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13.1 | 2016 (home.html)

Inside Doesnt Matter: Consumerisms Serial

Annihilation of Women and the Self in American
Psycho
Reagan Ross (authors13_1.html#Ross)

Thatconsumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary,

mainly concentrates on the superfluities of lifeharbors 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 isnt 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 all-consuming 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

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