The epigraph of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is a line from Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Report from the Besieged City’; “a rat became the unit of currency”. This absurd formulation is the ideal introduction to a fictional universe caught in the death throes of late capitalism, an era in which the notion of monetary value has been obfuscated and rearticulated as mysterious neon crawls across looming skyscrapers. In this eerily prescient novel (published well before the 2008 financial crisis, itself caused by predatory lending schemes), 28 year old Eric Packer is a multi-billionaire asset manager whose fortunes (financial and otherwise) plummet during an interminable limousine ride to get a haircut in New York City. In DeLillo’s trademark icy prose, we see the awful implications of the abstraction of money and rampant speculation as the vampiric Packer loses everything by betting against the rise of the Chinese Yuan. The corpses of rats are smeared against his ultramodern stretch limo by anti-capitalist protesters, and the reader is compelled to examine Packer’s radical estrangement from reality and its destructive consequences. This juxtaposition of dead rodents and emotionally vacant masters of the universe cannot help but evoke an earlier novel about money’s sinister power, although for those readers familiar with Patrick Bateman’s use of a rat in American Psycho, it may be a memory they would rather forget.
I was initially aware of Patrick Bateman’s ontological crisis solely through Mary Harron’s whip-smart, underrated filmic adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s supposedly unfilmable 1991 novel. Harron pared the novel down to its satiric essence, delivering a brilliant black comedy of (ill) manners, aided immeasurably by Christian Bale’s stunning performance as the eponymous American psychopath. However, it is only after recently reading the novel that I realised just why Ellis’s corrosive vision was dropped by its original publishers and viciously attacked by feminist groups and bewildered literary critics alike. Power drills, coat-hangers and live rodents are amongst the implements Bateman employs in his systematic, stomach-roiling torture/murder of a series of virtually indistinguishable young women (not to mention the helpless beggars he victimises and a young boy he impulsively murders at the public zoo). After finishing it I quickly read Annie Proiux’s magisterial collection Close Range and the latest Sarah Waters novel, and retrospectively this was perhaps an unconscious attempt to countervail the soiling effect of Bateman’s despicable misogyny. The last 150 pages or so contain some of the most frankly repulsive imagery this side of the Marquis de Sade, The 120 days of Sodom transplanted from the boudoir to the penthouses and alleyways of a pre-Giuliani New York awash in violent crime and the spectre of HIV. The debatable issue of these sequences’ ‘reality’ is an almost negligible concern, as Ellis’s jet-black vision of a soul’s descent into hell remains seared in the mind’s eye long after the final page has turned, whether Patrick Bateman is a psychopathic murderer who eats young women’s brains or simply a disturbed fantasist.
Ellis cunningly sets the reader up for these travesties in the early sections of the novel, when we are introduced to Patrick Bateman and his vapid menagerie of colleagues and ‘romantic’ entanglements. Interpersonal relationships are reduced to the mind-numbing cataloguing of designer clothes, electrical appliances and haute cuisine. This is a culture that has completely conflated surface with meaning, in which the desperate Wall Street men discuss the dos and don’ts of wearing cufflinks with the fervour of philosophers debating the existence of God. The scenes of sexual violence are generally preceded by truly pornographic depictions of sex (mediated by Bateman’s pornography-obsessed imagination) in which the objectification necessary for Bateman to commit his atrocities is grotesquely reinforced. Ellis himself has recently stated that he felt it only natural for Bateman to discuss his evil acts in the same obsessive, hyper-detailed manner he parses Whitney Houston albums and documents his early morning workouts. A Bildungsroman without a journey, an abyss with no exit, American Psycho is the story of a man who describes himself as, “some kind of abstraction… there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are comparable: I simply am not there”. Yet what is all this blood-soaked nihilism in aid of, and is there any merit to such abject hopelessness?
I would argue that there is, although I certainly understand readers’ reservations (a word with sacred power in Bateman’s universe of five-star eateries). Aside from the fact that the novel is often screamingly funny (the sequence where Patrick’s ex-girlfriend Bethany reveals that she is dating the co-owner and chef at the quasi-mythical Dorsia had me laughing out loud, a rarity when reading a novel), it is also a shrewd indictment of a narcissistic culture hopelessly enamoured with materialism and the sleek allure of surfaces. This is reflected in the novel’s enduring cultural impact, wherein Patrick Bateman has been adopted as a kind of proto-yuppie by some young professional men who idolise his keen fashion sense, luxurious lifestyle and physical perfection. Ellis himself would likely point at this development as disturbing proof of the legitimacy of his enterprise, reflective of a deeper anomie at the heart of consumer culture. The Marquis de Sade’s work, with its itineraries of escalating sexual torture and debasement, was, at least partly, a sustained critique of the hypocrisies of bourgeois French society and the Catholic Church. Ellis’s bitter vision of gradually intensifying depravity is directed instead at late twentieth-century capitalism and its depersonalising impact on individuals and their relationships with others, and as such it is a fiercely important statement that resonates even more deeply in the era of President Donald Trump and his consistent, callous disparagement of women and minorities.
Recently, in a linguistic flourish typical of mobsters and penny dreadful baddies, President Donald Trump referred to his ex-lawyer (and current witness against him in a sprawling criminal investigation including allegations of corruption, sexual impropriety and possible collusion with a foreign power) Michael Cohen as a ‘rat’. Upon reading American Psycho and discovering its protagonist to be utterly in thrall to real-estate mogul and citizen Donald Trump, I was struck both by the frequency of Trump’s appearance in the text and by the disturbing parallels between Bateman’s worldview and Trump’s regressive ideology. Bateman completely changes his mind about a dish he dislikes upon hearing that Trump recommended it, and corrects anybody who refers to Trump Tower merely as ‘the Tower’. He chastises a member of their dinner party for incorrectly identifying Ivana Trump at a restaurant and getting his hopes up, and The Art of the Deal takes pride of place on his office desk. Trump’s swaggering masculinity and avaricious business practices are idolised by Bateman and his odious cronies, and this hero-worship extends to their reactionary worldviews.
When Bateman leans over an African American beggar and says “I’m sorry, but we just don’t have anything in common”, before blinding him it is difficult not to hear the echo of Trump’s racially mediated elitism. This was around the same time, after all, that Trump was castigating the Central Park five in media outlets, assured of their guilt (although the young black men accused of a brutal rape would be exonerated years later). And then there are the women… In a rare moment of introspection while attempting (with an odd air of pathos) to eat one of his victims, Bateman reminds himself that this woman is shit, simply meat to be consumed. And is this contemptuous attitude towards femininity (serial murder and cannibalism aside) really so different from the man who bragged about grabbing women’s pussies with impunity? This is the same President who has framed menstruation as weakness, constantly attacked women who do not fit his ideal of beauty (who aren’t ‘10s’ like Bateman’s endless parade of hardbodies) and has rolled women’s rights to choose back to the Stone Age. Indeed, it is arguable that the lasting significance of Ellis’s caustic depiction of thoroughgoing misogyny, racism and all-conquering materialism is evident in the twinkling eyes of another rat from the streets of New York City.