The excesses of New York City have often been the subject of pop culture fascination. Across several mediums, the New York of various eras has been viewed as a space and a city bursting at the seams, whether it be socially, culturally, or politically. Underlying many of the hyperkinetic presentations of New York has been the implicit—and often explicit—undercurrent of capitalism as a driving force for the city and, often, its raison d’etre. This relationship, far from being presented as a benign one, often ends up with the glamour of New York being inexorably linked to its squalor, typically through some form of figurative or literal violence. Two narratives in particular—the 2000 film American Psycho and the 2017 Netflix series Neo Yokio—explore the darker aspects of this relationship between New York as a place and a people and capitalism as simultaneously its greatest driving force and its deepest sickness from somewhat different vantage points. This presentation compares these two competing narratives about New York excess against the backdrop of late capitalism and conspicuous consumption—American Psycho looking at a darkly surreal version of 1980’s New York and Neo Yokio looking at a cynically absurd alternate version of New York’s present—in order to both better understand how their differing visions of New York explore similar concerns with the relationship between social stagnation and conspicuous consumption within the city as a manifested space of late capitalism.
About the presenterDaniel Gilmore
Daniel is an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University, NYU, and CUNY in the areas of Communications and Media Studies. He has a PhD in Communication, Culture, & Media from Drexel University, with a dissertation that focused on the visual organization of surfaces in the context of modern protest movements. His research interests center around ways that people make themselves visible—culturally, socially, and politically—and how that process is often a result of contention.