I feel provoked to write today by an MA dissertation arguing that in American Psycho (1991) Bret Easton Ellis manipulates readers so that they share with its protagonist, Patrick Bateman, the pleasure he feels when he tortures, mutilates and kills his victims. I will award the student in question an A because she has researched and written her dissertation flawlessly, yet I also need to express my total disagreement with her thesis. This happens: as teachers we need to distinguish between the academic skills and the content in students’ exercises, provided of course that said content is not totally far-fetched. I always tell my Victorian Literature students that if they try to convince me that Great Expectations is a story about alien abduction they will not go very far; quite another matter is disagreeing on a controversial point within the limits of what is relevant in the text.
My brother, a fan of American Psycho like myself, gave me Ellis’s most recent novel, The Shards, as a present last Sant Jordi’s book day. I disappeared from hours on end into the protagonist’s increasingly deranged account of his teen days. That the young man is called Bret Easton Ellis is the author’s post-postmodern way to play with his readers, a joke some reviewers have found to be in very poor taste, but that I loved. There was a hint, somewhere, that the fictional Bret Ellis may have been closely connected to his literary sibling Patrick Bateman. I am not saying that they are the same man (I don’t think they are), but whereas American Psycho narrates the exploits of a terribly broken male mind, The Shards narrates how the mind of a young man starts breaking.
Many reviewers and readers decried this is not the right time to tell a grim story about white privileged Californian teens and their Reaganite ultra-capitalist 1980s background, but I was young and unprivileged in the same era, many kilometres away, and I am fascinated by how the same music, the same films, the same TV shows could fill teen lives so differently in the same generation. The rich teens in The Shards are not so different from teens I could see in Barcelona’s wealthier neighbourhoods, and what Ellis is doing here at the risk of ruining his own personal reputation is to remind us that privilege is rotten at the core, particularly in the case of the insecure young men who do not know how to deal with their sexuality and masculinity.
Oddly, I have not written about American Psycho, except for some passages in my doctoral dissertation, and an unpublished conference paper, “Teaching Politically Incorrect Contemporary Gothic Fictions: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) and Stephen King’s Misery (1987)”, of 1999, in which I explained why some horror texts are next to impossible to teach in class given their very graphic content. Twenty-four years later, I still haven’t changed my mind: I would never teach Ellis’s controversial novel because I believe it is a text best consumed in private and discussed through academic publications (or other types).
The main problem, as the dissertation I have read proves, is that it is difficult for less experienced readers to understand that a first-person narrative is not always designed for readers to sympathize or empathize with the protagonist. The author of the dissertation argues that this is how the novel operates: Ellis shows he is a master novelist by totally erasing the distance between his psychopathic male protagonist and the readers in order to make them feel what Bateman feels, namely, pleasure. I happen to totally disagree with this view.
I believe that Ellis actually designed American Psycho with a double purpose. On the one hand, he describes down to the last ghastly detail how thoroughly vicious a man who is deeply mentally ill can be; Patrick Bateman is monstrous and Ellis dares us to get as close as possible to him in order to grasp what a sick mind is like. On the other hand, Ellis is subtly mocking the readers who get too close by hinting that they might be psychopaths themselves in their lack of empathy for the unfortunate victims (if, that is, Bateman does kill anyone and is not simply fantasizing the whole time).
And, yes, I am committing the academic crime of taking for granted that an author’s intentions can be understood but, then, American Psycho is that kind of novel against which many other academic crimes are still being perpetrated. To begin with, Ellis’s use of the first-person narrative voice has been misunderstood, which often happens. I’ve been teaching this semester King Solomon’s Mines and it’s amazing to see how often the opinions of the main character, Allan Quatermain, are assumed to be those of the author, H. Rider Haggard. Nobody believes that Charles Dickens and Pip in Great Expectations are the same person, though.
There are, then, no grounds to claim that Bateman’s horrific acts of violence, his classism and misogyny are a direct expression of Ellis’s own stance, though this is what many readers, above all women, assumed. As a feminist woman, I read American Psycho as the portrayal of a deep malaise at the heart of Wall Street’s capitalistic patriarchal villainy, though at the same time I understand that Bateman belongs in a different nightmarish world from Gordon Gekko’s empire of greed in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street. Bateman, this is important, is too enmeshed in his own psychopathology to be minimally functional, which is what makes his narrative veer between the chilling and the ludicrous. Readers are not supposed to be on his side; we need to look at the Sadeian and sadistic spectacle of his madness in the same way we ‘enjoy’ other monsters such as Freddy Krueger or Norman Bates.
What makes Bateman particularly dangerous is Ellis’s powerful prose and that American Psycho was marketed as mainstream literature (by Vintage after Simon & Schuster tried to destroy it) and not as horror fiction. Having made a point that other defenders of this novel have made, I’d like to note that this novel was published only two years after the execution on the electric chair of notorious rapist and serial killer Ted Bundy. I have written recently about Bundy in my new volume American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film: Up Close Behind the Mask, in which I analysed the Netflix mini-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. In these tapes, recorded for a book by two journalists, Bundy (who had a degree in Psychology) offers a diagnosis of his own case in the third person. Bundy argues that ‘he’ was dominated by misogynistic sexual fantasies which could have been repressed if it weren’t because ‘he’ found in pulp porn (stories, not images) an inspiration, or blueprint, to commit his crimes. One of the journalists that interviewed him angrily snarls that ‘if all men who consume pornography were affected in that way the world would be full of Ted Bundys’ and, of course, he is right: you need to be mentally ill, unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, for your consumption of porn to become the basis of any actual violent action.
The point I am making is that Ellis followed a similar path for Bateman (both he and Bundy are apparently well-adapted, well-liked men) and asked himself whether an upper-class man could also be a serial killer, since, so far, only working-class and low middle-class men had been characterized as such. To build Bateman’s narrative voice Ellis appears to have mixed Bundy’s more banal declarations about his own psychopathology with Jim Thompson’s absolutely terrifying first-person narrative voice in The Killer Inside Me (1952). In that novel, marketed as crime fiction, Lou Ford is a sheriff with a double life, a model that goes all the way back to R.L. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), with the difference that while Mr. Hyde never narrates what he does, Ford and Bateman do, in all its unsettling detail. This pornographic violence was common in the pulp porn that Bundy consumed, and in the noir fiction to which Thompson’s novel belongs, but it became appallingly offensive when it crossed into the mainstream, as I have noted.
When I was reading American Psycho for the first time, at the height of its notoriety right after publication, a friend told me that what most baffled her was thinking of Ellis writing and rewriting the torture scenes until he got the effect he was after. I always think of her observation. J.K. Rowling confessed that she had cried and cried when she wrote the scene in which a very dear character in the Harry Potter series is murdered; when her husband asked her why she had put herself through so much pain she replied it was necessary for the plot. Now imagine Ellis waking up each morning for months, or perhaps years, to become Patrick Bateman’s ventriloquist and spew that appalling trash through his keyboard. As far as we know, Ellis is not a serial killer, which means that his impersonation of his main character’s voice must have been challenging to say the least. Thomas Harris chose the third person narrative voice to approach Hannibal Lecter, siding first with experienced FBI Agent Will Graham and later with rookie FBI Agent Clarice Starling to get close to the monster. In Bateman’s case, there is no filter between author and character, no buffer zone between protagonist and reader. This, of course, can be confusing.
I am convinced that American Psycho needs to be read as a satire of those yuppie males exalted by the capitalist system as winners, but looking back, now that we live in a world dominated by hegemonic men like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, it appears to be, too, a portrait of the general psychopathology of the American capitalist system. The three men I have mentioned are entrepreneurs and, thus, have a certain merit as creators of new ideas, whether we like them or not. Bateman, actually, is an investment banker and, as such, he is closer to the villainous cadre that caused the world to collapse in 2008.
I recommend that you see Charles Ferguson’s excellent documentary Inside Job, and read the companion volume he wrote to understand the type. The fat cats of the capitalist past, the ageing, paunchy men looking down on others cigar in hand, have been replaced from the 1980s onwards by sleeker players, like Bateman, now presenting themselves as action men leading Playboy-style lives, even when they are family men. Ferguson described how the financial masters of the universe (to use Tom Wolfe’s label) acted motivated by greed; totally unregulated by the law they create a huge pyramidal scam that destroyed many lives while they still enjoyed their yearly bonuses and their banks were rescued with public money. I find that more obscene than Bateman’s murders, but perhaps Ellis didn’t know enough about finance to expose his protagonist as a first-class scammer and not just a serial killer. In terms of the Wall Street circle, it surprises me that Bateman is such small fry; Gordon Gekko would probably despise him.
To conclude, I’ll repeat my main thesis: American Psycho is not designed for readers to connect, empathize or sympathise with his protagonist, a man who suffers from a profound psychopathology, but to make us see how dysfunctional the men in privileged positions can be. Whether his crimes are real or a fantasy, Bateman struggles to establish his credentials as a hegemonic male in a highly competitive Wall Street world, in which he really is a nobody. He lashes out against those weaker than himself seeking to re-empower his insecure, faltering masculinity, but he gains no recognition and his crimes, supposing they are real, are ignored.
No reader who is mentally balanced and gifted with a normal capacity for empathy can side with Bateman, and if you do, then you must know that you are the target of Ellis’s dark satire, for he is telling us that the world is full of men secretly fantasizing about rape, torture, and murder. Bateman, it must be stressed, is not normative: he is the abnormal Other, the Jekyll and Hyde wacky psycho. As such, he is not Ellis’s mouthpiece but a scarecrow he uses to warn us that there is something deeply rotten at the core of American capitalistic society, in the 1980s and now. Yuppies were envied and admired then but through Bateman Ellis tells us that this is not what we should feel for them; borrowing from the title of Hunter S. Thompson’s masterpiece, a writer who would have enjoyed Ellis’s satire, Bateman should elicit, always, fear and loathing, nothing else.