American Psycho
American Psycho is a horror novel by American writer Bret Easton Ellis, published in 1991. The story is told in the first-person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, narcissistic, and vain Manhattan investment banker who lives a double life as a serial killer. Alison Kelly of The Observer notes that while "some countries so potentially disturbing that it can only be sold shrink-wrapped", "critics rave about it" and "academics revel in its transgressive and postmodern qualities".
A film adaptation starring Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman was released in 2000 to generally positive reviews. Producers David Johnson and Jesse Singer developed a musical adaptation for Broadway. The musical premiered at the Almeida Theatre, London in December 2013.
The book has garnered notoriety for its graphic violence and has led to it being censored in multiple countries.
Development
Title
In an interview with November MagazinePlot
Set in Manhattan during the Wall Street boom in 1989, American Psycho follows the life of a wealthy, young investment banker named Patrick Bateman. Bateman, in his mid-20s when the story begins, narrates his everyday activities, from his recreational life among the Wall Street elite of New York to his forays into murder by night. Through present tense stream-of-consciousness narrative, Bateman describes his daily life, ranging from a series of Friday nights spent at nightclubs with his colleagues—where they snort cocaine, critique fellow club-goers' clothing, trade fashion advice, and question one another on proper etiquette—to his loveless engagement to fellow yuppie Evelyn and his contentious relationship with his brother and senile mother. Bateman's stream of consciousness is occasionally broken up by chapters in which he directly addresses the reader in order to critique the work of 1980s pop music artists. The novel maintains a high level of ambiguity through mistaken identity and contradictions that introduce the possibility that Bateman is an unreliable narrator. Characters are consistently introduced as people other than themselves, and people argue over the identities of others they can see in restaurants or at parties. Deeply concerned with his personal appearance, Bateman gives extensive descriptions of his daily aesthetics regimen.After killing Paul Owen, one of his colleagues, Bateman appropriates Paul's apartment as a place to host and kill more victims. Bateman's control over his violent urges deteriorates. His murders become increasingly sadistic and complex, progressing from simple stabbings to drawn-out sequences of rape, torture, mutilation, cannibalism, and necrophilia, and his grasp on sanity begins to slip. He introduces stories about serial killers into casual conversations and on several occasions openly confesses his murderous activities to his coworkers, who never take him seriously, do not hear what he says, or misunderstand him completely—for example, hearing the words "murders and executions" as "mergers and acquisitions". These incidents culminate in a shooting spree during which he kills several random people in the street, resulting in a SWAT team being dispatched in a helicopter. This narrative episode sees the first-person perspective shift to third-person and the subsequent events are, although not for the first time in the novel, described in terms pertaining to cinematic portrayal. Bateman flees on foot and hides in his office, where he phones his attorney, Harold Carnes, and confesses all his crimes to an answering machine.
Later, Bateman revisits Paul Owen's apartment, where he had earlier killed and mutilated two prostitutes, carrying a surgical mask in anticipation of the decomposing bodies he expects to encounter. He enters the perfectly clean, refurbished apartment, however, filled with strong-smelling flowers meant, perhaps, to conceal a bad odor. The real estate agent, who sees his surgical mask, fools him into stating he was attending the apartment viewing because he "saw an ad in the Times" when, in fact, there was no such advertisement. She tells him to leave and never return. It is implied that the apartment was cleaned up by the building owners and the murder or murders covered up in order to ensure the highly valuable property does not diminish in price.
Bateman's mental state continues to deteriorate and he begins to experience bizarre hallucinations such as seeing a Cheerio interviewed on a talk show, being stalked by an anthropomorphic park bench, and finding a bone in his Dove Bar. At the end of the story, Bateman confronts Carnes about the message he left on his machine, only to find the attorney amused at what he considers a hilarious joke. Mistaking Bateman for another colleague, Carnes claims that the Patrick Bateman he knows is too much of a coward to have committed such acts. In the dialogue-laden climax, Carnes stands up to a defiant Bateman and tells him his claim of having murdered Owen is impossible, because he had dinner with him twice in London just a few days previously.
The book ends as it began, with Bateman and his colleagues at a new club on a Friday night, engaging in banal conversation. All the men in the bar agree that economic success does equal happiness before reruns of the inauguration of George H. W. Bush and a Ronald Reagan speech appear on the bar's TV.
The book closes with a description of a sign in the bar — with the text appearing in all caps and in a different font from all the rest of the novel's text — that reads "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT."
Themes
According to literary critic Jeffrey W. Hunter, American Psycho is largely a critique of the "shallow and vicious aspects of capitalism." The characters are predominantly concerned with material gain and superficial appearances, traits indicative of a postmodern world in which the "surface" reigns supreme. This leads Patrick Bateman to act as if "everything is a commodity, including people", an attitude that is further evident in the rampant brutalization of people that occurs in the novel. This distancing allows Bateman to rationalize his actions; in one scene in which he cannibalizes a victim, Bateman remarks "though it does sporadically penetrate how unacceptable some of what I'm doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing..."Patrick Bateman's consumption of what he views as nothing more than a piece of meat is an almost parodically literal interpretation of a monster created by consumer culture. This, combined with sex, violence, drugs, and other desires of the id, is how Bateman enacts his sociopathic violence in a superficial world.
Bateman's episodes of schizophrenia also show clear signs of how he copes with being an affluent person living in a superficial world fashioned on consumerism. As described by the critic Jennifer Krause in her intertextual analysis of the novel, which relies on the work of postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson, Jameson "blames the schizophrenic's ills on the incoherence of postmodern media and capitalistic consumption".
Jameson's critique is expanded by Krause, who writes: "We can see a distinctly popular culture schizophrenia arise, a disease spread by the postmodern culture industry, which ruptures personality and isolates the fractured self. Though Jameson does not specifically reference two different types of schizophrenia in his writings, he implies an artistic schizophrenia versus a more popular form—one more or less accepted, and the other anathema. This raises questions about how popular culture might act as a potential cure for madness". On the one hand is a rich Wall Street banker, Bateman, concerned and very self-conscious about every detail of his physical appearance, expensive possessions, and control of the people and the world around him. On the other hand is the inner self of Patrick Bateman, the aboriginal-self, who copes and relinquishes his outer complications and "fake" identity, created by consumerism, through violence on other human beings, whom he finds consumable, and expresses absolute control of his desires and true self through his violent fantasies. His consumer, artificial self, proceeding in society as a wealthy consumer would live and spend his income, versus his natural self, who, instead of spending money, would hunt and prey on the weak and vulnerable, usually women, whom he deems expendable. Bateman treats the people around him just like any other consumer product because of the void he still battles with and wishes to fulfill from within, hence, having dual personas, having the dull artificial identity, compared to his free limitless persona of his mind.
Observing another side of potential behavior coming from the affluent American society of consumerism is explained through C. Serpell: "Though serialized violence in American Psycho is an extension of the deadening effects of serialized consumer exchanges in an economy where commodities and bodies become interchangeable and indistinguishable, this point largely escaped the notice of the novel's harshest critics". Despite critics arguing over the aesthetic properties of the novel from rapid patterns and transitions of self-consciousness and murder, Christopher Serpell claims critics have overlooked the key themes and motives of the novel. Serpell brings to light the patterns and trends Ellis expresses through Bateman, the consequences of how "serialized consumer exchanges in an economy where commodities and bodies become interchangeable and indistinguishable", could affect society, and the way affluent people view others, whether they are higher, lower, or the same in wealth or social status. The critic Thomas Heise states that "the uncertainty about the reality of Patrick's violence has become the chief critical debate on American Psycho, and it serves as a convenient introduction to the entanglement of epistemology and ethics in the novel". Bateman's character and traits, according to Heise, challenge what readers understand as the social norms for the way the elite upper class think and react to society on a normal basis. Bateman's epistemology and ethics in regards to his actions and way of thinking throughout the novel is a reflection, through his violence, which raises the questions of the moral and ethical understanding of all individuals in Bateman's position and status, and how they might act and think similarly or completely identically in a consumer world built on capitalism as people see in today's American society.
Citing the many bodies that are never found, Henry Bean wonders "is it possible that the murders themselves never occurred?" He continues:
It has often been noted that Patrick Bateman is an example of an unreliable narrator, and this feature of American Psycho has been the subject of discussion in several academic works. In a 2014 appearance on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, Ellis stated that Bateman's narration was so unreliable that even he, as the author of the book, did not know if Bateman was honestly describing events that actually happened or if he was lying or even hallucinating.