"No introduction necessary"
'American Psycho' is a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, his third after 'Less than Zero' and 'The Rules of Attraction'. It is set in the 1980s, and concerns the misadventures of Patrick Bateman, a successful Wall Street financier who was born into money. When he is not in the office or doing deals in exclusive restaurants, he kills people. Sometimes he tortures his victims, and films their torture; he uses Mace and nail guns and axes and starving rats and microwave ovens to transform his victims into burned, lacerated corpses. He kills men, women and children, and takes great pleasure in doing so. The more he kills, the more he wants to kill.
The book was released by Random House in 1991. Simon & Schuster, Ellis' previous publisher, decided not to publish the book after reading the manuscript, fearing litigation, unwelcome controversy and poor sales. American Psycho is a difficult book. The first half of the novel is a bleak comedy of manners, a numbing catalogue of Bateman's style-obsessed life and beauty regime. It consists mostly of detailed, first-person descriptions of Bateman's clothes, of his apartment, of the brands with which he surrounds himself; he does not really understand the things he owns, he merely knows that he should have them, because he read about them in style magazines. Bateman does not have a personality. He is either dispassionate or angry, and he does not like to fail. The second half of the book introduces mass murder, each chapter of Bateman's life alternating with a monstrous, foreshadowed killing spree. In a chapter entitled 'tries to cook and eat girl', Bateman tries to cook and eat the corpse of a girl he has killed; in a chapter entitled 'kills child at zoo', he kills a child (at the zoo). Bateman is not caught or punished for these acts. No-one suspects him. No-one wants to know. There is a feeling that no-one would care if he confessed his crimes. After all, worse things happened all over the world, every day.
Given that roughly a quarter of the book consists of nothing more than emotionless, matter-of-fact first-person present tense descriptions of horrific torture, 'American Psycho' caused something of a stir. In unshockable critical circles there was a perception that the book was merely a sensationalist riff on Ellis' familiar 'blank generation' schtick, mixed in with elements of Tom Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. Women's groups condemned the book for misogyny, whilst consumers were repelled and attracted in equal measure by the detailed, chapter-long descriptions of Bateman's personal grooming routine, and by the notoriety surrounding the book. It remains today the kind of book which lots of people have heard of, even if they haven't read it, or have just flicked through it in the bookshop in order to see what the nasty bits are like. The book is still in print, and, although it is supposed to be a satire of the 1980s, it seemed for a time as if Ellis had predicted the late-90s dot com boom, and the overpaid, overpraised, interchangeably zany 'personalities' it bred. I used to work for an online listings directory called Scoot. The boss of Scoot was a man called John Molyneux. Just after the dot.com crash, his wife hired a hit man to kill her husband; she went to prison for it. This actually happened.
Along with 'Naked Lunch' and the works of Proust the book was long considered unfilmable; nonetheless, in 2000, BBC documentary film-maker Mary Harron directed a film version. Starring Christian Bale, grown up from 'Empire of the Sun', it was probably the best film that could be made of the book - a black comedy which caused a minor controversy, not for the violence, which was restrained, but for a short three-way sex scene which was trimmed for release in America. Bale was excellent, the direction and music were spot-on, and any film in which a naked, blood-stained man chases a woman through a hotel whilst wielding a screaming chainsaw is a good film, in my book. The film had a mixed reception, being neither rip-roaringly funny enough to become a mainstream hit nor sufficiently true to the book or to any other vision to become an art-house classic. It was a terrible shame that the book's Tom Cruise cameo (Bateman lives in the same apartment block) was not repeated.
For some unexplained reason the novel's ill-fated character 'Paul Owen' became 'Paul Allen' in the film. Whether this was a reference to the head of Microsoft's space programme, I have no idea. A cheap sequel - in name only - was released in 2001, an 'I Still Know What you Did Last Summer' teen-horror cash-in set in California, co-starring William Shatner.
Both book and film are the source of the classic pick up line, "You're a fucking ugly bitch; I want to stab you to death and play with your blood"
Thanks to Walter for pointing out that, in the original draft, I had written that 'Batman' lived in the same apartment block as Tom Cruise. Which, of course, is not true.