Looking-Glass allegory and a cautionary tale navigating the perils of dissolving identity. In parody of how people now think in modern terms, Ellis "annoying[ly]" lists "the songs that are playing in the background, or even quoting them, as he does with Oasis' "Champagne Supernova"; in effect, the novel is provided with a movie soundtrack. As such, the book feels at times like a movie, and sometimes more specifically, a snuff film. New technology such as photo manipulation software (e.g. "PhotoSoap for Windows 95") are featured in the novel. This creates an ironic situation in which Victor, the character obsessed by appearances, is haunted by fake images that appear real which implicate him in a murder; it becomes hard to tell what is real in the 'modern' world. As such, "meaningful identity is obliterated"; this furthers the recurring joke from American Psycho wherein "characters are always getting confused by their friends with other people, with no noticeable consequences". The book prominently features a conceit wherein Victor's life is being filmed by a camera crew "introduced a third of the way into the book". As well as a postmodern device to examine the questionable "reality" of the situation, it also functions as a "tidy commentary" on the advent of mass surveillance in the 1990s. EW interprets the scene to mean "Modern life has become a movie (a point made more cogently by Neal Gabler's new book, Life the Movie)." The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette took the same meaning from the conceit, and described it as a "not-so-deep observation" that "has no real pay-off". The New York Times felt it was a "halfhearted narrative device ... suggesting that the novel's action is actually part of a film that's being made." The reviewer felt that allusions to ""the director" or to the fact that this or that scene is a "flashback"" was used to retroactively suggest cohesion in the novel's plot. "As much as celebrity itself, our collective celebrity worship becomes the real target of Ellis' satire", writes the Star Tribune. Models in the novel act as a synecdoche of the larger culture. Reviewer Eric Hanson writes, "Their [models'] selfishness and brutality, he implies, are simply an extreme manifestation of what consumer culture encourages in everyone." Victor's own pursuit of being cool or too hip "destroys him". A CNN reviewer gives the example of Victor not wanting to explain his impersonator, "because the places he was