Word: victors
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Altered photos of Victor supposedly at various parties and photo shoots appear, and he is threatened with edited photos of him ostensibly in the act of murder. It's the ultimate payback for someone obsessed with looks. This 'real truth' is less shallow than the original world of glitz we are used to--and at the same time purely superficial...
...masturbatory lists of famous names--"Brooke Shields; John Stamos, Stephanie Seymour, Jenny Shimuzu [sic]". And so many brand names make an appearance, from Alaia to Prada to Yohji Yamamoto, you'd think he had a product placement contract. It seems to be Ellis' convenient shorthand for character sketches. When Victor undergoes a transformation to a law student, we know he is different because he now wears a Brooks Brothers suit and drinks Diet Coke. London and Paris become nothing more than a different collection of recognizable proper nouns (Notting Hill and Irvine Welsh in the first case; Chez Georges...
...comes across like an effort to give a soundtrack to the entire book. Perhaps this is all a parody of how celebrities or people in general think in the modern world, but surely the point could be made with less. As it stands, all the names merely detract from Victor's troubles...
...Still, Victor's sense of terror in being unable to distinguish the true from the false is unmistakable. The world of celebrity in Glamorama really is inescapable, not just because Victor is too shallow to comprehend anything beyond it, but because everything--from the public spheres of politics and religion to the private sphere of sex--is part of this world. The plot twists more often than Chubby Checker on speed. Reality alternates with the constructed so often that the constructed becomes real: "everything is altered... everyone will believe this". Even the novel itself borrows Jay McInerney's Alison Poole...
Glamorama is a book that reads like a movie, and its constant references to Victor's life being filmed ("I think the look they exchange is over-done; the director, surprisingly, does not") without any specific motive is a tidy commentary on the creeping increase of observation. After all, when we put down the book, we can return to the 'real' world and watch When Animals Attack and Cops on prime time television...