American Psycho

The reader sees the extreme superficiality of the world the characters inhabit in Chapter 4, when Bateman’s friends lose interest in the woman with the slightly flawed knee. Their world is one where youth, virility, and status are paramount. This is why Bateman spends so much time and money on his grooming and exercise routines. It is also why Price ridicules Stash after the dinner party. As Bateman observes, Stash’s clothes are “ill fitting […] his net worth a pittance” (12). He has a “cheap, bad haircut” (20). Indeed, Bateman says, Stash’s hair is bad “because it’s cheap” (20). Markers of status and quality are inextricably, though in some ways arbitrarily, linked to perceptions of cost. Restaurants and Armani suits are seen as good because they are expensive, just as much as they are expensive because they are good. They are valued because they exclude others. This is summed up by the name of Bateman’s health club, “Xclusive” (65). The reader also sees this when Price delights at teasing and humiliating homeless people with his money.

Behind the bravado of consumeristic enjoyment lies something broken. Even for the supposed “winners” in this world, life is characterized by addiction and frustration. Evelyn, Bateman’s fiancée, is hooked on antidepressants. Price and Bateman are dependent on cocaine. And social life is organized around the continual and excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. These problems both cause and impact the characters’ inability to connect with each other. The reader sees this most graphically in the opening chapter with Evelyn and Bateman. Giving up on sex, they lie watching “the Home Shopping Club” (23), a parade of obscure items, “glass dolls, embroidered throw pillows, lamps shaped like footballs” that they could not possibly want (23). Their sexual and emotional lives are dysfunctional and narcissistic; they are warped and mediated by the very consumerism that controls other aspects of their existences. The reader sees this, for instance, when Bateman masturbates to a Calvin Klein ad.

Things are not better in the other relationships portrayed in the novel. McDermott’s story about a woman who wore a glove during a sex act is a grim metaphor for the disconnect and fear existing between men and women. This is exacerbated and symbolized by the threat of HIV, which was poorly understood at the time. Men and women manipulate and use each other. As Price says, one must “act differently from how one feels to get sex, guys” (51). In other words, men must lie and perform to get women. This attitude is justified by the idea that the women they meet are only really interested in what restaurant they can take them to.

Meanwhile, relationships between the male characters are defined by petty competition. The reader sees this in the scene with the business cards. As with Evelyn and Bateman, relationships between men are mediated by products. Products are a proxy for who is the most successful in a social and economic sense. Competition matters far more to Bateman then any relationship. His intense feelings of jealousy and depression over having an inferior business card contrast markedly with his indifference to the idea that Evelyn might be cheating on him.

This begins to spill over into violent thoughts and behaviour. Evelyn is turned on by Bateman’s professed lack of concern when she tells him that Stash has HIV and that this may well transmit to Vanden. In the absence of emotional connection and intimacy, violence and cruelty can quickly become the default way human beings relate to each other and feel alive.

This is especially and increasingly the case with Bateman. He talks about wanting to masturbate to a scene in Body Double where “the woman is getting drilled to death by a power drill” (67). He thinks about ripping off the arms of a woman he meets in a club and slicing open the face of his “friend” McDermott with a serrated edged knife. Bateman’s psychopathic tendencies reach a head with Patricia, the woman he meets for a date in Chapter 8. Bateman says that he will not kill her and “won’t get any pleasure from watching her bleed […] by cutting her throat […] or gouging her eyes out” (74). However, he takes bloodstained sheets to a drycleaner in the next chapter. This and his graphic descriptions suggest he killed someone, if not her. His violence, which until then was only seen in Bateman’s thoughts and which reflects the implicit violence of his world, finally spills over into reality.