Avatar and How We Consume or Fail to Consume a Movie

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 09, 2015

Avatar was a visual spectacle that captured the hearts and minds of millions of people and then just went away.  Why?  Avatar was about a paraplegic former marine who was brought into negotiate the relocation of an alien species.  His twin brother died so he was asked to replace him as a Na’vi human hybrid called an “Avatar” in order to explore a forested habitable moon orbiting a massive planet composed mainly of gas.

It’s the year 2154 and Jake Sully is assigned to learn from the indigenous alien species, the Na’vi, learning their customs and beliefs about their world and their place in that world.  He is also covertly studying their infrastructure for a potential military attack on them.  Underneath their village exists a valuable mineral called Unobtanium that a militarized company called The Resources Development Administration, which Sully works for, wants badly. 

The Na’vi are these 10 feet tall, blue-skinned, sapient humanoids who live is this tranquil harmony, co-existing perfectly with their natural surroundings while worshipping a mother goddess they call Eywa.  The Avatar Program was set up to explore and adapt to Pandora’s biosphere.  Sully integrates himself as one of these Na’vi and falls for the female Na’vi, Neytiri that is assigned to initiate him to their society.  Sully falls in love with her and her people’s naturalistic way of life.

While Sully learns all these wonderful customs, the military plot an attack against them to get that mineral.  A war breaks out and Sully takes the side of nature and fights for the trees, the land and the people living there in harmony with it. 

Avatar is a cautionary tale about how we are killing our planet as we steam roll over ‘lesser people’ to get what resource we feel we want.  It’s about how the little man can fight back and win.  It’s an age-old story about good versus evil and for the most part has all but been forgotten.

Avatar is the most successful movie ever made but yet it never became a pop culture phenomena.  It grossed almost double than The Avengers, which is stapled firmly into the collective conscious of the pop culture population.  Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and the Hulk are everywhere.  They are on t-shirts, bumper stickers, tattoos, Coke bottles and are discussed in internet debates.  

Star Wars was the explosion that started most of what we identify as pop culture these days.  It might be from a galaxy far far away but here on earth, in the first world, we have anthropomorphized these aliens (yes Luke Skywalker and Han Solo would be classified as aliens) to exist with us in our 3 dimensional space.  We’ve made them tangible, we’ve reversed-engineered the virtual nature of their genesis, the movie screen.  We’ve invented Jedi religions and cosplayed them to death at comic-cons.  We so desperately wanted them to be real because what is real to us isn’t as exciting.

We 3-dimensionalized the Terminator, the Back to the Future series, Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings but Avatar has been left with little to no cultural significance.  Unlike Avatar these other movies have become these everlasting cultural memes that have weaved themselves into the very fabric of modern first world society.

Avatar became a cultural sound bite of sorts.  It visually stunned people and captured their imagination like in a scene in the movie where a ship flies past floating mountains, but yet it was forgettable.  It can be blamed on all the 3D movies we are all subjected to today but what else has it done.  How can something be so enormously successful, more than anything else, and yet be all but forgotten?

Avatar wasn’t a horrible movie, it entertained and even had an environmental message, which was likely its gift but also its curse.  Environmental issues never happen in the Marvel universe, the Harry Potter universe, the Back to the Future universe, or the Lord of the Rings universe.  Our actual environmental plight on this planet is very real and is sadly being fought by very little.  Avatar attempted to juxtapose American environmentally unfriendly intervention on various nations around the world.  Most movie-goers lost that sentiment because they have been systematically trained to not process metaphor.  For them the crisis is fictional and sadly disposable after they leave the theater.

Philosophically the movie mildly explored the body and mind issue, Sully suffered from out of body fatigue.  He was loving being in the avatar and using his legs but was also losing parts of himself while in the avatar.  Falling in love and exploring this incredible world certainly didn’t help him reconcile with his virtual experience.  

In the end James Cameron, the movie’s director, achieved what he wanted.  His technology is now out in the world, his movie grossed just under 3 billion dollars worldwide, he’s the ‘king of the world’ again, but what of this legacy?  The question here is should we value something solely based on its pop culture significance and longevity?  Was Avatar a movie to be seen as a lesson to learn from or simply a bumper sticker throw-away meme?  Possibly more time will tell as all the sequels are released but for now the big question is 'do we really need anymore of these environmental lessons'?  I would think we absolutely do.

Terminator Genesys: Semiotics and the Reprogramming of Historical Meta-Narratives

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JULY 04, 2015

“Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”

– Walter Benjamin

There are some spoilers ahead.

Terminator Genesys is not a good movie.  In places it wasn’t bad but for the most part it failed to live up to the previous films, certainly the first two.  Instead of living up to them, Genesys decided to terminate them.  Especially the first Terminator movie where that time line got completely severed.  Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as the T-800, a cyborg infiltration unit: part man, part machine with a hyper-alloy combat chassis and microprocessor-controlled, with living human tissue on the outside.  He was sent back to 1973 to protect Sarah Conner from a T-1000 liquid metal unit that was sent to kill her.

A T-800 terminator is sent back to the year 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, the mother of the leader of the Resistance, John Connor, who leads the war against the machines in the year 2029.  In Genesys, John Connor along with Kyle Reese, his first in command, in the year 2029 set out to destroy Skynet’s new primary weapon, which they learn is a time machine.  The T-800 is sent back before the Resistance can reach the machine, so Kyle Reese is then sent back to protect Sarah Connor from the Terminator.  While Reese is in the magnetic field of the time machine, he envisions an alternative timeline where he sees warnings of events that take place in the year 2017.  Just before he disappears into the time machine he sees a soldier from the Resistance walk up behind John Connor and attack him.

The T-800 arrived back in 1984 as he did in the original Terminator movie but this time he is met by an older version of the T-800 sent back to protect Sarah, who was ‘old but not obsolete’.  They fought and the bad T-800 is terminated by Sarah Connor and thus adding a very telling postmodern meta-narrative to the already convoluted retelling of this story.  Here is where Genesys cuts the timeline from the original film.  Kyle Reese arrives in the alley and is chased by a police officer into the department store, much like the original, except here the cop is a T-1000 liquid metal terminator like the one in Terminator 2.  Reese is saved by a soldier-ready, combat-trained Sarah Connor. “Come with me if you want to live!” she shouts out to him rather than him shouting that out to her in the original.

On many levels this is off-putting.  Here Genesys pays zero respect to the original film and its existential material.  It rewrites the narrative of the story within the story and also, and more disturbingly, it attempts to rewrite our own narrative of the story as an audience member.  Here the movie is pushing at the ceiling of postmodernism, threatening to create yet another complication on how we store knowledge versus how we store data in the external world.  

Genesys suggests that knowledge in the external world is the only knowledge there is.  It also suggests that knowledge can be manipulated and changed anyway it sees fit.  This commodification of knowledge is what philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard warned us about in his 1979 book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report into Knowledge, where he summed up what he thought of the postmodern age and the ‘decision makers’ that are altering the narrative for their own means of profit.

“What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction.” 

- Jean-Francois Lyotard

The Terminator was a masterful film following a vulnerable young woman that was thrown into this insane world of cyborgs and machine wars.  The film showed Sarah grow from a helpless girl to the mother of the leader of the Resistance.  She was forced to embrace her strength and fight back not only for herself but her future son.  The existential part of the film lies in its ever-impending dread.  Like George Romero’s zombies, the Terminator cannot be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, and it doesn’t feel remorse, pity or fear.  It’s a force that will not stop until she is dead.  It’s impervious to negotiations but in the case of this film, it’s postmodern because it’s a machine from the future.  It’s not only death coming but death by man-made technology.  It changes everything Sarah thought about the world, it throws into question her own existence.   

The semiotics of Terminator Genesys lost all this meaning and vanished into this shallow-surface, level terminator-coolness that it failed to even capture.  It also failed at having any life-force that the first two films had throughout.  Genesys didn’t make us care about anyone even though it exploded characters that we do care about nostalgically.  The Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor of this movie had no chemistry at all where in the original they had it throughout, you believed their love story where with Genesys it was Facebook-forgettable.

Terminator Genesys had actors playing characters that had less life in them then “Pops”, the T-800 older terminator that was sent back to protect Sarah.  These characters have impassive eyes like dolls or oddly enough, like terminators.  These new generation actors are social-media-friendly-disconnected-consumers that have not been brought up on human emotion like an Al Pacino or a Dustin Hoffman.  Genesys mentions how technology and our obedience to it will result in our eventual demise but simultaneously embraces it by celebrating the ‘Guardian’ terminator that saves Sarah and the future of mankind.

In the end, the ‘Genesys’ program, which is an app in the movie that allows consumers to consolidate their technology and thus allows Cyberdyne to take over the planet, is destroyed.  Kyle, who remains alive unlike the original, and Sarah remain in 2017 after time travelling there from 1984, where they await the next chapter of this convoluted story.  The movie had some okay action sequences but was ultimately a disappointment to the franchise.  It was a symbolic mess and as a result could very well be studied for years to come for its very post-postmodern reassignment of knowledge and its assignment of meaning.

“Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made.” 

- Jean-Francois Lyotard

Jurassic World, Surviving Progress and Still not Learning our Lesson

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 22, 2015

Jurassic World was an entertaining movie with quite a few pacing problems, along with plot holes and one dimensional characters.  The dinosaur effects were pretty good, certainly not the leap one would expect from the ground breaking effects of Jurassic Park, but for the most part believable.  Chris Pratt’s Owen was the best part of the human side of the movie while the two boys, Gray and Zack, and most of the other characters were forgettable.  The two control room operators are oddly the most three dimensional in the movie with about only ten minutes of screen time between them.  Pretty well everyone else are hollow stereotypical characters that don’t really act like people do.

Bryce Dallas Howard’s character Claire was the typical corporate, inhuman boss that doesn’t see the dinosaurs in the park as animals.  She sees them as products for which she calls assets.  When there is a wall breach and a monstrous mega-dinosaur escapes, her main concern is containment of the animal without alerting the 2000 visitors in the park she is managing.

Jurassic World is about a thriving theme park, which is Disney World-like, housing a large number of genetically engineered dinosaurs.   The facility is on the same island as in the first movie, off the coast of Cosa Rica, Isla Nublar.  The new park is managed by Claire, who works with the scientists to create a new genetically modified dinosaur called Indominus Rex.  This new dinosaur is made up of the DNA of several predator dinosaurs.

They create the Indominus Rex to raise attendance to the park because it is their belief that the current collection of dinosaurs in the park, no longer dazzles the consumer demands of the spoiled first world public.  They feel that something bigger and with more teeth will draw in more guests and thus boost revenue.  The theme of the Jurassic series is the consequences of not only taking science too far but also our dreams.

What was so wonderful about the first Jurassic Park movie was the spirit of John Hammond, the man made his dream of a park filled with dinosaurs come true, without sparing any expense.  Hammond was an old man but had the inspiration, and naiveté of a child.  

Jurassic World is a very modern action movie.  It is deeply trenched in a hyper-individualistic culture, where greed, self-centeredness, vanity and blame exists. So it is not surprising that wonderment here is replaced with corporate greed.  John Hammond wanted to make children happy, he was a Santa Claus type figure.  In this latest installment to the franchise they deserve their fate, not only because of what happened to the park in the past but also the fact they all didn’t learn a thing from it.

Greedy, power hungry human beings are still under the illusion that they can harness the power of the environment without there being any repercussions.  There still exists this push forward, chasing progress, while this planet and all its wildlife, humans included, suffer so the one percent can control the world. 

The Indominus Rex is a killing machine, much in the same way as a great white shark.  Its instinct is to survive and feed but it’s also a murderer killing for sport.  Here the movie fails to learn the lesson of its own story.  In the story InGen goes too far for the sake of upping the excitement and suffers the consequences as does Universal Studios.  Like in the movie, the studio feels that their audience has seen it all before with the past three installments so they too up the carnage to appease a growing detached, narcissistic audience.  An audience whose attention span increasingly grows narrower.

Jurassic World is a billion dollar success so sadly the lesson that can be found here will be all but smothered by the weight of the money it makes.  Universal will continue with their multi billion dollar franchise, they will up the ante in the fifth installment to maintain interest from their massive movie going audience.  Like the movie Wall Street, the lesson of going too far in the H.P Lovecraft sense will be lost and then replaced with the mantra of the 20^th and 21^st century; greed is good.    

  

American Psycho and Escaping Reality to Return Videotapes

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 2, 2015

"Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"

There are spoilers ahead.

American Psycho is a about a wealthy investment banker that is also a murdering madman that in order to feel something kills other people. The film is based on the controversial book by Bret Easton Ellis about Patrick Bateman, a man in belief he himself isn't even there.  What is there is this shallow man that is obsessed with morning exercises and beautification routines, the material accoutrements of his lifestyle mean more to him then the people in his life.  He listens to Robert Palmer on his headphones while walking into the office, ignoring everybody.  

"I live in the American Gardens Building on West 81st Street on the 11th floor.  My name is Patrick Bateman.  I'm 27 years old.  I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine.  In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I'll put an ice pack while doing my stomach crunches.  I can do a thousand now.  After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion.  In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub.  Then I apply an herb-mint facial masque which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine.  I always use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older.  Then moisturizer, the an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.  There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman.  Some kind of abstraction.  But there is no real me.  Only an entity.  Something illusory.  And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simple am not there."  

Bateman dines at trendy, hard to get into, restaurants with his shallow associates while commenting on what its going to take to make the world a better place, like end world hunger, treat women as equals and stop materialism.  He is clearly regurgitating a list of solutions pervasive within the culture that he himself doesn't particularly strain over, but sounding relevant at a table of people that he doesn't quite care about, seems more important to him.


Bateman has a fiancee, Evelyn, that he really doesn't really love in the traditional sense, he's having an affair with an associates pill-popping wife and watches porn like most people watch the news.  Everything and everyone are mere objects to this ego-centric modern hollow man.  When something isn't going his way or he is being pulled from the center of his world, he imagines threatening them with death and then snaps back into the uncontrollable situation.  Reality for this empty man is unbearable to the point of him escaping it at all costs. 
  

His condo is pale white, modern yet style-less, empty yet furnished, like Patrick Bateman himself, his place is cold, obsessively clean and lacking any real personality.  This place is not a home, it's a place where he sleeps, where he keeps all his designer clothing, exercises and rigorously cleans his body.  It's essentially his war room, where he plots his life of meaning in his meaningless existence.  Here he attempts to make reservations at one of the fanciest restaurants in New York City, a restaurant that is so booked even he can't get in there, only to be laughed at by the host.

While at the office Paul Allen approaches Patrick, mistaking him for one of the other associates.  Paul Allen is the superstar of their firm, a man being celebrated by everyone, a man that can get into the fanciest restaurant in the city.  Paul passes one of his business cards to an associate of Patrick's and leaves the room glowing in style, certainly from Patrick's view.  Patrick then takes out his new business card in a display of vanity only to be met with his associates upping him with better business cards with better font and printing.  This enrages Patrick but like most internal outbursts, he keeps them in and safe from view.  Here we see how obsessed he is about not showing weakness in the face of defeat. 

"Look at that subtle off-white coloring; the tasteful thickness of it... Oh my God, it even has a watermark."  

Out of view of his colleagues, Bateman walks down an allyway at night and asks a homeless man about why he doesn't have a job.  He then stabs the unsuspecting man in the chest a number of times and then stomps the man's dog to death.  Here the rage from living a fake plastic existence expresses itself happily, as Patrick transfers his hatred of himself and wrath toward those that continue to remove him off the high-horse that his ego has worked so hard to secure.

"I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust.  Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why.  My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days.  I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy.  I think my mask of sanity is about to slip."

At a Christmas party, Patrick continues down his road to complete insanity.  He thinks his fiancee doesn't see him and the whole Christmas thing is clearly an annoyance.  Patrick meets Paul Allen, who still thinks Patrick is another person, at a restaurant while over drinks, Patrick confesses that he's insane but that's okay because Paul isn't really listening to him anyway because he's too drunk.  Paul Allen says that he thinks that Patrick Bateman is a dork as Patrick laughs it off.  Patrick can clearly only take so much.

Back at Patrick's place Paul sits on a covered sofa surrounded by newspaper placed on the floor.  Patrick puts on Huey Lewis and the News and puts on a plastic coat and grabs an ax while talking about Huey Lewis's music.

"Their early work was a little too 'new-wave' for my taste, but then Sports can out in '83, I think they really came into their own - both commercially and artistically.  The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.  He's been compared to Elvis Costello, but I think Huey has far more bitter, cynical sense of humor."

Patrick then slams the ax down on Paul's back and proceeds to chops him up while screaming what he hates about him.

"In '87, Huey released this, Fore!, their most accomplished album.  I think their undisputed masterpiece is "Hip To Be Square", a song so catchy most people probably don't listen to the lyrics - but they should!  Because it's not just about the pleasure of conformity, and the importance of trends, it's also a personal statement about the band itself!  Hey Paul!"

Patrick has blood all over his face as he hatches up Paul while psychotically yelling and screaming at him.  He then stops and calms himself, he removes his plastic bloody coat, he sits down and smokes a victory cigar with a bloody face as Huey Lewis sings that it's "Hip To Be Square" through the speakers.  He then gets rid of the body and goes to Paul's place,  which he comments to himself is better than his place and that it over looks the park, and packs up some clothing to make it look like Paul has has gone to London for a couple of days.


After being talked to by a detective about Paul Allen's whereabouts, Patrick blows off some steam by working his stomach muscles on the floor of his apartment while listening to Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre murdering some screaming people.  

Bateman picks up a hooker in his limo and instructs her that his name his Paul Allen and her name will be Christie as he orders an escort over the phone.  At his place, Patrick and the two prostitutes, Christie and Sabrina, sit in his living room when Patrick walks over to his stereo system, puts in a CD and enthusiastically presses play.

"Do you like Phil Collins?" 

"I've been a big Genesis fan ever since the release of their 1980 album, ....Duke.  Before that, I really didn't understand any of their work.  Too artsy, too intellectual.  It was on Duke where, uh, Phil Collins' presence became more apparent.  I think "Invisible Touch" was the group's undisputed masterpiece.  It's an epic mediation on intangibility.  At the same time, it deepens and enriches playing of Banks, Collins and Rutherford.  You can practically hear every nuance of every instrument.  Sabrina, remove your dress.  In terms of lyrical craftsmanship, the sheer songwriting, this album hits a new peak of professionalism.  Sabrina, why don't you, uh, dance a little.  Take the lyrics to "Land of Confusion".  In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problem of abusive political authority.  "In Too Deep" is the most moving pop song of the 1980's, about monogamy and commitment.  The song is extremely uplifting.  Their lyrics are as positive and affirmative as, uh, anything I've heard in rock.  Christie, get down on your knees so Sabrina can see your asshole.  Phil Collin's solo career seems to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying, in a narrower way.  Especially songs like "In the Air Tonight" and, uh, "Against All Odds".  Sabrina, don't just stare at it, eat it.  But I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, than as a solo artist, and I stress the word artist.  This is "Sussudio", a great, great song, a personal favorite."

Patrick fucks both of the girls while Sussudio is blaring and he's looking at himself heroically fucking in the wall mirror.  He flexes his muscles as he takes Sabrina hard from behind.  Both girls are just going with the flow, they are detached like business as usual.  He films everything as they both blow him while he clearly holds misogynistic contempt for both of them.  Later after he films more sexual positions and valorously points at himself in the mirror and camera, they go to sleep.  They wake up and Patrick pays them as they quickly leave his place a bit freaked out by his disjointed demeanor.

In a lounge Patrick and two of his associates sit around and talk about women, and whether it even matters if they have a personality or not, because they are only good for one thing.  Here the men express their contempt for women for restricting there freedom.

Bateman: Do you know what Ed Gein said about women?

Van Patten: Ed Gein? Maitre d' at Canal Bar?
Bateman: No, serial killer, Wisconsin in the fifties.

McDermott: So what did Ed say?

Bateman: When I see a pretty girl walking down the street I think two things. One part of me wants to take her out and talk to her and be real nice and sweet and treat her right.

McDermott: And what did the other part think?

Bateman: What her head would look like on a stick.

After talking to Courtney's husband, who doesn't know that Patrick is having an affair with his wife, shows the group his new immaculate business card.   Patrick, annoyed, follows him into the bathroom and places his leather-gloved hands around his neck only to be met with joy and relief. This man understands Patrick's attempt to kill him with homosexual affection, which he welcomes dearly, while Patrick feels homophobically discombobulated, disgusted and emasculated. 

"I have to return some videotapes!!"

Patrick fucks Courtney hard and fast to regain his fleeting masculinity.  Courtney, a bit drugged out as usual tells Patrick, as he dresses himself, that if he doesn't see her again to have a good one.  Clearly a cry for help but Patrick brushes it off as any detached ineffectual person would.  Instead he soullessly goes to a night club and does cocaine among hyper-gladiatorial fuckheads in stalls screaming and yelling as they all desperately escape reality. 

"Murders and executions."

Bateman invites his secretary Jean out for dinner.  Jean is a woman that Patrick constantly belittles over her lack of fashion sense and overt sexuality.  What perplexes Patrick about Jean is that Jean is real, she isn't fake like he is and pretty well everyone he knows.  He talks to her in his apartment about having a meaningful relationship as he covertly traverses his living room and places a nail gun to the back of Jean's head without her knowledge.  Patrick puts the nail gun down as he is yet again debilitated.

Patrick hooks up with Christie again and another girl and they make out while Patrick talks about yet another shallow, disposable pop artist by the name of Whitney Houston.  They fuck and Patrick then chases Christie out of Paul Allen's apartment and into the hallway, naked, bloodied and welding a chainsaw, mimicking the madness of Leatherface himself.  

Here this film explores what it is we want, our atavistic desires and our need to be special, and thus maintain a highlight on ourselves.  Patrick draws the chainsaw slicing through Christie on paper as he sits with Evelyn in a fancy restaurant.  He breaks up with her and walks out.  He recognizes that they are fake and not worth the bother. 

"I have to return some videotapes."   

Bateman's illusions begin to start catching up to him as he shoots at and runs from the cops.  He showers the next day and then goes back to Paul Allen's place, there he is told by a women that Paul Allen doesn't live there.  This scene is a very David Lynch type scene where there is this sort of drift between the real world and the manufactured fake world.  Certainly a world that Lynch captures every time.  Patrick breaks down.

Bateman finds out that Paul Allen is not dead at a party talking to his lawyer while Jean finds Patrick's drawings of his murders.  He sits around a table with his asshole associates while contemplating connectivity.  Behind him is a door that reads, This Is Not An Exit.

"There are no more barriers to cross.  All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it, I have now surpassed.  My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone; in fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others.  I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself; no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling.  This confession has meant nothing."

The very fact that throughout the film Patrick seemed oddly aware of his ignorance and narcissism seemed to lend itself more to the "we know what we are doing but yet we are doing it anyway" sensibility of the late 80's just as it exists unfortunately today.  American Psycho tells the story of a man that is welded to the modern system of consumption, he is was Marshall McLuhan foresaw as the "quantitative results (that) point to a massive and subliminal erosion of our culture through right-hemisphere indoctrination by TV."   Patrick Bateman became a modern man without meaning, he became part of a machine that is incompatible with the human being.