Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

[January 2025]

I hallucinate the buildings into mountains, into volcanoes, the streets become jungles, the sky freezes into a backdrop, and before stepping out of the cab I have to cross my eyes in order to clear my vision. Lunch at Hubert's becomes a permanent hallucination in which I find myself dreaming while still awake.

American Psycho follows Patrick Bateman's incessant inner monologue as he navigates working as an investment banker on Wall Street at the end of the 1980s. Bateman comes from a family of immense fortune and lives a life of intense pleasure, despite this, he is coming apart at the seams. Bateman self medicates using prescription psychoactive drugs, nominally illegal drugs, alcohol, retail therapy, and most cathartically, the torture and murder of those less fortunate than himself, all the while losing his tenuous grip on reality.

Now, one might wax moralistic about the fact that Bateman is misogynistic, racist, classist, and how it is a travesty that this book has been written at all, given the gruesome descriptions of mutilation and torture that Bateman revels in, but that really is not the point. Ellis refers to a crucial moment in the history of the commodity market in America, where the advent and proliferation of magnetic tape for storing audio visual information had introduced a new ethic of film-making and viewing to the consumer who could afford it.

video was the perfect medium for the fledgling filmmaker, videocassette itself was the perfect commodity, an all-rounder that was conveniently suited to production, distribution and for collecting. As much as technology engendered the filmmaker, the videocassette gave rise to a new type of audience. Films no longer needed the formal environment of a cinema. The videocassette lent itself to a more personalized experience, a wholly private one if required, much as 16mm and 8mm loops before it.

— David Kerekes, in, Killing for Culture.

Alongside video technology rose a great moral panic over the use of this, relatively cheap, technology to produce pornography and snuff films.

[...] technology is the root of the problem, or the catalyst that creates the problem. It ties in with moral panics and society’s general distrust of populist entertainment, be it the penny gaffs of the 1800s, horror and crime comics of the 1950s, the Beatles in the 1960s, or more recently hip-hop, videogaming and camera phones. In Britain in the eighties, video and the home entertainment explosion delivered the ‘video nasties’ panic. Typically, it was aligned with the corruption of youth, the imminent collapse of moral values, criminal activity and worse. These fears have never truly been laid to rest, and indeed can be found throughout the history of cinema itself.

— David Kerekes, in, Killing for Culture.

And Bateman is the epitome of the fear espoused by the moral panic over video technology; he owns a plethora of equipment for viewing video tapes and laser discs, he expands this collection later, adding a Sony CCD-V200 8mm camcorder, his membership to VideoVisions, a video rental store, costs 250 dollars each year, and he's always returning videotapes, especially Body Double, which he's rented 37 times by his own admission. Not to mention, he does film his mutilation and murder of Torri and Tiffany using a Minox LX ultra miniature camera; not only is Bateman a connoisseur of snuff film, he's a film maker on the scene as well, or at least he thinks he is.

Central to the novel is the construction of unreality, and the very first thing that struck this reader was how descriptions of a multitude of material things, commodities, actually existing articles in the world, can be used to simulate unreality. Patrick Bateman effortlessly and pedantically identifies not only his own garments and accoutrements, but those of his colleagues and acquaintances, and while these are references to actual things, none of it sounds real; partially because Bateman ascribes their creation to their respective brands, rather than the workers whose labour actually produced them, and partially because of the sheer glut of products that blend into one another. Every brand name, cut of cloth, style of drapery, and electronic device estranges Bateman's inner monologue from anything even tangentially related to the real world.

Instead, that Patrick Bateman is indeed a denizen of the world is evidenced through his colleagues; Bateman's admirer, Luis Carutthers despises the Japanese; he won't eat Japanese food, he won't even share space with an Akita. At one point, Harold Carnes tells Truman Drake that the Japanese will own most of the United States by the end of the 1990s. This throwaway line can be traced back to the fact that in the 1970s and 80s Japan was capturing global supply chains across the world through finance capital. By concentrating on banking and trading coupled with avoiding the risks associated with production, Japan began posing a threat to the United States' perceived imperialist acumen.

The appearance of Japanese cars in the United States, and the related decline of Detroit's car companies sparked public awareness of Japan's rising economic fortunes. Some business leaders jumped to learn from Japanese success, showing interest in "quality control" and "corporate culture". Other business leaders sought reprisals against Japan. A wave of public fear emerged. One index was the 1982 murder of a Chinese American, Vincent Chin, mistaken for a Japanese by unemployed white autoworkers in Detroit.

— Anna Tsing, in, The Mushroom at the End of the World.

This apprehension is peppered across the cliques of investment bankers who are central to the functioning of American imperialism, and in an effort to conform, Bateman himself slits the throat of a Chinese delivery boy, mistaking him for Japanese, only realising his blunder on surveying the contents of the food cartons his victim was carrying. These scant references to contemporary political economy are the only dregs of Patrick Bateman's relation to reality. Even the graphic descriptions of his more lascivious sexual encounters are manifestations of his distance from reality, because not only does he manage to witness his sexual acts from points of view other than his own, no single instance of a sex act involving the anus turns up even a speck of excrement, as if it were a pornographic production;

[...] I'm beginning to think that pornography is so much less complicated than actual sex, and because of this lack of complication, so much more pleasurable.

Patrick Bateman is continuously living out his fantasies to escape the tedium of life in finance on Wall Street, and his dissolution into the throngs of finance workers, who really don't need to work, who really should not be working, that populate New York City.