Consumerism and Cosmopolitanism in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers

Abstract

Rooted in the ancient philosophy of the Cynics and Stoics, cosmopolitanism is essentially an ethical notion, which insists on moral obligations and compassion towards others, regardless of racial, national, class, or other affiliations. However, in the late twentieth century, political and theoretical debates—generated by specific situations and issues—complicated the ethical notion of cosmopolitanism with more practical political and sociocultural connotations, melding it with globalisation, anticolonialism, and multiculturalism. Cosmopolitanism has also been associated with the global elite. The super-rich are the protagonists in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Informers, a collection of interrelated short stories, set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. The sprawling, featureless city offers hollow enjoyment and the illusion of eternal youth through the consumption of commodities that include not only objects and entertainment but also human beings, who are commodified by means of their eagerness to experience more pleasure. Drawing on the ethical and the culturalist concept of cosmopolitanism and Baudrillard’s theory of the consumer society and simulation, this paper argues that Ellis’s privileged white Angelinos, immersed in a multicultural environment and global consumerism, are profoundly alienated not only from the racially other human beings they encounter, but also from family, friends, and even themselves. Their progressive debasement is fuelled by drug abuse, excessive mass media consumption, promiscuity, and impulsive behaviour—all linked to a way of life that is governed by consumerist values, such as the cult of the body, the adulation of youth, obsession with fame, and the pursuit of sensual pleasure. Culturalist cosmopolitanism is shown to be an evolved version of consumerism, as it entails the consumption of the racial and sexual Other as a means of self-aggrandisement and the assertion of the cultural hegemony of white American masculinity. This paper concludes that culturalist cosmopolitanism as well as consumerism are fundamentally hostile to ethical cosmopolitanism.