1 research outputs found
Violence as content : Patrick Bateman, Michael De Santa and late-capitalist culture in American Psycho and Grand Theft Auto V
No full textThe aim of the study is to examine how violence is represented in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Rockstar Game’s Grand Theft Auto V in relation to late-capitalist culture. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism and late capitalism, together with Linda Hutcheon’s account of postmodern aesthetics, the essay analyses the protagonists Patrick Bateman and Michael De Santa as figures shaped by environments saturated with consumption, media and spectacle. Previous research by Leigh Claire La Berge and Richard Godden on American Psycho, and by John Wills and Kyle Moody on GTA V, is used to situate the texts in debates on finance, masculinity and the American Dream. The study argues that both works depict violence not as a clear break from everyday life but as something embedded in ordinary routines of work, leisure and entertainment, and that their different forms as a first-person novel and an open-world video game affect how this violence is experienced and understood. It concludes that in both cases legal and moral consequences are left uncertain and that the fictional world actively absorbs and keeps low-consequence violence rather than resolve it clearly. This matters for the investigation since it shows how both texts present late-capitalist culture as system in which violence can be repeated, consumed and enjoyed without leading to a stable or legal closure
