VAPORWAVE MEGATEXT:
gLAMORAMA By bRET eASTON eLLIS

Written By: Michael Uhall

Published on: Sunday, November 10th, 2024

“If there is anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, it’s that a male model’s life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn’t mean that we too can’t not die…” – Zoolander (2001)

Page one tells you everything you need to know about Victor, protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ underrated and underread 1999 novel Glamorama: “Who the fuck is Moi? […] I have no idea who this Moi is, baby.” Indeed, this is the question around which everything else in the novel turns: Who is Victor Ward? (This question could almost serve as the vaporwave inversion of the same question, in another context, about a certain John Galt…)

On the one hand, the answer to Victor’s question is straightforward. Ward is a male model, the current “It Boy,” and a stupefyingly vacuous denizen of celebrity and fashion culture. Despite his many aspirations (including scoring a role in the then-satirical idea of Flatliners 2, a movie no one needed or wanted in 1998, or one year after we passed through the event horizon of time itself, in 2017, when this movie, unironically, was actually made…), Victor is one hollow man among many.

Art by @Cerulea_dlux

When the novel opens, he is trying to open his own small night club, virtually under the nose of his erstwhile boss, Damien, a nightclub owner and also the romantic partner of Alison Poole, with whom Victor is having a meaningless affair. He is a creature of pure appearances. Indeed, you could say his whole life is a meaningless affair – this is one of the recurrent objections raised by his girlfriend, top supermodel Chloe Byrnes: “You don’t care about things that don’t have anything to do with you” (158). “So you don’t have any lip balm?” Victor replies, entirely in earnest.

On the other hand, Victor Ward is also Victor Johnson, son of the ambitious Senator Johnson, who lowkey finds Victor a disappointment and an embarrassment:

“You’re not a loser, Victor,” Dad sighs back. ‘You just need to, er, find yourself.” He sighs again. “Find – I don’t know – a new you?” “‘A new you’?” I gasp. “Oh my god, Dad, you do a great job of making me feel useless.” “And opening this club tonight makes you feel what?” “Dad, I know, I know – ” “Victor, I just want – ” “/ just want to do something where it’s all mine,” I stress. “Where I’m not… replaceable.” “So do I.” Dad flinches. (79)

But by the end of Glamorama, Victor, in fact, has seemingly been replaced, whether by a Manchurian Candidate version of himself or by some postmodern literary surrogate. At this point, Victor Johnson and Victor Ward quite literally seem to split in two – and this is not a metaphor. Victor Johnson, who supplants the Victor we’ve been following all along, is getting his life together, moving on from whoever Victor Ward is now.

“Goodbye,” this new, improved Victor (or, rather, his replacement) tells Victor on the phone, in one of the novel’s late moments of surreality (476). Meanwhile, Victor Ward, imprisoned in a safehouse in Milan against his will, is trying to get his life back. He fails. Even former intimates, like his sister, fail to recognize him when he sneaks in a phone call. Indeed, his physical execution seems imminent. The lifespan of the husk is over. Ultimately, he is a disposable man, the citizen and then refugee of a disposable culture

In one sense, Glamorama is about Victor’s inability to integrate the real into the play palace of his perceptions. His world exists in an almost purely semiotic register. Hence, the novel’s incredible fixation on listing brands and the names of celebrities, in vast chains of association and depthlessness. Who’s in; who’s out; who’s where; who’s not. Whether they’re even really present at the party is irrelevant. What matters are the invocations and lists themselves, the decorative citational explosions that guild the undead lily of a life lived entirely inside the virtual plaza. These explosions of hyperreal intensity leave behind detritus – like confetti scattered on the sticky floor the morning after a big party, or the dread and irritating “specks” (often interpreted by Victor as mysterious confetti) that continually intrude into the bisexually lit soap bubble of Victor’s sensorium. Welcome to the desert of the real, indeed; the sand gets in everything…

Art by @Uy_que_Paila

So, Victor cannot acknowledge or integrate the real, either because he is so structurally deformed and shallow, or perhaps because he is himself a kind of projection, a cheap hologram, a false self, an escape route posed by some other self. Imagine finding out you are nothing more than a cover story, your personality (or lack thereof) a mere pretext for some deeper, stranger politics, beamed into the virtual plaza from a VIP dimension or some cosmic plane you’ll never be allowed to enter. Indeed, throughout Glamorama, Victor constantly encounters people who mention seeing him in places he wasn’t, at fashion shows and openings he did not attend: in Miami, at the Alfaro show, at Pravda last week. (One recalls a brief scene from Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups [2015], which explores the same themes as Glamorama, but with a rather different trajectory to the narrative… Christian Bale’s character is being robbed, but the thieves are frustrated at the emptiness of his life. It’s an existential joke, or a riddle: What is a life that contains literally nothing even worth stealing?) This never fully, consciously registers for Victor, beyond occasionally irritating him, because he wishes he’d been there instead of his distant doppelganger. No further questions.

Likewise, Victor seems to believe increasingly that events in his life are scripted or staged. This does not alarm him. If anything, it’s a source of strange succor; events have the promise of meaning, perhaps, if they unfold in the sixteen-millimeter shrine. He perceives increasingly the ghostly presence of film crews, intimate conversations with mysterious directors, and other people in the flux of life around him, who appear as characters or “extras.” In part, Victor is incapable of understanding the events of the novel’s plot outside of this framework. Indeed, these events may be inaccessible, structurally occluded, haunting the text itself. After all, within the glamorama, everything is appearance (consider the etymology of “glamour”…). What better framing device, then – or refuge – than to perceive all the happenings of your life as if they’re just part of the movies, if these horrific and terrifying events represent some internal logic rather than the fatal trajectory of a car crash with the Outside?

Ultimately, Victor falls in with a group of nihilistic supermodels who have, for reasons Victor is never fully able to understand, started a vast campaign of stochastic terror and hideously random violence. Their leader, Bobby Hughes, is himself a former It Boy, a male supermodel of incredible charisma, since retired. Victor encounters Bobby’s gang almost (but not actually) inadvertently. After fucking things up in the States, Victor is recruited via skyhook to go to Europe in order to track down an ex-girlfriend, who supposedly has gone missing (she hasn’t). The man who recruits him does not exist. Again, Victor has few questions. Quelle chance!

But the sense of dread in the novel grows and grows. It’s like Victor can see disaster approaching, just out of the corner of his eye. But, since he’s always avoiding it, or in some way unable to register the real, he never focuses on what is happening in –or to-the world around him. As Bobby tells Victor, when Victor asks why Bobby seems to like and trust him: “Because you think the Gaza Strip is a particularly lascivious move an erotic dancer makes […] Because you think the PLO recorded the singles ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ and ‘Evil Woman.’” Also, note how the chapters are always counting down. To what, or whom? Quis est iste qui uenit?

Precisely here Glamorama becomes comprehensible primarily as a vaporwave novel: Victor, denizen (and ultimately victim) of the virtual plaza, encounters the radical exteriority of a world that exceeds the hologrammatic dead mall dimension where his dreams play out. Perhaps, in the end, he’s the only person who ever really lived there. Consider again the etymology of glamour: “1715, glamer, Scottish, ‘magic, enchantment’ (especially in phrase to cast the glamour), a variant of Scottish gramarye ‘magic, enchantment, spell, said to be an alteration of English grammar (q.v.) in a specialized use of that word’s medieval sense of ‘any sort of scholarship, especially occult learning,’ the latter sense attested from c. 1500 in English but said to have been more common in Medieval Latin.”

A glamorama, then, is perhaps an updated term for an illusory space, like a fairy circle, or a virtual machine, running in the void…

Pick up your copy of Glamorama from Penguin Random House here

VAPORWAVE MEGATEXT:
VERMILION SANDS By J.G. Ballard

Written By: Michael Uhall

Published on: Tuesday January 30th, 2024

First released on June 15, 1987, the GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) was invented two years before the Cold War went underground, making it truly an artifact from before the time factories all shut down. A GIF, of course, is an image format that allows for multiple images to be represented in sequence as the file references its own palette, producing (or reproducing) simple animations in repetitive, somewhat static loops. The GIF is the vaporwave artifact par excellence – especially now, in its long afterlife, where image and spring break forever come together as one in a strange and endless ballet under the red desert sun of the real.

As an example of vaporwave literature, J. G. Ballard’s collection of short stories Vermilion Sands (1971) is incomparable. It is also a literary GIF; the entirety of the book could be reconstructed out of wordless GIFs with no aesthetic loss whatsoever. But it is not fundamentally a hybrid object, like Jon Bois’ melancholy, mutating hypertext 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future (2017: “To pass all that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it in a variety of strange ways to suit their new reality”). Unlike Dennis Cooper’s GIF “novel” Zac’s Haunted House (2015: “an experience somewhere between carnival mirror labyrinth, deleted Disney snuff film, and a deep web comic strip by Satan”), which Cooper first created as a specifically visual artifact intended to emphasize intersections, juxtapositions, and loops, Ballard’s stories are resolutely textual.

Or are they?

After all, each story targets a specific media form: sculpture (“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” and “The Singing Statues”), opera and horticulture (“Prima Belladonna”), painting, poetry (“Studio 5, The Stars”), fashion (“Say Goodbye to the Wind”). Each one reflects – no, refracts – how media become entangled in, or perhaps even constitutes, the strange loops of desire and dream that unfolds within and beyond the prison of the human psyche, opening it up and splaying out the psychological strata of all our looping, nested dreamworlds. Recall the horrifying, and horrifyingly suggestive, nature of the libidinal “body,” or landscape of desire, as autopsied by Jean-François Lyotard in his Libidinal Economy (1974): “All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities […]” Much like how the GIF is a “flat” image (even superflat), yet captures both depth and motion traversing the deeps. This is what it means to speak Muybridge, after all. You probably think Stephen Wilhite invented the GIF – and he did, in its current disguise – but it was Eadweard Muybridge who first uncovered the primordial form of the GIF, lurking in the world’s heart like a fossil from the future. Imagine a paleontology of the future, an idealistic morphology of media artifacts, waltzing backward through time, approaching the event horizon of the perpetual now, the long 2016… Vaporwave literatures invert media archaeologies.

Back to Vermilion Sands: “No one ever comes to Vermilion Sands now, and I suppose there are few people who have ever heard of it.” So, what even is Vermilion Sands? It’s a “bizarre, sandbound resort with its lethargy, beach fatigue and shifting perspectives.” It’s a dream archipelago of abandoned villas, awash in crimson sands from the environing desert, shadowed by flying albino and purplish sand rays, “wheeling above the rock spires in the blood-red air.” It’s the posttraumatic landscape of the arts, all of which operate like so many ghostly robots, totally burned out but still fueled by vaporous promises. Vermilion Sands is a hologram: it looks a lot like things happened there, but remains peopled by dead souls and the dying stars, fragments of subjects from a Golden Age that never existed. Vermilion Sands is the primal scene of the end of history, casting neon shadows out of time.

“The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista” (originally 1962): “All the houses in Vermilion Sands were psychotropic.” In other words, the architecture is perpetually plastic undeath, adapting to the drives, moods, and quirks of the occupants and always carrying the psychic impress of former occupants inside its mutable and rippling structuration. Imagine being haunted by abstract moods; imagine living inside an undersea fan, gently swaying. “Living in one was like living in someone else’s brain.” Howard Talbot and his new wife, Fay, buy a new house at 99 Stellavista. All the perennials are polyurethane. There’s a heart-shaped swimming pool in the foyer. Through its glass bottom, you can see the garage, the finned car parked below “like a coloured whale asleep on the ocean bed.” Its previous owner, Gloria Tremayne, had been a beautiful, diaphanous woman “with a powerful and oblique personality,” a movie star who murdered her husband to end his abuse. Ironically, Howard had been the assistant to Gloria’s lawyer at the trial, ten years ago. “The water was motionless, a transparent block of condensed time.” But the house remains haunted by Gloria’s psychic residues, which enfold Howard like a mass of invisible tentacles; the house grows jealous of Fay and tries to murder her, too. Howard becomes increasingly entranced, all wrapped up in the fossilized contours of this doomed movie star’s emotional echoes. The house, “like an anguished squid,” flexes and changes color. “The place must have been insane. If you ask me it needs a psychiatrist to straighten it out.” But Howard can’t break the spell of its psychoactive past; the house beckons him into its plasticine embrace. Fay’s long gone. You could give everything to the past which ensorcels you. But for now, at least, the house is turned off, and yet I know that I shall have to switch the house on again” (this always happens in Ballard)

“The Screen Game” (originally 1963): “Soon we were overrunning what appeared to be the edge of an immense chessboard of black and white marble squares. More statues appeared, some buried to their heads, others toppled from their plinths by the drifting dunes […] the whole landscape was compounded of illusion, the hulks of fabulous dreams drifting across it like derelict galleons.” Paul Golding, an artist, returns to the scene of the failed Orpheus Productions flick, Aphrodite 80. Like many of the artists who encounter (or haunt) the desolate, lush fastness of Vermilion Sands, Paul had been experiencing a “creative pause” (in his case, “showing signs of beach fatigue”). Specifically, Paul has been employed to paint numerous screens that would serve as the backdrop to the obscure psychodrama of this film, staged as a comeback for the dishy, mentally unwell actress Emerelda Garland, a ghostly Venus… “Decorated with abstract symbols, these would serve as backdrops to the action, and form a fragmentary labyrinth winding in and out of the hills and dunes.” Paul meets Emerelda multiple times; she is attended by jeweled insects who seem to be expressions of her underlying psychic state, or at least somehow under her control: “I felt that I had strayed across the margins of a dream, on to an internal landscape of the psyche projected upon the sun-filled terraces around me.” The director, Charles Van Stratten, reveals to Paul the purpose of the film’s production: “Its sole purpose is therapeutic […] I’m convinced the camera crews and sets will help to carry her back to the past […] It’s the only way left, a sort of total psychodrama […] With luck, the screens will lead her out into the rest of this synthetic landscape. After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she’ll cease to fear it.” Note that Ballard writes “The Screen Game” two years before John Fowles published The Magus (and both get echoed in The Prisoner). The grand psychoanalytic ritual (or is it a trap?) goes awry, of course: Charles Van Stratten, a petty tyrant, is swarmed to death by Emerelda’s “armada of jeweled insects.” The production ends, and only years later does Paul return to the deserted villa, to the ruins of the backdrops he had painted. “The whole question of the illusions which exist in any relationship to make it workable, and of the barriers we willingly accept to hide ourselves from each other: How much reality can we stand?”

“Cry Hope, Cry Fury!” (1967): “Hunting for rays, I sometimes found myself carried miles across the desert, beyond sight of the coastal reefs that presided like eroded deities over the hierarchies of sand and wind. I would drive on after a fleeing school of rays, firing the darts into the overheated air and losing myself in an abstract landscape composed of the flying rays, the undulating dunes, and the triangles of the sails. Out of these materials, the barest geometry of time and space, came the bizarre figures of Hope Cunard and her retinue, like illusions born of that sea of dreams.” Note: “I was twenty miles from the coast and my only supplies were a vacuum flask of iced Martini in the sail locker.” After crashing his yacht, Robert Melville is taken in by the mysterious Hope, recuperating under her care at the isolated Lizard Key: “both villa and island had sprung from some mineral fantasy of the desert.” Hope is a painter, and Robert becomes her model as he recovers. But these paintings are psychogenic, or perhaps even mutagenic… “Given a few hours each day, the photosensitive pigments would anneal themselves into the contours of a likeness […] Little did we realize what nightmare fish would swim to the surface of these mirrors.” The paintings, somehow, become haunted by another figure; in the background of this endless, hazy misadventure, a disconcerting figure stalks Lizard Key. Hope has a ghost, it seems. A former lover, supposedly murdered, but who survived the attempt. “I tried to explain why Hope had shot at him, this last attempt to break through the illusions multiplying around her and reach some kind of reality.” Libidinal fog embraces everything, heightening the hyperreality of these starkly blurry images, like a Gerhard Richter painting in drag.

You’re getting the vibes: a man, typically some kind of artist or functionary, ensorcelled by his own visionary encounter with a doomed icon of desire from the past, who exists as a real or virtual specter haunting some media form or another. The landscape is decadent, though not depraved; time no longer really exists in Vermilion Sands. Recurrent throughout the stories is the intimation of a “Recess,” “that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years.” When the Recess ended, it “started up all the clocks and kept us busy working off the lost time […]” This is the endlessly looping fever dream of Vermilion Sands: imagine the red desert, crisscrossed by the fading yet perversely resilient libidinal intensities of a faintly posthuman class. Ivory rays glitter in the skies above you. You board the shining silver yacht that will take you into the deeper wastes. In the shifting sands, you will find mysterious artifacts, treasures of the past, strange remnants of a whole culture mummified by the omnipresent heat. Here, time is a painting of a stopped clock…

My edition came with 3D glasses included. But the glasses are cursed. Or perhaps they emancipate one’s vision. Wearing them, you see in Ballardian all the time now. All I know is I can’t take them off anymore. These mallwave mirrorshades have become adhered to the very structure of my face, like a Cronenbergian artifact. I think its fused with the bones of my skull. I can feel them restructuring my psyche, penetrating the distant recesses of my desire, reworking the primordial sludge of self into strange new chromium sculptures. Even if I could, I’d no longer remove them.