimless frivolity of the opening sections.
In London, Victor finds the girl, another model. He falls in with her group of roommates, also all models. Victor is thrilled to be going to such cool parties with such hot people, blinded by their good looks and designer clothes. But it soon turns out these models are terrorists. Their cover is beauty and fame, and their crimes are violent and gruesome. On a party tour of Paris, Victor is blackmailed to stay with the cell, closely controlled by its leader, the supermodel Bobby Hughes, who “had a set of breathtaking abdominals before anyone was really paying attention to the torso, and he was probably the major force in starting that craze”. Under Bobby’s leadership, the group pulls off a series of major attacks all while air-kissing their way around the glitzy Paris fashion world. Everyone is being watched, everything is being filmed, people aren’t who they say they are, and Victor’s reality collapses in on itself, conspiracies layering and deepening.
The actual goals of the model-terrorists are never explained, and they aren’t the point. The spectacle is. The first order of business is aesthetics. During a bombing in Paris, Victor thinks: “It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.”
Yet Victor’s conscience haunts him. He tells Bobby he doesn’t want to be involved, that he’s not political. “Everyone is, Victor,” Bobby tells him. “It’s something you can’t help.” Bobby tells Victor he trusts him precisely because of his shallowness: “Because you think that the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes. Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman’.” Stupidity has made Victor vulnerable, and ultimately dangerous. People who are political, who do have an agenda, have taken advantage of Victor because he’s distracted by surface glitz.
There are many more potential Victors out there today. In Glamorama, the allure of beauty stupefies people, turning them into the pawns of those who know how to manipulate it. The same is true on the internet, which has provided an incredibly powerful tool for politicisation, even radicalisation, cloaked in soft-focus lifestyle content or in quasi-ironic memes. It’s all too easy to be misled by a pretty face — or a fine set of abdominals.
It is now commonplace for dead-serious political ideas, even extreme ones, to filter into the mainstream on the basis of aesthetics alone. The “Trump Gaza” AI video that depicted the territory as a glamorous beach resort, which went viral when the President himself shared it, was meant as “satire” according to its creator. But in Trump’s hands it became a tool to normalise the idea of a full takeover of Gaza. The puerile imagery of belly dancers and golden statues sanitised the sobering reality of what this takeover would mean.
The Right has long understood the importance of looks. Roger Ailes used to evaluate potential Fox News hosts by watching them on mute. Trump’s career can be seen as a large-scale experiment in how far one can get in politics by putting image first. More so than any recent president, Trump has generated an instantly recognisable aesthetic, turning his agenda into an easily consumable visual brand. His movement is adept at using the internet’s visual language to promote his agenda through imagery that elides its gravity — one example is the Studio Ghibli-style AI cartoon of a crying Dominican woman being arrested by ICE, which the White House tweeted this spring. In sneering at his unsubtle tastes for glitz and gold, Trump’s opponents have missed that these tastes are what many Americans find aspirational, even beautiful.
The pull of beauty — of what we most want to look at — has come to determine in many cases which news events capture the public imagination, and which don’t. Aesthetically appealing images get attention, and attention is today’s most valuable asset. Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was a particularly cinematic recent example, optimised to go viral. From the first grainy surveillance video, showing a peek of Mangione’s chiseled jawline, the internet was hooked. It’s true that Mangione’s story tapped into a deep well of dissatisfaction with American healthcare, but I’m not sure he would have become a beloved online figure if he didn’t happen to be good-looking.
It seems our culture can’t resist a handsome criminal. Jeremy Meeks, the “hot felon” whose mugshot for gun charges went viral in 2014, parlayed his fame into a modelling career after getting out of prison, walking in fashion week shows in Milan and New York. He now has nearly 1.5 million followers on Instagram. Even fictional killers can be influencers these days if they have the look: Ellis’s better-known protagonist, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, has recently inspired a cologne and a namesake Manhattan cocktail bar — on top of a wealth of memes.
While Patrick Bateman channels the nihilism of 4chan, Victor Ward embodies the insidious triviality of TikTok. In Glamorama, Ellis captured the feeling of scrolling through a social media feed long before such a thing existed: a barrage of decontextualised images, a flurry of brands and people and eventually ideologies. If the novel had been written today, Victor’s journey would take place somewhere in the endless scroll.
Just as Victor is sucked into a dark reality through his unquestioning participation in a culture of images, many people nowadays find themselves funnelled into various ideological corners by what seems at first to be innocuous content tailored to their interests. Motherhood accounts are full of gauzy day-in-the-life videos that eventually turn out to be promoting free birth or Biblical submission to your husband. Men seeking lifestyle hacks find themselves swept up in the manosphere. People can and do become indoctrinated without realising it, drawn in by an attractive veneer. “We’ll slide down the surface of things,” Victor often thinks in Glamorama.
The models in Glamorama understand that images define reality, and not the other way around. In a 1999 interview on Charlie Rose’s show, Ellis said he chose the fashion world as the setting for his story because “where would these terrorists want to unleash this conspiracy where no one else would look for it?… They’d do it in a world where image is truth, where surface is truth.” The terrorists operate from within a “beauty culture” that “feasts on insecurity” and “makes us act in ways I don’t think we normally would act”, Ellis said.
Today, beauty culture is even more pervasive than in the Nineties. The question is: how far will we go to keep up with it? “The better you look, the more you see,” is Victor’s catchphrase — and it takes on an increasingly sinister tone as the novel goes on. In Glamorama, beauty is a trap, a smokescreen that dulls our reason. It is a warning for the image-saturated world we live in.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Rosie Gray
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://unherd.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
