Reading the Film :

Filmic Narrative in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama

Abstract

Drawing on intermedial theory, this article examines how elements traditionally associated with
film are adapted in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, a novel that offers a vivid portrayal of celebrity culture. Ellis uses filmic narrative techniques to mirror the highly visual medium of fifilm with the visual–centric nature of the celebrity world depicted in the novel. Furthermore, he creates a hybrid narrative form that juxtaposes the realist conventions of film with Victor Ward’s fragmented, hyper–visual, and often hallucinatory narration. Ellis uses filmic
techniques not to ground the narrative, but to heighten its paranoia and instability, highlighting
the performative and constructed nature of reality within a celebrity culture dominated by
surfaces, spectacle, and image. While the theoretical framework will provide a foundation for
analysing the novel’s interplay between filmic and literary forms, this article will demonstrate
which filmic narrative strategies are employed and what they aim to achieve by presenting
specific examples from Glamorama. These strategies include, among others, an establishing
shot to situate scenes within a broader visual context, a montage, mirrored by quick, successive
descriptions or by events edited together to condense time, space, and information, and a
soundtrack, adding an auditory dimension to the predominantly visual narrative.