Take a Walkman and the most expensive suit you can find, and blast either Whitney Houston’s perfect song How Will I Know or the clearly best track by Huey Lewis and the News – Hip to Be Square. Now grab any old date for tonight and off you go to Dorsia! After a rather mediocre evening you head home, where the axe is already waiting to precisely sever your date’s spine. Et voilà – that’s how easy a day in the life of Patrick Bateman goes.
The fact that this absurdity is often celebrated today in the sigma movement shows how badly the character is misunderstood. Bateman was never meant as a role model, but as a caricature of a narcissistic Wall Street generation. This misreading may come from Christian Bale’s boundless charisma and his near-perfect take on the character from the book. Still, it shouldn’t be too much to ask to pick up on the irony in this work.
Now that I’ve finally read the book too, I feel downright chosen to say my insignificant words about one of the best and most important works about toxic masculinity - American Psycho.
Wall Street in the eighties is full of high-performance bluffers who care about nothing more than standing out from the crowd with their success and their tailored suits. But that’s exactly what drives them even deeper into a uniform mush of Armani jackets, Ralph Lauren trousers and Testoni loafers. But one stands out: Hamilton! Sorry, Halberstam! Or was it Bateman after all? Whatever – in any case the guy with the best tan of them all, who sadly doesn’t own his own sunbed but actually still has to go to the tanning salon himself. The man who enjoys a more intense skincare routine than any influencer. The man who loves talking with his equally rich, not-quite-as-handsome friends about the latest episode of The Betty Winters Show.
The protagonist’s slow decay is probably best reflected in the topics of the show. Where it starts with how to make tuna sandwiches properly, by the later pages of the book it’s already about the ideal way to set a woman on fire. Bret Easton Ellis, the author of the book, knows like no one else how to tell things as absurdly and in as much detail as possible. That goes for everyone’s different outfits every single day just as much as for every murder scene, however gruesome. In places the book reads like a fever dream, and with all its outfit descriptions it may feel very slow and repetitive to some – but it didn’t let go of me for a single moment. So, a clear recommendation to give the book some of your time too.
But Mary Harron, the director of the film, clearly deserves just as much praise. Translating the whole vibe of the book into just over an hour and a half of film takes a lot of skill. Although she regrets nothing more than changing Paul Owen’s name to Paul Allen in the film, I think this name change fits the idea of the book perfectly, since hardly anything is as striking as everyone constantly mixing up each other’s surnames.
Christian Bale: one of the best castings ever, if you ask me. He manages to play every facet of the main character so convincingly that it’s almost uncomfortable. Whatever situation he’s in – he always keeps this cold, almost dead undertone that lets us know nobody is ever safe from him and his thoughts. That uneasy feeling runs through the whole film, which makes it feel surreal and feverish too – a perfect complement to the book.
As mentioned, alongside Fight Club, American Psycho is one of the most important works of the 90s and of the late 20th century in general. It deals in a very special way with toxic masculinity, capitalism and the (right?) way of handling your own thoughts. When a few pages of the book leaked – which, unfortunately, were about the murder of a woman – the work was already making waves and causing a stir before it was even published. How disturbed does a man have to be to describe something like that in so much detail? Over time Ellis even received death threats. But all of this died down once the book was published and people saw what they were really dealing with – to quote the author himself: “It’s just some boring novel.”