Lunar Park: From Ashes To Ashes

Lunar Park (2005) is a fictional work that is seemingly passing for memoir; it tells the story of Bret Easton Ellis's fame and family, and takes place between memories of Los Angeles and his new home in a suburban town just outside of New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Although the reader initially assumes the narrator Bret to be the author, it is soon revealed that he is in fact Ellis's fictionalized version, a magnification of the author's own imagined identity (who I will be referring to as 'Bret'). The novel begins with a list of Ellis's literary works, beginning with Less than Zero, written in 1985, and moving onto The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994) and Glamorama (1998), all of which are satires of American consumerism, celebrity culture and which make a statement about the desensitization to violence and human emotion. Central, is the way in which this depthless environment affects individuals; the characters (which recur throughout all of Ellis's novels) are detached from one another, their families and their own desires and emotions. His writing is accordingly affectless, sarcastic, witty and dry, leaving the reader as distanced from the characters as the characters are from one another. While Lunar Park does not completely deviate from this pattern, it is set apart from the start because the author himself is (purportedly) the protagonist. Although we soon discover that Bret is only a parody of Ellis, by invoking his own name, Ellis creates a bridge between himself and the reader that brings her closer to the author. Adam Phillips also acknowledges the novel's distinction stating that, 'in Lunar Park many plain things are said plainly, with no jokes attached' (Phillips 2005: 20). Moreover, towards the end of the novel, the writing takes on poetic prose that reinforces a sense of seriousness in this novel that is different from the others, which I will be returning to later in this article. However, for now, I note that this seriousness is partially related to the protagonist's trauma, which is represented through ambiguous figures such as Bret's daughter's doll and Patrick Bateman (the serial killer from Ellis's novel American Psycho). Here, the reader is placed in a mindset similar to Bret's, thus identifying with his traumatic state of delusion. For instance, the reader is as perplexed as the protagonist when a man pretending to be a detective tells Bret that there is a Patrick Bateman impersonator, only to reveal that the detective himself is the murderer, who is mimicking the detective character in American Psycho. Thus, in Lunar Park the reader is left questioning whether events are imaginary or real, and whether this distinction matters. I suggest that by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Ellis gestures towards a current American culture that is predicated upon fabrications that pose as fact. He paints a landscape of a twenty-first-century America that masks its trauma through ruptured, excessive and surface fictions. Since this notion of narrative obscuring trauma is central to the concept of American Exceptionalism, I want to briefly provide a platform for this thought, turning to Donald Pease for clarification: The traumatizing images that insist within American exceptionalism's transgenerational fantasy reach back to events that accompanied the nation's founding - Indian massacres, the death worlds of the slave plantations, the lynchings and ethnic cleansing of migrant populations - and project themselves into the present as images that confront historical narratives with what violates their conditions of representation. (Pease 2009: 38) Here, Pease illuminates the origins of this fantasied nation, suggesting that the country was founded through a double or split - trauma and the strain for a better life - which exists and has manifested into today's ideology. It is a fantasy, an unreachable ideal of an exceptional nation that accommodates the current denial of history. Pease continues, 'Exceptionalism activated a twotiered process dividing the manifest organization of the U.S. role in the world with the latent fantasy whereby U.S. citizens imagined themselves as practicing nationalism through the disavowal of imperialism' (Pease 2009: 23).1 America uses violence under the false pretence of bringing freedom and democracy; the American ideal is structured through a denial of its traumatic underbelly. As Deborah Madsen puts it, 'Exceptionalism has always offered a mythological refuge from the chaos of history and the uncertainty of life' (Madsen 1998: 166). At stake however, is that disavowal does not erase the past but glosses over it through a coating that continually cracks. The past cannot be forgotten, and both despite and because of this repression, it still bears profound affects. It is the events of September 11, 2001, that provide a recent and clear example of this disavowal or split, revealing not only its persistence, but also its importance: disavowing the trauma in a particular way has caused various detrimental results, such as the 'legal use of global violence' (Pease 2009: 182). In this article, I will look at how Ellis's novel Lunar Park confronts the importance of American repression by hinting towards the underlying destruction caused by September 11 and dramatizing how this kind of disavowal plays out in American relationships, families, landscapes and his own personal identity. To begin, I shall briefly go back to American Psycho (which is present in Lunar Park), to suggest that it also, in different ways, represents that split: the unreachable American fictional ideal and the traumas behind it. The novel, about a 'world we all recognize but do not wish to face [. which has] a head-on collision with America's greatest dream- and its worst nightmare' (Back Cover), I contend, is indicative of 'American exceptionalism [. which] demanded that U.S. citizens perform the disavowal of American imperialism as the way to continue to feel good about their national identity' (Pease 2009: 23). The novel chronicles the life of Patrick Bateman, who is haunted by both the desire to be the model American (the epitome of capitalism and attractiveness) and the desire to kill. Written through excessive descri ptions of consumer products and murders, it is as though by layering meaningless details, the protagonist can further deny the roots of the problem. In so doing, Bateman's violence, like that which America represses through the American dream, multiplies, only to be revealed in bloody outbursts. As Richard Godden writes of the novel: Ellis stumbles from a study of the fetish (as an affective and semi-secretive device for dealing with loss); through an attendant anxiety over what has been lost; and so, via immanent allegories, towards a critique of the workings of fictitious capital within the US economy during the 1980s. (Godden 2011: 863) It is Lunar Park, however, that revives this fetish in a less allegorical, more direct fashion. Opening, not closing, with a collapse between narrative and reality, the book is foregrounded by that which discreetly underlies the former. Furthermore, American Psycho depicts the fantasy upon which American capitalism has been structured only through Bateman and his workplace, whereas Lunar Park extends this to the protagonist's social circle, family, the representation of media and through a fissured landscape, pointing towards the wider implications of this split and how it continues to haunt Bret. Furthermore, in Lunar Park, there are murders being carried out by a Patrick Bateman impersonator. Thus, the Bateman character in Lunar Park, I contend, stands for the disavowal - both personal and national - that haunts Ellis in the novel. In this way, Lunar Park exposes the inescapability of trauma: he, like America, cannot erase a painful history. Ellis's fictionalized image as an individual, family member and author, through the figure of Bret, reveals a destructive self-identity predicated upon its surroundings - upon a nation structured through disavowal. In a Baudrillardian fashion, America is pictured as flat and illusory, as though the denial upon which it is founded has turned into a one-dimensional landscape that blurs the social and personal distinctions between screen and reality. America 'was there before the screen was invented but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen' (Baudrillard 2010: 57). Here, the nation functions through negation - images only reflect other images - calling forth that disavowal central to American Exceptionalism. However unlike Baudrillard, Ellis not only states this but also brings it life, emphasizing its affects, at how screen and life are interchangeable. When American Psycho was released, Bret confides, it was scorned and refused, and in the process, his identity was conflated with its protagonist: 'I was vilified even though the book sold millions of copies and raised the fame quotient so high that my name became as recognizable as most movie stars or athletes. I was taken seriously. I was a joke' (Ellis 2005: 12). Here, screen, text and reality collapse: Bret's character is inseparable from his society (which paradoxically takes celebrities seriously, as a joke); and his writing is both comedic and to be taken seriously (which I will later develop). Additionally depicted here is how America's split between trauma and the ideal plays out in the day-to-day: Bret is idolized precisely because he is a 'villain'. America's fictions, then, like Ellis's, are necessarily fuelled by violence. It is Lunar Park that begins to unveil the kind of violence Pease discusses that is planted within Bret's identity as an individual and writer. He writes: American Psycho 'wanted to be written by someone else. It wrote itself, and didn't care how I felt about it [.] I was repulsed by this creation and wanted to take no credit for it - Patrick Bateman wanted the credit' (Ellis 2005: 13). Bret's other - the fictionalized American ideal - is painfully writing itself upon the narrator through his texts, leaving Bret lost in a shallow identity. This plays out from the novel's opening, as Bret is figured as a culturally constructed star whose identity and writing is intertwined with a notably postmodern America. Bret, writes Ellis, became a member of what was called the literary Brat Pack (reflecting Ellis's real life), which 'was essentially a media-made Lunar Park 213 package: all fake flesh and punk and menace. It consisted of a small, trendy group of successful writers and editors, all under thirty, who simply hung out together at night [.] according to Le Monde, "American fiction had never been this young and sexy"' (Ellis 2005: 8). Here the postmodern condition is actualized: literary depthlessness is enfolded into social surfaces. This echoes Fredric Jameson's theory that the postmodern condition can leave an individual unable to stabilize the meaningfulness of herself within the world around her. According to Jameson, a sense of united individuality is fractured, as 'reality, and our experience of it, are discontinuous with each other' (Jameson 2008: 109). Ellis depicts this both in style and content, as his ruptured fictional books have seeped into the real. Less than Zero (which Bret states was primarily mistaken for an autobiography) concerns parties, drugs and empty sexual relationships, resembling the Brat Pack that followed its release, suggesting an entanglement between the book and social/individual realities. Thus, literary postmodernity has been actualized, as Bret's authenticity is dictated and ruptured by his social reception. Bret is built through a culturally constructed illusion that obscures what lies beneath, that 'state of fantasy' to which Pease refers. This contextual fragmentation has also affected Bret's personal relationships, including that with his son Robby (who I will later be suggesting signifies Bret's own lost past). In one scene, Robby was staring at Nintendo Power Monthly while slipping on a pair of Puma socks and then he was tying his Nikes. The TV was turned to the WB channel and as I stood in the doorway I watched a raunchy cartoon zap into one of the many commercials pitched toward the kids - one in a series of ads that I hated. A scruffy, gorgeous youth, hands on his skinny- boy hips, stared defiantly into the camera and made the following statements in a blank voice, subtitled beneath him in a blood red cross: 'Why haven't you become a millionaire yet?'(Ellis 2005: 89) This passage calls forth Jameson's notion of schizophrenia: 'an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence' (Jameson 2008: 549). Aligned with this definition, the passage above depicts Robby and Bret as being disconnected through a ruptured context (a series of 'blank voices' ads and commercials) and in their relationship (communication between Bret and his son is mediated by the onslaught of screen images). However Ellis does more here than describe this postmodern condition: he points towards the importance of what is being repressed. Beneath the cartoon images rests a bloody truth; beneath the American fantasy lays destruction. Ellis' descri ptions here and throughout the novel portray this Jamesonian schizophrenia, wherein an 'intensification of our normally humdrum and familiar surroundings' is underlined by a 'felt as loss', an 'unreality' (Jameson 2008: 550), in a satirical, yet ominous tone. Bret explains that he lived in an environment, 'that allowed the three-day smack binge with the upcoming supermodel in the four-star hotel. It was a world that was quickly becoming a place with no boundaries' (Ellis 2005: 10): the intensification of everyday life is quickly becoming more shattered, emptied and erased. This sense is further expressed through the writing itself, as Ellis - through exaggeration, irony and lavishness - playfully insinuates that these contexts are illusory and prescribed. What the inextricability between his writing, identity and social media emphasizes is the power of textual affect. Bret's book has written him (as he explained of American Psycho) while he is writing it; just as the American 'fantasy state' has written the individuals who are continuing to write it. However in Lunar Park, Bret begins to write himself out of this repetitive fantasy. Although primarily somewhat linear, the novel progressively ruptures itself in tune with Bret's own fissured notion of self. By inflicting his own rupture through writing instead of passively letting it fracture him, is Bret distancing himself from the narrative, enabling him to loosely string together descri ptions of landscapes and society, characterizing each person as a depthless cliché? Though Ellis's America reflects Baudrillard's account, Baudrillard takes a notably European perspective. Bret, while he has perspective enough to write this world, is simultaneously enmeshed within it, generating an uncanny doubling effect. Like Ellis, Baudrillard is interested in how culture and society are affected by technology, suggesting that social reality has been supplanted with signs and representations, concepts discussed through the term 'simulacra'. According to Baudrillard, '(1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. (2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. (3) It masks the absence of a basic reality. (4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum' (Baudrillard 2008: 423). 'Simulacra', then, like the 'state fantasy', is formed in relation to what it attempts to hide. For Baudrillard, experience has been dramatically altered and reconfigured, shorn of its supposed semantic grounding, existing within realms of simulation that are disconnected from what we call the real. Following Baudrillard, Ellis points towards an American 'world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning'; Ellis's America is 'dreamed up and fractured and postmodern' (Ellis 2005: 74). This fragile and flat facade outlined by Ellis and Baudrillard rests just atop an empty promise, a dormant void, which begins to slowly crack throughout Lunar Park, finally exploding into ashes towards the end, in what I suggest is a metaphor for the destruction of the Twin Towers. Continued...