Commercial Sadomasochism: American Psycho
February 27th, 2011
I first saw the 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) several years ago. At the time, I took it as more or less a cult B-movie and remembered it chiefly for its hilarious scene on business cards and its ridiculous violence. Indeed, the image of a naked Christian Bale brandishing only white Nike’s and a chainsaw has been burned into my brain.
Recently, I came across the novel while looking through a torrent of novels for the Kindle and decided to give it another shot. I’m glad I did.
It would be hard for any film to do justice to this novel — Patrick Bateman slowly spirals out of control throughout its pages, which are littered with countless references to 1980s fashion and product merchandise. Seriously…the extent of these references has to be seen to be believed:
In the early light of a May dawn this is what the living room of my apartment looks like: Over the white marble and granite gas-log fireplace hangs an original David Onica. It’s a six-foot-by-four-foot portrait of a naked woman, mostly done in muted grays and olives, sitting on a chaise lounge watching MTV, the backdrop of a Martian landscape, a gleaming mauve desert scattered with dead, gutted fish, smashing plates rising like a sunburst above the woman’s yellow head, and the whole thing is framed in black aluminum steel. The painting overlooks a long white down-filled sofa and a thirty-inch digital TV set from Toshiba; it’s a high contrast highly defined model plus it has a four corner video stand with a high-tech tube combination from NEC with a picture-in-picture digital effects system (plus freeze-frame); the audio includes built-in MTS and a five-watt-per-channel on-board amp.
A Toshiba VCR sits in a glass case beneath the TV set; it’s a super-high-band Beta unit and has built-in editing functions including a character generator with eight-page memory, a high-band record and playback, and three-week, eight-event timer. A hurricane halogen lamp is placed in each corner of the living room. Thin white venetian blinds cover all eight floor-to-ceiling windows. A glass top coffee table with oak legs by Turchin sits in front of the sofa, with Steuben glass animals placed strategically around expensive crystal ashtrays, from Fortunoff, though I don’t smoke.
And it goes on. And on. For pages. This kind of reading gets tedious fast, but in experiencing it I believe its effect is supposed to mirror the increasing insanity of the protagonist/serial killer. Bateman’s life is spent trying to find meaning and happiness in stuff, only to be tormented by his own need to satisfy his homicidal tendencies (his words, not mine). After several hundred references to fashion designer clothing and expensive gadgets, the meaningless of yuppie culture sinks in without any explicit diatribes on the author’s part. It’s quite clever.
American Psycho is best known for its casual and unconcerned description of violence. These scenes start out innocent enough, such as a description of one of Bateman’s past conquests:
A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that “Life is full of endless possibilities.” I tried valiantly not to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner.
Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year. That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low hanging branch, three miles away. My rages at Harvard were less violent than the ones now and it’s useless to hope that my disgust will vanish — there is just no way.
But as the Bateman continues his downward spiral, the scenes become increasingly grotesque — almost to unimaginable levels. The language is so shocking that it’s difficult to read, though I was most affected by his casual murdering of a small child at the zoo, rather than his extreme cannibalistic tendencies.
In the end, if you’re a fan of the cult film, I highly recommend you take some time to explore the novel. It was penned by an author who was just 27 years of age — younger than I am today. Yet it shows a depth and complexity beyond its author’s years.
