What is the significance of the billboard?

That's the problem with this book, isn't it? It meant exactly what it says.

>>8775134
Read the sign at the start of American Psycho and the poster at the end of Glamor, and it'll become clear.

>>8776896
Or you could just tell us your amazing theory so that we can tell you if you are an asshat or not.

>>8775134
It's been a while since I've read it, the billboard was on the freeway and said "disappear here" right?

>>8776911
I'm not sure I have the energy, and it'll take forever, but here's the rough version, with some stuff borrowed here. The phrase in all its obvious "nothing means anything" glory is all over the novel (Clay thinks, "You can disappear here without even knowing it.")
"Disappear Here" is the message on a billboard that Clay passes early in the novel. By introducing it at this point, Julian's prostitution is linked to the wider exchange base of consumer culture, and both are shown in a symbiotic relationship with the viewer. In this critical scene, then, Clay ties together the desire to view, the impact of advertising, the economic purpose of viewing, and the essentially exploitative basis of pleasure/desire. If Julian is a "fetishized" commodity, this scene uncovers the intellectual, semiotic, and emotional labor that produced him.
In the context established so far, the slogan 'Disappear Here' can be understood as referring back to Clay's observation under the gaze of the staring stranger that possibly "I'm not here", and while the link is yet rather tentative, it soon becomes obvious. A few days later, Clay is lying listlessly on the beach and staring "out at the expanse of sand that meets the water, where the land ends. Disappear here". By now the clever advertising slogan has assumed crucial significance and turned into an obsessive concern for Clay. So it's about hopelessness, "leaving" this world in the sense of becoming faceless, lost, annihilated. Simple: it's his first novel, after all.
Next post explains how he starts tying it to Dante's crisis in the woods that leads him into Hell.

The most obvious Dante reference in American Psycho is the first line of Ellis’s novel: “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE,” scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of 11th and First in downtown Manhattan, as Patrick Bateman’s cab symbolically crosses the threshold into Hell, or the business district of New York. These words, the final of the nine lines engraved over the gates to Hell in Inferno’s Canto III, are first viewed by Bateman’s co-worker Timothy Price, who is as close to a Virgil as Bateman will get during his sojourn in Hell (Bateman calls him, “the only interesting person I know” ). At first glance, Tim Price seems a particularly odd excuse for a Virgilian guide, at least from a moral point of view. His behavior and conversation quickly establish him as a much more cynical character than Bateman, but this is intentionally misleading. Price certainly loves to lecture Bateman and his circle about the shallowness of their clique, and seems to be the only person capable of inspiring lust in the otherwise Halcion-numbed Evelyn, Bateman’s titular fiancée. Bateman’s flawed Virgil, however, soon abandons all affairs, and his friend, in a mysterious manner.
One night, Price gets Bateman into Tunnel (a real NYC nightclub from the late 1980s), and in an updating of Virgil granting Dante access past the various borders and sentries of the Inferno, provides Bateman with drink tickets and two VIP basement passes, but he ultimately deserts his charge. Price becomes obsessed with the old train tracks running through the lowest level into an underground tunnel by the dance floor. After a little cocaine and vodka, he suddenly announces that he is “leaving… getting out…going away” to find what lies behind the blackness. He climbs the railing, champagne flute in hand, and with a hearty cry of “So long…fuckers!” he runs into the darkness of page sixty-two, not to reappear until sixteen pages from the end of the novel.

The explanation I offer is that Price, at the lowest physical place visited in the story, somehow recognizes that he is at the floor of Hell, the Ninth Circle, where the only exit is to climb the Devil’s very body through the center of the earth until he emerges by the Mount of Purgatory. Virgil takes his charge with him, and so Dante becomes the first living man to walk the length of Hell and escape. After many demons and damned souls assure him that there is no exit, he is nonetheless safely guided by Virgil past the Devil and through the center of the world, emerging to see the stars. Yet Price goes alone, whether from selfishness or because he understands that his friends could not make such a pilgrimage with him. The others belong in Hell, something Bateman himself rarely tries to deny. Indeed, when Price has vanished down the dark tunnel, the only concern voiced is Paul Owen’s worried question, “He doesn’t know about some secret VIP room, does he?”
When Price finally walks back into Bateman’s office many months later, he has been through his purge and come as close to heaven as an unredeemed soul can, but like Virgil in Purgatorio, has had to return to the Inferno in the end. Bateman has no understanding of where Price has gone or how he has changed, but he does see a smudge on his forehead, and suspects nobody else could see it. The smudge is a reference to the seven Ps of the penitent that Dante has removed one by one as he ascends the purgatorial mount, and to the cross of ashes marked on worshippers’ foreheads on Ash-Wednesday for the Lent season. Virgil never wears these marks, since he is only a guide, but Price went alone to his purgatory and seems to have been at least partially rehabilitated. Now, on to Glamorama.
Dante’s emergence to the stars (“stella” is the last word of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) is also referenced in the final image of another of Ellis’s novels, 1998’s Glamorama. Victor Ward is in Milan, looking at a mural of “a giant mountain” (Purgatorial Mount, the sight that greets Dante as he emerges from the tunnel), and he experiences sensations of falling and moving upwards simultaneously. “The stars are real./ The future is that mountain."
There are dozens of other connections and points to be made, but that's the quick version.

>>8776995
I can't believe you managed to convince me Price was a Virgil figure. I always wondered about that ash Wednesday smudge on his forehead. Good posts, thanks for these.