Mike Grimshaw
Profile
Mike studied History and Theology at Otago University. His PhD was a revisionist history of the conflict between missionaries and settlers in the New Zealand Wars. After teaching at Victoria University for two years he came to Canterbury in 2000. He is interested in the issues of religion and post-Christian theology in a world experiencing and reassessing postmodernity, especially the issues of religion and contemporary and popular culture. Mike has published on the intersections of religion and cinema, sport, country music, travel, ecotheology and pop culture. He has also co-edited an anthology of New Zealand religious poetry (Random House [NZ] 2002). He is coeditor of …Push. Occasional Papers in Theology and Religion. His current research interests are travel and religion, modernist architecture and theology, issues of a post-theistic imago dei, and neo-orthodoxy in New Zealand in the 1930s.Cultural Pessimism and Rock Criticism
Bret Easton Ellis' Writing (as) Hell
"History is sinking and only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad."
American Psycho
Toward the end of last century, in a fin de siecle yet to be fully registered, catalogued and analysed, cultural pessimism ran as a discordant counter note to a carnivalistic postmodernity. Yet leading the charge was a novelist who himself seemed to embody the success mantras of late twentieth century celebrity. Young, white, privileged, privately educated, a pop culture and media darling in his early twenties, running as part of a brat pack that helped restore the novel as hip, sexually ambivalent, diving nose first into drug culture Brett Easton Ellis seemed to embody all that was deemed as 'the next big thing'. He came across as Media savvy, aloof, disdainful, troubled yet excessive, his pen on the pulse of postmodern urban youth, a cultural critic and brand name junkie-whore who sought to transcribe transgressive thrills for readers either looking to re-read their own lives or experience a hyper-real frisson . It was sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll…perhaps. Because in their curious blend of pop culture sensibility and raging moral outrage, the novels of Bret Easton Ellis are in many ways most reminiscent of the elitist societal criticism of Jose Ortega Y Gasset’s The Revolt of The Masses (1932). For in ‘the heart of darkness’ of Ellis’ vision, are to be found the echoes of the Spanish’s philosopher’s elitist disdain for mass existence and the mass man. According to Rockwell Gray, Ortega Y Gasset’s text, written from a sense of "almost visceral discomfort" is "a cry of distress and doubt".[1] Likewise Ellis’ novels are tales lamenting the triumph of mass man, those who, as Ortega states set ‘no value on themselves’, who ‘feel like everybody else’ -- yet ‘are not concerned’. Ellis writes as one who is deeply concerned with the rise of ‘mass man’, a paradoxical critic of contemporary society who yet appears to give society a vision of itself that it desires. His ‘anti-novel’ novels, with their disinterested, disaffected multiple voices and lack of narrative structure echo Ortega Y Gasset’s critique that with the rise of the masses "there are no longer protagonists; there are only chorus".
This fin de siecle chorus is late Twentieth Century commodity culture singing a bittersweet siren love song to itself. For Ellis’ novels are crammed full of lists, references and commodities that explicitly perpetuate the cultural ennui of late Twentieth Century consumption. The point made by Bataille that the object of desire is "the mirror in which we ourselves are reflected"[2] is repeated time and time again in the ethic of Ellis. We desire that which we consume -- and which in turn consumes us -- because in it we see ourselves in both actual presence and potential actuality. Yet this act of consumption masks a deadly reality, for the violence of consumption is indicative of the violence with which we interact. Consumption is communication according to Bataille; that which breaks through the separation and limits of contemporary existence.[3] This act of consumption as communicative violence reaches its apogee in American Psycho. Patrick Bateman’s obsessive chronicling of his and everyone else’s consumption is indicative of a limited existence that can only be overcome by acts of psychotic, diabolic violence that seek to reduce victims to the level of dehumanised commodities for (at one point, literal) consumption. Yet Ellis, for all his ability to act as cultural chronicler, acts primarily as dissenting voice: as the voice of Agape as opposed to Eros; as the call to fraternity away from self-love; as the one who acts as moralist in times of immorality. For as Ortega noted, the mass-man aspires "…to live without conforming to a moral code… Immoralism has become a common place, and anybody and everybody boasts of practising it".[4]
--Mike Grimshaw, http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=346 [Jan 2005]
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