The Plot Sickens

To focus on misogyny is to obscure American Psycho’s scope, to ignore that the book is an uncompromising, unapologetic vortex of misanthropy and nihilism. Its narrator expresses disgust, contempt, anxiety and fear towards women, gay people, art students, Jewish people, the non-WASP, the homeless, the poor – anyone, in fact, who differs even by a small degree (a marginally more impressive business card, a better restaurant table) from the ideal which Bateman forces himself to emulate and sustain. Men in the novel are portrayed as unsympathetically as women, and dispatched as dispassionately – so why is it the torture and death of women that seems to abide with the reader?

Chip Kidd’s cover redesign for Picador, 2011

Like all satire, the book exaggerates and burlesques that which already exists. The book’s scenes of torture and murder were, apparently, all based on Ellis’ reading of real life cases and criminology textbooks, not whimsically called into being by him. So American Psycho on one level is an uncensored, unsanitised exposé of what has already been done to women without any incitement or instruction from its author. Neither does Ellis’ writing give the impression that violence against women is in any way attractive. The impression it does give, to me at least, is that violence against women is horrifying, viscerally disgusting, and the preserve of fucked-up, nightmarish individuals who are increasingly prevalent during a stage of socio-economic development which encourages selfishness and greed over empathy, and whose actions are increasingly ignored or disbelieved within the same environment. His work is a mirror, not a manifesto or an instruction manual. To posit it as something qualitatively worse either than crimes actually committed against women throughout history, or to the presentation of sexualised violence or serial killing in almost any other area of the entertainment world, seems dubious.

It’s worth noting too how the deaths of Bateman’s victims are affected by their socio-economic background. Having decided against the murder of his date Patricia – a minor character so boringly materialistic that I’m fully on board with the theory that takes her to be Patrick’s imaginary female persona – Bateman reflects on whether it’s ‘her family’s wealth [that] protects her tonight’. In contrast, the vagrants and call girls he kills are already economic casualties, considered disposable even before they become casualties of violence. No character from society’s lower strata appears to be missed; it is only Paul Owen, Patrick’s peer and rival, whose disappearance is considered deserving enough to warrant a police investigation. The crude and blatant contrast between Bateman’s lifestyle and that of his victims – their disparity in wealth, and therefore in power, is explicitly fetishized in more than one encounter – which calls attention to the issue of why the victims of such killers are so often sex workers, or homeless, or transient, both male and female:

“Within police culture… we know that if a prostitute goes missing and is reported as missing, that they won’t be given the same priority as other people would get… [sex workers are not] valued enough in our culture for the police to take it seriously.”

– David Wilson, Howard League for Penal Reform

– again intertwining a socio-economic indictment with a proto-feminist impulse.

The Plot Thickens

Redesign for Picador’s 40th anniversary (Neil Lang)

One could argue incessantly about whether the book itself is misogynistic, or edifying, or indeed readable, but a
more productive debate centres on whether one can like art that one also acknowledges as problematic. When reading Anwyn Crawford’s excellent critique of the treatment of women in the lyrics and prose of that other aging enfant terrible, Nick Cave, I wasn’t convinced by all of her analysis – Cave’s work at least in its earlier phases seems, like Ellis, preoccupied with morbidly examining a pathologised masculinity rather than valorising it – but the most substantial point I drew from the ensuing debate was that the issue may be less such works themselves and more their involvement in the mainstreaming, acceptance and excusing of problematic attitudes. The gynophobic aspects of these works are made respectable by being cloaked as edgy or transgressive, when they merely dramatise the violence and inequality that already exists. Although I still contend that the violence in Ellis’ writing is not there as intentional titillation, as long as there are those for whom such things are lived experience, rather than escapist fantasy or performance material, then there will be a correspondingly visceral response to their artistic portrayal.

Although readers who read for prurient or puerile pleasure are hardly something for which writers can bargain or legislate, questions can be asked about the cachet Ellis manages to retain in the world of Guardian profiles and Soho salons, when other works of equally politicised and equally slapstick splatterpunk – Dennis Cooper, say, or Stewart Home, or even The SCUM Manifesto – languish in the ‘cult fiction’ gutter. Helen Zahavi’s brilliant Dirty Weekend, a novel published the same year as American Psycho, explores similar themes but blurs the lines between victim and perpetrator. There are marked stylistic differences, sure – Zahavi uses lyrical prose to distance or distract the reader from the trauma and gore she describes, whereas Ellis more or less rubs the reader’s face in it – and the violence of Zahavi’s protagonist is entirely reactive: she wishes only to be left alone and when she is not, she strikes out and strikes upwards. Dirty Weekend, despite receiving polarised reviews on publication, has had nothing like the long-term vilification heaped upon American Psycho, but by the same token has received far less enduring acclaim or even attention.

Maybe it’s just Ellis’ pre-existing status as wunderkind author of Less Than Zero that elevates his subsequent work. Or it might be the very obviousness of his traditionalist politics – American Psycho has more than a bit in common with something like Last Exit to Brooklyn, a cult novel of 1964 which also enlists depictions of depravity and sexual violence in the service of what can look an awful lot like proscriptive neo-puritanism. Is there more mainstream space for works which reproduce existing social structures and power relations, which, even if they challenge their existence, do so through the evidently ambiguous strategies of grotesque exaggeration or reductio ad ridiculum rather than direct disruption? For all its horrified laughter at the state we’re in, American Psycho isn’t in the business of imagining alternatives to it.

Marshall Arisman’s cover for Vintage Books’ UK edition

I read the book as a deeply moral – disappointingly puritan, if you like – anti-capitalist and even vaguely feminist tract. American Psycho is a house built with the tools of the master: it is, just like 1980s capitalism, crass, lurid, vulgar, heavy-handed and unapologetic. It bludgeons home its basic homily, that consumerism fails to make us happy or to lend meaning to our lives, with all the subtle and delicate artistry of a Reagan speech. But beyond this, in 2012 it’s undeniable that the values and trends the book castigated two decades back have only become more deeply entrenched. Does the book’s earnest, and still depressingly relevant, indictment of capitalism and consumerism excuse its scenes of rape, torture and murder? Maybe not, but I think those who criticise the book on these grounds, like those who called for its suppression and boycott twenty years ago, end up alienating a potential if problematic ally.

Nightmares on Wall Street

It’s hard to take seriously much that Ellis says, about either this book in particular or his work in general. A lot of his public pronouncements deal in Dylanesque obfuscation, or deliberate outrage-baiting – his Twitter account alone is a masterclass in trolling – which makes it both absurd and unfortunate that his work is so often perceived as deadly serious and condemned on the same grounds. His explanations of the origins of American Psycho, though, have the ring of sincerity, and place the book in opposition to the impact of 1980s society and culture on the individual male:

‘the book is, need I even say this, a criticism of a certain kind of masculinity and a certain kind of white male, heterosexual, capitalist, yuppie scumbag behavior.’

– Bret Easton Ellis, 2011

‘Whenever I am asked to talk American Psycho, I have to remember why I was writing it at the time and what it meant to me. A lot of it had to do with my frustration with having to become an adult and what it meant to be an adult male in American society. I didn’t want to be one, because all it was about was status. Consumerist success was really the embodiment of what it meant to be a cool guy.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2011

‘[Bateman] was crazy the same way [I was]. He did not come out of me sitting down and wanting to write a grand sweeping indictment of yuppie culture. It initiated because of my own isolation and alienation at a point in my life. I was living like Patrick Bateman. I was slipping into a consumerist kind of void that was supposed to give me confidence and make me feel good about myself but just made me feel worse and worse and worse about myself.’
– Bret Easton Ellis, 2010

Fay Weldon, one of very few women to positively review the novel, did so while emphasising its anti-capitalist aspects. Elizabeth Young, too, identified Patrick Bateman as not a character but a cipher indicating the nihilism and emptiness of yuppie culture and identity.

Bateman is of course capitalism’s dirty little secret – the madman in the attic. His sociopathy is mirrored in the socio-economic inequality and political insincerity around him. In his world, the atomised and alienated dealings of colleagues, friends and lovers are highlighted through contrast with the visceral intimacy of murder, and Ellis’ stylistic trick of detailing frenzied sex and violence in flat and clinically dispassionate prose does not disguise that as a form of human encounter it carries more weight than Bateman’s ritualised interactions with colleagues or his sexless and loveless interactions with girlfriends. His narration frequently betrays a yearning for consummation, contact and engagement in the midst of the desperate aching loneliness, the longing for meaning (even Bateman’s violence is purposeless and arbitrary) which permeates the book. In a society so unsustainably alienating and unequal that the centre plainly cannot hold, we see how badly things can fall apart.

Psycho Drama

Accused of having written ‘a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women’, Ellis found himself subject to boycotts, hate mail, death threats and violent revenge fantasies, on the basis that he had clearly written this book as either wish-fulfillment or glamorised incitement. Detractors of the book and author on these grounds display a puzzling inability to distinguish between creator and creation, which as a first principle is utterly bizarre – where is it written that characters must necessarily be extensions of an approving creator?

The novel contains a few dozen pages in amongst four hundred or so on the torture and dismemberment of women – and of men – though their impact is disproportionate. These scenes – often ludicrous, often grotesque to the point of comedy – are presented as a logical extension of the lack of empathy and mindless, numb urge to consume that characterise the world in which they take place. They don’t seem written in order to arouse any more than the determinedly un-erotic, sterile sex scenes do, or the interminable deconstructions of clothes, cosmetics and Huey Lewis’ back catalogue. The book gradually reaches a point where reading about all three feels indistinguishable in its horrific, unrelenting tedium.

The chapters in which sexual violence occurs are also, helpfully, almost all headed ‘Girls’, so you are able to avoid reading them – or I guess, according to how your tastes run, to read them in isolation and dispense with the rest of the book. I got through these scenes gingerly on my first read, treating it as a kind of endurance test, but tend to skip them on subsequent reads as they aren’t the reasons I revisit the book. I read American Psycho in the same semi-masochistic spirit in which I watch, for instance, Chris Morris’ and Charlie Brooker’s hipster-eviscerating Nathan Barley, a work also bleakly amusing, also received with disbelief and criticism of its gratuitousness, and also concerned with the consequences of elevating surface over meaning, although its slack-jawed, skinny-jeaned targets were more symptom than cause – and arguably Ellis had already been there, done that, too, with 1998’s Glamorama. I read American Psycho like I’d read any work which explored capitalism, consumerism and their messy, distasteful effects, from Voyage au bout de la nuit to The Hunger Games. (But not de Sade. Sometimes life’s just too short.)

Finally, if perhaps most obviously, it takes some effort to read Ellis’ presentation of Bateman’s attitude or actions as approving. Unlike, say, Thomas Harris depicting Hannibal Lecter, or the creators of Dexter, he gives his anti-hero little in the way of charisma or appeal. Mary Harron’s film of the novel, produced a decade after it when the stardust of the 1980s had settled somewhat, arguably does more than the book to establish Ellis’ unreliable narrator as a slick and stylish seducer rather than a pathetic interchangeable fantasist. Despite the subversive nature of Harron’s direction, Christian Bale’s tour-de-force performance renders Bateman far more compelling than his written incarnation, who is overtly racist, misogynistic and homophobic as well as dim, snobbish, superficial, chronically insecure, socially awkward, a hopeless conversationalist, and tediously obsessed with material goods. If it weren’t for the fact that almost every other character displays exactly the same character traits, it’s conceivable that the novel’s Bateman could make his dates expire of boredom without any need to break out the pneumatic nail-gun.

It’s interesting too that the film’s elevation of Bateman is bound up with its objectification of him, particularly via its concentration on his character’s proto–metrosexual aspects, but that’s a whole other essay.

• Catch the second part of this post here

A few points before we go any further:

• This is us revisiting Suzanne Collins’s books, mainly, and looking at the characters we like, and how the books – for us – jigsaw with other franchises out there. Back in the mists of time, Team BadRep’s Jenni also talked about the books on here in a more spoiler-free, introductory way.
• SPOILER WARNINGS are all over this. Do not read this post if you want to read the books unspoilered.
• Sarah’s been interviewing the cast of the movie over on Den of Geek, and you can read those posts here, here, and here.
• As Bucky and I haven’t seen the press screenings, we’ll maybe be back to talk about the movie later.

On Those Triangular Twilight Comparisons

Miranda: I made a blog post the other week elsewhere on the internets about how the movie franchise is being merched, as far as I can tell, in a way which visually dovetails with a lot of Twilight merch, and the disappointment I feel around that. Nonetheless, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling trilogy is, I think, using the love triangle motif in an effective, nuanced way. So while the Twilight comparisons might be short-sighted, they’re not unreasonable. But what do my friends think?

Bucky: OK, so here’s my big confession: I sort of love Twilight. It’s the reading equivalent of eating popcorn, plus I’m a sucker for romance, which should be apparent in the fact that even the most depressing things I write are always thinly-veiled love stories. My beef with Twilight was the general mormon-propaganda shittiness. I could totally have gone for a general horror-lite romance WITHOUT the abominable gender politics and chastity stuff.

Throughout the first book, it was apparent that this wasn’t just going to be a vapid romance, which was fine and the nature of pitting them against each other sort of insisted that the romance be downplayed, but across the three books I was disappointed by the things that didn’t happen – when the action/adventure/1984 stuff took over the romantic hook was still what kept me reading!

Sarah: I think comparisons to Twilight are kind of irrelevant here, because they’re completely different stories in completely different genres. Twilight is a romance, and The Hunger Games is… well, anything but that. It’s an action/thriller/horror with strong anti-war sentiments, and I think reading The Hunger Games for the romance is doing it a massive disservice.

In particular, getting overly invested in the love triangle element is missing the point, because Gale and Peeta aren’t really individuals, they’re metaphors.

Bucky: OK, I’ll give you that it’s an unfair comparison, but there’s no escaping the Love Triangle parallels, Collins just uses it as a device to much greater effect, rather than pinning an entire series of books on it.

On the Boys

Sarah: Like I say, I think the boys are, in part, metaphors – Gale in particular, which is why the idea that anyone would declare themselves “Team Gale” utterly baffles me. Because what does Gale stand for? Anger. Revenge. He’s a hunter; he’s kind of Old Testament-y. He’s very black and white, and not very interested in forgiveness. He’s initially presented as having the most in common with Katniss: they have the same background, they live in the same area, they look like each other, they’re very close friends and their lives seem very similar. But even right at the beginning, she’s restraining him. He’s shouting about rebellion in the woods while she tries to calm him down and keep him safe. He just gets more violent as the books go on, and it’s his bombs that kill a bunch of innocent children. Gale is basically a terrorist, and his is no way to build a future.

Bucky: I do like what you’re saying about Gale. I think all the main characters are realised brilliantly, because they’re people, compromised and damaged people with their own agendas, not pin-ups like they would be in Twilight. But I don’t feel like Collins had such a good handle on Gale’s character in the first book – I think his anger was hinted at but I don’t think she’d made the leap towards thinking that he’d become Anger, Vengeance etc – early on he still has the potential to be a romantic lead and not a product of his society. Peeta is pretty great, in retrospect. He’s a well created character.

Sarah: Yeah, Peeta is great. Peeta is so great. It’s not Gale that Katniss seeks out when she wants to feel safe, it’s Peeta. It’s easy to forget how strong he is, because he’s so warm and protective. But Collins makes sure – over and over again, especially in Mockingjay – that he needs to be protected, too. I don’t think I can quite forgive Gale for that line where he says Katniss will choose whichever of them she can’t survive without, because he’s wrong – she’ll pick whoever can’t survive without her, which is clearly Peeta. Peeta is preternaturally calm, loving, and forgiving (until the Capitol breaks him). I think it’s super important for them to be together at the end, because they’re the only ones who understand one another – and they make one another better. They’re different, but their differences make them better equipped to work towards a world that’s better than either the world they grew up in, or the one that Gale and President Coin want.

I think maybe the way Peeta gets broken in Mockingjay is the first time we really appreciate him for who he is. I dunno. I’m still thinking about this.

Miranda: What d’you reckon about this piece over on Bitch, about masculinity in the trilogy? I’m digging it.

Sarah: I like it too. I’m not keen on the view that Katniss isn’t a feminist heroine because she “ends up weak” at the end of the trilogy. YEAH ALRIGHT LET’S SEE YOU GO THROUGH WHAT SHE DOES AND SEE HOW BLOODY XENA-LIKE YOU ARE – I might love Katniss a bit too much. Hmm.

Miranda: I thought it was interesting that they picked up on the “does she need to end up alone? How do feminists find romance in books now?” thing.

Sarah: Yeah – I mean, surely we’re not gonna claim that women can’t be in relationships with men and still be feminist? I think the happy ending, with all of its caveats, was necessary.

The leading lady we've been waiting for? Katniss Everdeen takes aim

“Like Joan of Arc”

Sarah: Katniss’s attitude to sex is worth thinking about, too. She’s almost completely sexless (unless we read between the lines a bit with all the many nights she spends sleeping in Peeta’s arms?) and just not really that interested in romance… but she explains that quite early on, I think, because it’s not a safe enough world that she’s ever really thinking beyond her next meal. I bloody love her, in exactly the same way I love Buffy and Starbuck and all those other tough-because-they-have-to-be women out there in sci-fi/fantasy.

Bucky: I think it’s pretty awesome. I know I wanted romance, but it’s still cool that she just doesn’t have time in her life to care about “petty” stuff like that.

Miranda: This whole area fascinates me. I think Katniss’s story engages with the issue of ‘sexless action heroines’ really well. A lot of my early engagement with feminism came from a place where, sick of all the sexualising/objectifying/insert buzzword here, you know what I’m talking about – I constructed a sort of mental checklist for movies. It involved asking questions like “is the heroine SENSIBLY DRESSED?!” and “is she defined by her romantic attachments (usually to men)?” It was like Bechdel Plus.

I think these remain pertinent questions to ask, and I still ask them. But I also think I spent years mistrusting any heroine who dared to fall in love or wear a V-neck, just in case she was being somehow undermined from somewhere. It’s only recently I’ve begun to engage with heroines like Emma Frost, and also to confront the fact that ‘sexless heroines’ can also feel quite limited in their own way, depending on how they’re written. Often I think we cite a heroine’s lack of sexual desires as evidence for her liberated awesomeness, but this can feel for me like a bit of a red herring, and one that’s still being driven, in a sense, by the same set of patriarchal restrictions. The question about how to write “feminist romance” is therefore an interesting one.

Katniss directly faces off with these questions. The novels show her wrestling a load of societal pressure to live out a romantic narrative and define herself against one – her survival may depend on it. Uunderneath all that, she does struggle with genuine desires for Peeta and Gale, played out against a hugely traumatic backdrop.

I thought it was fascinating – she does find love, but it’s a struggle to get there in fair, real terms. I think Katniss – though Jennifer Lawrence describes her as a Joan of Arc figure in your interview – goes a lot further than many heroines in TVTropes’s Jeanne D’Archetype section because we get to see that struggle played out, with all the paranoia over who’s controlling the narrative that that entails. She moves through a sexless phase, in the process taking on an entire system of oppression in order to discover how she really wants to express her desires, and how to be able to do that safely rather than it being a capitulation of any kind. These are books about struggle, personal and political.

Illustration from the initial range of UK print covers for the books - by Jason Chan

Revolution!

Bucky: I almost like the books more now that you’ve both pointed out the media and propaganda themes that I took for granted – they are, in hindsight, pretty strong ideas to sell to a teenage audience. I like to think that I’m quite media-savvy, but I guess that if I encountered this at a time in my life when I wasn’t then it might have raised some interesting questions.

Sarah: I do super-love that tension Miranda pointed out in her blog post, re: merchandising this franchise when it’s all about the evils of capitalism and in particular the way we exploit people in other countries. I think they should’ve gone with more Mockingjay “symbol of the rebellion” stuff, but in a way Capitol-themed makeup ranges are perfectly apposite.

Bucky: Yeah, the merchandising is insane, especially because propaganda is insanely merchandisable (by its very definition) so to ignore that angle and create “straight” merchandise like a Katniss barbie instead of “in-character” merchandise is just batshit.

In Conclusion…

Bucky: The more I talk to you guys, the more I feel like it’s cool I enjoyed these books and all, but I’m not the person whose life this might make a difference to. I don’t need any more role models, but younger readers might benefit from Katniss and will almost certainly benefit from the way that she isn’t sexualised or defined by her relationships. So that’s pretty cool.

Sarah: I’ve just got back from a press screening of the film. I think Gary Ross really really gets the political aspects of the book, and he’s really explicit about it, and there were at least two new bits he’d put in that made my jaw drop. My review’s over here.

Miranda: ONE DAY TO GO!