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

I have no idea how that happened so fast, but either way you can’t now enter the local shopping centre without being bombarded by Now That’s What I Call The Best Xmas… Ever! (Vol.64). In honour of the season, I thought, time allowing, that I’d do some little case studies on some of the songs currently assaulting your ears as you shop. You may hate all Christmas music, or you may love it – personally I’ve never minded it much – but pop singles are like miniature time capsules, so examining their gender politics, and what happens to these when new artists cover them, is one way to divert your brain into a state of broad feminist contemplation rather than all-out anti-consumerist rage in the queue at HMV¹.

Um. I said contemplation. But I can’t guarantee that every vid embedded in this series I’m proposing won’t have you reaching for a pretty stiff drink.

Been an Awful Good Girl

Anyway! Cast your mind, readers, back to the postwar baby boom – specifically 1953. Elizabeth II ascends the throne here in the UK! Everest is climbed and DNA discovered! And the volume of the Kinsey Reports titled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, an attempt to research women’s sexual appetites and desires, is published to great controversy and brouhaha. And in December, this guy called Hugh Hefner launches some magazine or other and sells over 54,000 copies. The cultural melting pot for the sexual revolution of the Sixties is neatly bubbling away.

Christmas novelty smash hits have become a Thing since the War – White Christmas came out in 1942. And into this arena slinks Santa Baby, recorded by Eartha Kitt and penned by Joan Javits (a Republican Senator’s niece). It sashays onto the airwaves with a ba-boom-ba-boom of barbershoppy backing vocals, tongue shoved firmly in its cheek.

These days it’s been heard so often and covered enough times that people seem to have forgotten that it’s witty, that it actually stands out as distinct from more earnest fare like White Christmas. White Christmas is about a generation of people longing for their loved ones during the War. It dreams of idyllic peacetime Christmases. Santa Baby, on the other hand, is a playful and sly kick in the tender area for rising peacetime consumerism, as well as a tale of a trophy wife who always wants more stuff, from yachts to platinum mines to rings (not on the phone). In 1954 Eartha re-recorded a version called This Year’s Santa Baby, the lyrics of which reveal that the yacht wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and our heroine still isn’t satisfied.

Come And Trim My Christmas Tree / With Erotic Capital From Tiffany

For the feminists in the queue at HMV, especially those being subjected to the Pussycat Dolls version, this is naturally not unproblematic, not least because the kind of woman the song portrays appears to be exactly what Catherine Hakim, in her book Honey Money, wants women to aspire to be like. Without any tongue in cheek about it. And Honey Money only came out this year, despite the fact that it appears to be the product of what happens when you take Eartha Kitt completely literally. The gold digger the song portrays is a popular stereotype, and the song’s contemporary with the postwar rise in popularity of the “male breadwinner” family model, which wasn’t economically feasible across all social classes. More generally, of course, it’s a riff on a whole social trope around women’s bodies and feminine sexual allure as a source of transactional power.

I think for a lot of people, being exposed to the versions Kylie, the ‘Dolls et al have come out with has somehow managed to dampen our sense of the irony within the original – which makes more sense within the context of more ‘wholesome’ Fifties Christmas music, which it does snerk at, and class politics of the time – perhaps because newer versions are contemporary with many songs that aren’t particularly ironic in their appreciation of Worldly Stuff?

Shame, really, because Eartha had this sending up the golddigger stereotype thing pretty down. Check out her recording of Old Fashioned Millionaire, which is similar to Santa Baby but ever so slightly more acerbic, ably sending up cliches of postwar consumerism, patronising Empire-era South Pacific-style racism (which as a mixed race performer she was certainly no stranger to) and middle class pretensions around social properness and upward mobility with lines like “I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence / and an old fashioned millionaire” and “I like Chopin and Bizet / and the songs of yesterday / String quartets and Polynesian carols / But the music that excels / is the sound of oil wells / as they slurp-slurp-slurp into the barrels…”

Some Very Different Covers

There are a lot of other covers of the song out there, like the bratty pop-punk stylings of the Dollyrots – Wikipedia lists loads. Most notable for me, in very different ways, are these two.

RuPaul’s 1997 cover takes precisely no prisoners, announcing “Been an awful good queen”, and adding in caustic asides like “Now honey, Miss RuPaul has been so good, it just hurts, and now I want you to reciprocate… by givin’ me a few ITEMS, you know…” and the wink-nudge reply to “come and trim my Christmas tree…” of “Honey, you ain’t trimmin’ nothin’.”

Surely after that glorious effort there was nowhere else the song could really go, right?

Wrong!

Santa Buddy

From the sublime, dear readers, to the ever so slightly ridiculous.

For lo, Santa Baby has just this year been covered again by – wait for it – Michael Bublé, god-emperor of bland, whose official site bio at the time of writing boasted frankly awesomely reality-disconnected statements like “his essence remains solid as a rock”, and “like Elvis”. But let’s not stare into that particular abyss too long – back to Santa Baby, for which Bublé’s version has completely rewritten the lyrics to recast the entire song as being about… um… a straight dude who likes presents.

That’s it.

No erotic funny business round here; Michael’s after CARS and FOOTBALL TICKETS and he’s going to MAKE PLATONIC MANLY BRO-FRIENDS with Santa until he gets them. Clearing all that flirting out the way – presumably to make room for all the “decorations bought from … Mercedes”, because I have NO idea how you hang a car bonnet on a Christmas tree, after all – he cracks out “Santa, buddy” at one point, and makes sure to stipulate that the convertible needs to be “steel blue”, since presumably “light blue” wasn’t quite macho enough. Though I’m not sure it really works, it’s fascinating – and the complete opposite of what RuPaul does with it. He even throws in a fastidiously heteromanly “I’ll wait up for you, dude“, to avoid looking too camp.

Of course, in this, as with nearly everything else Michael Bublé attempts to accomplish that isn’t looking like every photo of him would be marvellously improved by the addition of hungry velociraptors, he fails hilariously.

Mind you, to be fair to Michael, for every alteration he makes to keep the conversation with Santa strictly platonic – “Santa pally” (?!) – he also adds in “been a sweetie all year” rather than Eartha Kitt’s original “been an angel”, and where Eartha has “think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed”, Michael’s got “hotties”, which is pretty gender neutral, the writers clearly being aware that in the marketing niche he belongs in, squarely between Ronan Keating and Will Young, for every five straight middle aged women buying his records, there’s also a pretty significant gay following – he mentioned it himself with some enthusiasm in an interview.

And really, for all the “women like jewellery and men like… CARS” binary implications in there… there’s something about the way he goes “forgot to mention one little thing / cha-ching!” that just isn’t really all that macho after all. It’s almost rather sweet. Or maybe I’ve been looking at all those images of him being stalked by raptors just a bit too much and started feeling sorry for him.

It only seems right to end such a string of different treatments of a song about femininity and consumerism with the ultimate scion of both: Miss Piggy. I truly believe that she is perhaps the only one who’s almost on a par with Eartha herself. Think of all the froggies she hasn’t kissed!

Enjoy your Christmas shopping as far as possible. I’m contemplating tackling Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses next. AREN’T YOU EXCITED. I BET YOU CANNOT WAIT.

1. NB: for the record I’m inclined to think said rage quite justified, but at the same time, you probably can’t afford a criminal damages bill in these pressing times of recession and tinsel.