Brett Easton Ellis’ famed book turned movie starring Christian Bale, American Psycho; begins its descent into delusion with the imagery of foreboding red inscriptions quoting what Dante in his Inferno claimed to be on the gates of Hell greeting those who enter: “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” Blood red, as the text details.
According to Ellis, his writing portrays a psychotic episode in textual representation. Dialogues as long as Ayn Rand’s monologues about anything, everything down to the minute smallest detail. Eyes viewing with obsessive compulsion, more than mere perfectionism; endless knowledge of memorized factoids about average apparel (at least, for Patrick Bateman’s class); and grandiosity all the while in a state of free-fall. Seemingly with no ground to finally crash down onto. Never is it told in the course of the nearly 400 pages of descent if the character portrayed is psychotic by nature or developed disorder…. Psycho being in the title, the implication is less of a mere fantasy from an unreliable narrator like Hubert Humphrey in Nabokov’s infamous Lolita, more an actual psychopath’s inner monologue after reaching past the point of depersonalization.
Whether the presented perspective in the book is merely embellished from insane insight or delusional delight, is up to interpretation.
Brett Easton Ellis has stated in interviews that Bateman is quite largely based on his own mental fugue of experience in the 1980s as a closeted, repressed homosexual. Readers and viewers of American Psycho might pause with that remark, given in both film and novel the character Luis makes explicit advances on Patrick; one must also consider the time, place and taste.
Sexuality is a part of the human animal, for better or worse. A procreative prerogative paired with intelligent imagination. Similarly, that Homo Sapiens have animalistic impulses—harsher hobbies— often not disconnected to sexuality is true. Domesticated dogs are often neutered for a reason— it’s called ‘fixed’ quite ironically. Like sexuality barbaric, brutal behaviors are also loaded into the genetic gun. Like a dog, even neutered, humans get frustrated (to say the least) in said regard.
Definitionally, the word psycho means, “a mentally sick or neurotic person.” Psychotic and Neurotic differ in detail; though are slight synonyms. Psychotic, coming out of psycho, lending then to the term ‘psychosis’ which is defined as, “a major mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of personality.” In relation to Neurosis, such is, “less serious than a psychosis, marked by severe anxiety, depression and the like, without any apparent physical origin.” Then lending to Psychoneurosis, being a more direct verbiage for the idea of a neurotic individual (New Webster’s Medical Dictionary, 1981).
A state of psychosis implies neurosis whereas neuroticism in of itself is not psychotic. Psychoneurotic goes with neurosis, meaning a psychotic individual is psychoneurotic; however psychoneurosis on its own is not an implicit signal for psychosis; only neurosis.
A better illustration to this, in less graphic though nearly melancholic lense: the 1980s dark fantasy Nietzschean film The Never Ending Story. Also based on a book, the movie makes a montage of the collapse of imagination— life in a sense for the human animal as we consciously live— into a literal gaping void of Nothing. Only is it resurrected by the reader of the story, who has to have the power of a truly wondrous, childlike, naïve imagination.
Without imagination a person is, like Patrick Bateman, an automation. Alive, but a person without a person. Going through the motions of harsher hobbies, his being external rather than purely personal. Bateman exists in a banal branch of the American Upper Class in New York. Working despite not having to, the life of upper echelon business surrounds him. While he’s shown to not be the sole solipsist in a state of decay— all around his colleagues are consuming copious amounts of cocaine, fretting over suits and sluts, competing over better business cards, etcetera— it directly gives the perspective of his own person, without a person. Psychotic, past the point of neurotic depersonalization. The title of the book cannot be clearer in connotation for the contents of its pages: an American Psycho.
Chicken or the egg: what came first, the economic situation or mental illness?
To defer to Mark Fisher, hauntological philosopher of lost futures and acid communism; in his K-Punk writings speaking in various essays in regards to activities seen as degenerate, the difference in deviancy is quite little regardless of class position. What closes up the gap, according to Fisher, can be summed up as an extreme boredom of the banal bullshit; to the point of neurosis, leading to psychosis.
Foregoing any conclusion to Patrick’s confession, it amounts to a completely void story. Not ending in arrest or death, simply five capitalized words stating: “THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.”
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