Ellis’s first-person account of Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street type who kills between binges of good grooming, was a scandal even before its publication because its first contracted publisher refused to print it. Its horrific, some would say pornographic, depiction of sexual violence continues to raise the question of its value, or more precisely, what the exact nature of its value might be.
The book is a tour de force, a virtuoso permutation of the premise that serial killing (particularly dismemberment) and commodity fetishism are alike in being forms of repetition compulsion characterized by the addictive accumulation of part-objects that are unconsciously intended to substitute for an undeveloped unitary self but can only provide a momentary satisfaction that must be sought again and again (Seltzer, 65).
Self-administered facials and other essentially masturbatory acts of body pampering are implicitly equated with the carving and gouging of victims’ bodies, not merely because they too are indulgences, but also because both constitute the fetishization of part over whole. Fetishized brands displace the body: “I’m able to compose myself by simply staring at my feet, actually at the A. Testoni loafers. . . .” (151).
Bateman monotonously recounts each ritualized stage of his grooming regime, all the while reciting the specs and capacities of the products he applies: “Then I use the Probright tooth polisher and next the Interplak tooth polisher . . . which has a speed of 4200 rpm and reverses direction forty-six times per second” (26). There is a grisly comic aspect to the idea of a cannibal concerned with whitening his teeth.
But the constant referencing of accessories and mechanical apparatus does more than illustrate the fascination with phallic mechanisms so often ascribed to serial killers; nor does it merely foreshadow the later application of drills to the bodies of others in the attempt to lay claim to their mysteries. The function of branding is to bestow an implied affiliation. It is as if the narrator, by naming product brands—which are already fetishized by advertising that designates them as the supplement of a deficient or inadequate self—might somehow provide himself with an identity.
Indeed, the operative analogy may be between serial killing and advertising itself, insofar as consumption practices could not be as they are were it not for the fact that conventional advertising imagery has already acclimated a materialistic populace to the power and provocation of part-objects: the fetishized body parts of women that are in turn linked to the product, the part-object writ large.
“I place a camel-hair coat from Ralph Lauren over her head. . . . I keep shooting nails into her hands until they’re covered” (245). For all the sadism, there is something of the carnivalesque as well: the abject grandeur that the mutilated body has in pulp fiction is degraded by the branded accessories, rather than glorified.
The bland yet insistent way that Bateman habitually catalogues his designer apparel, even as he is torturing some woman, can be seen as the consequence of the mutual dependency and ultimate conflation of obsession and triviality that has been strategically designed by consumerist capitalism.
This alteration and eventual conflation of emotional vacuity and sensation, of nonchalance and sensationalism, is perhaps best encapsulated by the way Ellis segues from Bateman’s horrific description of his consumption of body parts to a banal conversation about the relative merits of different bottled waters (250ff).
Bateman’s uncannily flattened tone conveys a detachment and general absence of affect that is more disquieting than any amount of heavy breathing and slavering. He occasionally displays contemptuous indifference: “I don’t want to ruin this particular Alexander Julian suit by having the bitch spray her blood all over it” (77); but his heart is not in it: I “touch my chest—expecting a heart to be thumping quickly, impatiently, but there’s nothing there, not even a beat” (116).
In the latter third of the book, Bateman’s increasingly frequent anxiety attacks do produce a heightening of disgust: “I start stuffing handfuls of the ham into my mouth, scooping . . . getting it stuck beneath my nails . . . throwing up . . . leaning against a poster for Les Misérables . . . I kiss the drawing . . . leaving brown streaks of bile smeared across [the] soft, unassuming face” (150).
But he is upset by pieces of rabbit smeared with salsa, which “looks like one big gunshot wound” (123), in a way he is never disgusted by the human “meat” he cooks and eats. After poking at the rabbit in “disbelief,” he wipes his finger off on the thigh of his girlfriend (who seems not to notice).
Inattention is a motif and insistent theme of the novel. A friend remains “unfazed” as Bateman “belch[es] into his face . . . greenish bile dripping in strings from . . . bared fangs” (151). Bateman coos at a baby in the arms of its mother, “‘Yes I’m a total psychopathic murderer, oh yes I am, I like to kill people, oh yes I do honey . . . yes I do’”; but the baby only grabs at his credit card.
The cleaners never question his bloody sheets, nor the maid his smeared walls. Unlike Les Misérables, this is no story of the implacable attentions of the law. His confession to friends that on seeing a “hardbody” he wonders “[w]hat her head would look like on a stick” (92) is laughed off, as conversation turns to dinner.
However grotesque, this is comedy of manners, and indeed one of the book’s three epigraphs explicitly refers to a “mannerly” way of doing things and the need for restraint.
To suggest that serial killing is a manifestation of the lack of good manners is not as comically outrageous as it might seem, since the absence of civility, that is, barbarity, is linked to inattentiveness (the subject of the third epigraph), which is in turn associated with lack of affect, the inability to feel appropriately—“the point when your reaction to the times is one of total and sheer acceptance, when your body has become somehow tuned into the insanity” (5–6).
But the question is, is this insanity intended to shock the reader into recognizing something, or even to shock the reader out of something? Is the book a satire? Insofar as Bateman is never censured by his colleagues, the novel might be read as a satiric diagnosis of general socioeconomic tendencies that he personifies to an exaggerated degree.
This would seem to be supported by the book’s first epigraph, which is from Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, a first-person confession of an alienated sadomasochist who “represents a generation” in his thoroughgoing nihilism and desire to be acknowledged by those he despises.
However, there is little, if any, textual evidence to support the contention that the book expresses moral indignation, as some wishful thinkers have pretended in the hope of legitimating it. If it is a satire on the self produced by capitalism, it is a postmodern one in which the recognizable objects of satiric degradation are present but displayed with a self-conscious awareness that is always gesturing toward precedent texts.
Dostoyevsky’s underground man did not have the intertextual benefit of a Madonna song as a soundtrack (“life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone. . . .” [150, 371, 373]). This is by way of saying that Ellis’s narrator is not subterranean but all surface insofar as he is postmodern, just as the scenes at his aptly named club and café (Chernoble [sic], Nowheres) provide a postmodern take on urban anomie (disorientation due to the absence of traditional value-communities).
The urban postmodern is conceived as performance even when it is not: “people pass, oblivious, no one pays attention, they don’t even pretend to not pay attention” (150). Bateman performs the serial killer role; he enhances his monstrous self-image by having himself witnessed on video by his victims, thereby becoming a performer of monstrosity like the guests on the talk show he habitually watches.
Ellis makes no attempt to produce the impression of interiority or depth. Bateman does not narcissistically confuse himself with others, nor does he seek to fill the void with the victims he consumes, as (Ellis knows) serial killers are supposed to do. He is nothing but surface. After forthrightly telling a masseuse that he fantasizes transfusing the blood of a dog into a girl, she tells him, “‘Oh Mr. Bateman, your face is so clean and smooth. . . .’” (117).
More (or, rather, less) than this, Bateman is sheer textuality, as much as his designer clothes are. “[T]here is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. . . . Myself is fabricated, an aberration” (376–377).
But if he could be said to come by an identity through acts of identification, it is identification with texts. Even his name identifies him as a monster of intertextual reference (during a restaurant conversation Bateman refers to Eddie Gein, the real-life prototype for Psycho’s Norman Bates).
The textuality of identity is one of the many significations of the ongoing competition regarding who has the most impressively designed business card (Bateman’s are “bone-colored”). Immediately after trying to strangle a homosexual (who misreads the attack as rough sex), the narrator is asked to arbitrate a question of style.
He responds in a manner that parodies style magazines, though it is not clear whether this is intentional: “While a tie holder is by no means required businesswear, it adds to a clean, neat overall appearance. . . .” (160).
This exemplifies how his consciousness is a construct produced by what the literary theorist and Dostoyevsky expert Mikhail Bakhtin terms polyphonic discourse—a clamoring of competing voices and texts: TV talk shows, pop songs, horror videos, tabloid newspapers, fashion, cuisine, technology, celebrity culture, exercise regimes, money markets, hair mousse—each claiming, but all failing, to hold the self in place.
If it is nihilism for Bateman to claim “[e]ach model of human behavior must be assumed to have some validity” (377), it is a distinctly postmodern type: “Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in . . .” (375).
Sources
Annesley, James. Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto Press, 1998.
Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. Basingstoke/Oxford, England: Picador, 1991.
Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York/London: Routledge, 1998.
Simpson, Philip. Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis, Psychological Novels
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