The American Nightmare: Hyperreality and Loss of Identity in American Psycho and Escape from Tomorrow

The renowned French philosopher and cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, creates and defines the term “hyperreality” as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” Utilizing this definition, this thesis analyzes the text and film versions of Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial postmodern classic, American Psycho, in conjunction with the anti-“Disneyfication” independent film, Escape from Tomorrow, as complex examples in fiction of the excess and ultimate consequences of American materialism that has developed since the 1991 publication of Ellis’s novel about the over-indulgent “yuppie” culture of the 1980’s. I argue that the main consequence of the practice of blind belief in the endurance and reliability of material signifiers for the protagonists of these works, Patrick Bateman and Jim White respectively, is the sacrifice of their identity to the machine of homogenized corporate capitalism.