I have no interest at all in violent movies, nor do I normally read violent books, but I have been curious about the status of American Psycho (1991) as a post modern classic since interviewing Justine Ettler – the author of The River Ophelia, who did her PhD thesis on Ellis’s work.
Ettler wrote a paper, Sex Sells Dude: A Re-examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of American Psycho in 2014, which I read – or reread, I suppose I first read it in preparation for the interview – when I was about a third of the way through the book.
American Psycho is written in the first person as the account of a highly paid (and underworked) broker, Patrick Bateman, in a Manhattan merchant bank. He is 26; is always beautifully turned out, is in fact fanatical about both his clothes and his body; is a fan of Donald Trump, seeking glimpses of Donald and Ivana (then in their forties, a couple of years before Trump’s casinos filed for bankruptcy, and more than a decade before The Apprentice) in the street and in restaurants; imagines himself loved by beautiful young women, not least his secretary, and to all of whom he behaves despicably, not least when he imagines he isn’t.
His accounts of his meetings with his best friend, Timothy Price, his fellow merchant bankers with whom he goes to bars, nightclubs and dinners, with his fiancee Evelyn and her friend and his sometime lover, Courtney, are interspersed with descriptions of random acts of violence, which I am inclined to take as imagined, though I gather that they are often read as real (that is, I believe the narrator is fantasising rather than describing). So, for instance, Ettler writes “American Psycho is an impossibly ambiguous story narrated by an impossibly unreliable protagonist, … a serial killer who works on Wall Street.”
I’m tense, my hair is slicked back, Wayfarers on, my skull is aching, I have a cigar – unlit – clenched between my teeth, am wearing a black Armani suit, a white cotton Armani shirt and a silk tie, also by Armani. I look sharp but my stomach is doing flip-flops … I brush past a crying bum, an old man, forty or fifty, fat and grizzled, and just as I’m opening the door I notice, to top it off, that he’s also blind and I step on his foot, which is actually a stump, causing him to drop his cup …
Ellis was young when he wrote this, 26 like his protagonist, though it’s his third novel. And he has a young man’s desire to shock, all the while satirising peak greed – the elevation of the Wall Street banker to demigod which characterised the 1980s.
AP has no plot, just a slow reveal of Bateman’s inner vileness as he goes about his ordinary, privileged life, eating, drinking, taking drugs with his equally privileged fellows; dating or picking up women in bars, employing prostitutes singly and in pairs; sometimes even putting in a few hours in the office.
I didn’t read the violence as real, but as a statement about the misogyny of male dominated merchant banking (then and now); skip reading the increasingly gory descriptions as I do when reading crime fiction. Ettler writes about pornography followed by violence – and I’ll come to that shortly – but in fact it is the violence that is pornographic, both here and in crime fiction. Too many readers, and writers too, probably, get off on detailed descriptions of death and dismemberment.
Ettler’s point is that Ellis’ flat prose leads from descriptions of clothing to descriptions of sexual activity, and without a break, to descriptions of the most horrible violence, “conditioning readers to associate the erotic with the representation of extreme violence towards women”. That is, she argues that the book itself is misogynistic.
In her conclusion she vehemently disagrees with “recent scholarship which argues the scenes [four violent scenes which Ellis refused to excise] are part of the novel’s postmodernity and claims that they are either fantasies, because Bateman is an unreliable narrator, or that they are textual appropriations.”
I found another critical essay, by another Australian academic, Donna Lee Brien, Professor of Creative Industries at Central Queensland University, who argues “there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well.”
And goes on “the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream.”
Right now, I am somewhere between the two. I accept that Ellis’ project was to satirise “selfish consumption” by taking it to its ultimate extreme; but I take Ettler’s point that by making that extreme the violation of women’s bodies he is embodying that misogyny which his intention was to criticise.
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Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho, first pub. 1991. 390pp. (my edition, Picador, 2011, not the one pictured.)
Justine Ettler, ‘Sex Sells, Dude’: A Re-examination of the Mass Media Feminist Critique of American Psycho, Outskirts Online Journal, UWA, Volume 31, Nov. 2014.
Brien, D. L. (2006). The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment. M/C Journal, 9(5). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2657