Watching Through Windows: Bret Easton Ellis and Urban Surveillance

Abstract

This chapter reads Bret Easton Ellis’s only collection of short stories, The Informers (1994), as both an important account of what it means to be an overlooked—and often mutually surveilling—urban subject at the turn of the twenty-first century and also, crucially, as a pivotal text within Ellis’s own canon. Partially authored around the same time as Ellis’s debut novel Less Than Zero (1985), but developed until, and published at, what is currently the effective midpoint of his literary career, The Informers occupies an unusual position, reflecting and developing spatial concerns evident in Ellis’s early writing, but also taking on an eerie prescience in its initiation of the narrative representation of surveillant tendencies which would come to characterise his later fiction. The chapter identifies and explores a plurality of spaces depicted in the collection (including the airport, the homestead, and the thoroughfare), and overlooked and surveilling subjects located therein, foregrounding contemporary cityscapes—with particular focus on Los Angeles, and also with reference to Tokyo—as representative of what has been termed the “media city” (McQuire 2008), and, significantly, as spaces of surveillance, both repressive and potentially liberating. In so doing, it outlines that Ellis has much to teach us about the interplay, in the contemporary period, of a culture of surveillance; the city; and the overlooked and observant subject.