"Inside Doesn’t Matter": Consumerism’s Serial Annihilation of Women and the Self in American Psycho

That…consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life…harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption.- (Arendt, 1958: 133) Perhaps no film more radically reveals the "serial killer" (cannibalistic) nature of consumerism than American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron).The implications of this disturbing "reality" are cataclysmically far reaching: The end of the world may not come from some tangible material catastrophe (at least insofar as it isn't a corollary of this dehumanization process); rather, more insidiously, it may come via a psychological de-humanization process whereby we literally lose our humanity from the inside out.To understand this development, the film didactically reveals an allconsuming consumption fixation that begins with a food fetish but then is extended to the consumption of women in particular, Others in general, and, most disturbingly -and informing the first two -the "self."The Political Didactic Before I discuss this film, I want to defend the importance of the popular political film (and I would strongly argue that American Psycho is one of the most radical political films ever to come out of Hollywood as I will show in this paper).Indeed, I would argue that the progressive (and subversive) potential of popular cinema in general is substantial.I have argued elsewhere that "popular" films in particular are important as a first step towards breaking free of the commodified and reified chains that keep mass audiences in place.[1]One cannot drag people kicking and screaming into the de-reified air of engagement with the dominant social order; rather, one must do so through a series of steps, the first step being that which they can most relate to, the "popular."More particularly, the oppositional possibilities of popular cinema reside in what I have called the "political didactic."In present times, the neglected notion of the didactic in aesthetics has been generally seen as a devaluing of art.However, in the postmodern moment, when the norm is the opposite of the didactic -the decentered (displaced, fragmented) and reified subject -the didactic potentially grounds the subject back to a more coalesced perspective of the current moment.Fredric Jameson has suggested something similar in his work.He has said that we need an aesthetic that allows for "the reinvention of possibilities of cognition and perception [and] that allow social phenomena once again to become transparent, as moments of the struggle between classes" (1977: 212).Jameson has come back to this need for "transparency" repeatedly in his work on the postmodern.Indeed, in his influential concept "cognitive mapping," Jameson posits a kind of aesthetic application with a "deeply pedagogical function [that] teaches us something about what would be involved in positioning ourselves in the world" (Wegner, 2009: 167)."While I do not suggest that "Inside Doesn't Matter": Consumerism' s Serial Annihilation of Women and the Self in American Psycho Reagan Ross Reagan Ross fast capitalism Volume 13 • Issue 1 • 2016"popular cinema" can do this, I do suggest that popular cinema can serve a critical function in its didactic mode: as a first step to a break from a reified and commodified existence.I will also argue that while it is true that popular, mainstream films mostly only offer us the symptoms of a commodifying and reifying capitalism, that may be enough, at least for those first few steps I mentioned above.The seemingly sedimented belief that only texts from the margins can usefully awaken people to their reified existence doesn't take into consideration the incredibly powerful hegemonizing influences of global capitalism.It is time to recognize that we can't begin at the margins and hope to bring the margins to the center.That strategy has merely kept progressive ideas where the dominant social order wants them, at the margin.No, we have to re-strategize, working from the center out, bringing people to the margin (and thus bringing the margin to the center).We begin to do that, by gaining a foothold in the mind of the reified viewer.To further attest to this postmodern shift in the oppositional potentialities of popular cinema, I offer another angle to this debate.In contradistinction to the modernist approach of the post-'68 French film groups (journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma and Cinétheque, filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, and organizations such as the Dziga Vertov group), who saw the political and the oppositional more in terms of an avant-gardist approach -as a way of getting "outside" the dominant mode of the social order -I suggest the necessity of seeing an oppositional aesthetic that is only possible from the "inside."That is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it in their important text Empire:We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics.It is better both theoretically and practically to enter the terrain of Empire and confront its homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity, grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude (2000: 46). Key Differences between Novel and FilmI want to also first say something about the adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis' notorious novel of the same