34. American Psycho: Murder, Trump, and New York City

0:10I decide to even up the score a little bit by showing everyone my new business card. I slap it on the table, waiting for reactions. New card. I try to act casual about it, but I'm smiling proudly. What do you think?

0:24Dominic Sandbrook: Whoa. McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card. Genuinely impressed. Very nice. He hands it to Van Patten. Cool coloring. That's bone, I point out. And the lettering is something called Cillian Rail. It's very cool, Bateman. Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard. But that is nothing. He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. Look at this. A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the colour and the classy type. I clench my fist, as Van Patten says, smugly. Eggshell, brother-o-malian type. Nice. I croak. Jesus. Price says. This is really super.

1:13How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful? I'm looking at Van Patten's card, and then at mine, and cannot believe that Price actually likes Van Patten's better. Dizzy, I sip my drink and then take a deep breath. But wait, Price says.

1:28Dominic Sandbrook: You ain't seen nothing yet. He pulls out of an inside coat pocket and slowly, dramatically turns it over for our inspection. Even I have to admit, it's magnificent. Suddenly, the restaurant seems far away, hushed, the noise distant, a meaningless hum compared to this card, and we all hear Price's words. Ray's lettering, pale nimbus white Price pulls it out And though he's acting nonchalant I don't see how he can ignore Its supple, off-white colouring Its tasteful thickness I am unexpectedly depressed that I started this So hello everybody That was from American Psycho By Brett Easton Ellis Published in 1991 Dominic and I are putting on our very best Yuppie impressions And as you can tell from that opening reading It is a darkly funny horror novel about a wealthy Wall Street banker in the 1980s who, beneath the surface, is actually brutally torturing and mutilating people while seemingly going about this very elite New York, Manhattan existence.

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5:22Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremphaya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TremfireRadio.com. The book is notorious for its violence. It is censored in some countries. And of course, it was made even more famous by the 2000 film starring Christian Bale, which I was actually modeling my performance on there. And there is so much to discuss in this episode, particularly with you, Dominic, because we're going to be diving into 1980s American capitalism and Wall Street. We're going to talk about Brett Easton Ellis himself, the dark comedy of the book, the superficial cult of consumerism, its parodying, and of course, its violent.

6:08But Dominic, before we started recording, we were talking to Nicole about our early experiences of this book. So what was yours? Because I don't think it casts you in a particularly positive light.

6:19Dominic Sandbrook: So I first read this, I must have read it in about 1992. So I was at school, so it had only been out for a year or so. I hadn't even been born. I know. Terrifying. And I can vividly remember the boys at my school, some of them saying, a couple of them had read it, saying, God, this book is absolutely brilliant because it's a book perfectly calibrated, I would argue, to please 17 -year-old boys at a boarding school. and I can remember one of my friends actually saying to me well you should skip all the stuff about the consumerism and the dinners and Wall Street because that's quite boring and the first sex scene starts on page 200 or something which probably is not the spirit in which this book should be read well it definitely isn't the spirit as a 17 year old reader I thought it was extremely clever in the way that it made you complicit in Patrick Bateman's violence because just to emphasise for listeners this is of course a very violent book because I would be talking about some very grim things.

7:20Dominic Sandbrook: And I thought at the time, I mean, what really impressed me as a reader, what impressed itself upon me was the way, the transition, you have this extremely pornographic sex scene that moves almost seamlessly into a scene of hideous torture and violence. And this was the first time I'd read anything remotely like this. And it's stuck in my mind ever since. And we will discuss the way that juxtaposition works, what purpose it serves, if any, at all. I actually didn't read it at school and it had never been that attractive to me as a concept. But then the place where I used to work, Brett Easton Ellis was coming to do an event to do a talk about his latest book.

7:59This was about five years ago, I think, four or five years ago. And so I hardly read American Psycho because I was going to be looking after him in the green room. And I thought, you know, it was important we had something to discuss. turns out I need not have worried because he kind of shuffled in with this enormous suitcase that I think his assistant was carrying and then he opened it and inside there was nothing but a full bottle of gin so on brand and his notes for the talk and I was like okay and then he got onto stage and he was just brilliant he was so articulate he was so impressive and then went upstairs to discover that the whole bottle of gin was empty so I was impressed in more ways than one but my early reading of American Psycho didn't leave much of a mark I think I kind of hurried through it I remember thinking god it's very very violent I think I kind of ended up skipping some of the more gratuitous sections yeah and have thought about it hardly ever since but I do love the movie so let's see how this time my impression has changed okay but there is someone who's a very very big fan of this and I think you can see the correlation between his work and Brett Easton Ellis' and that's a guy called Irvin Welsh and he's the writer of Trainspotting exactly and he describes it as a book that holds a mirror up to a particular age.

9:17It says that it's petulant, unerring and uncompromising because that is what the book is doing. It's parodying a particular moment in time among other things and now Dominic this is totally your hinterland so So tell us about the context of American Psycho, because this is 1980s America, capitalism, the Wall Street boom. Think Wolf of Wall Street.

9:35Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, exactly. Or The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. So this is one of the, I suppose you would say this is actually one of the canonical texts of that era, of sort of 1980s New York. Of course, it's written slightly afterwards, but it's looking back at the kind of heyday of the stock market fuelled consumerism of the late kind of Reagan and then Bush years in America. So to give people a bit of historical context, the 60s had been a period of great idealism, of course, civil rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War and stuff. Then you had the 1970s, stagnation, Nixon being brought down by Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the hostages in Iran and so on.

10:12Dominic Sandbrook: So a lot of introspection and a lot of sort of gloom about the American capitalist model. You get to the 80s, you get to particularly the election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980. And it's as though there is a, you know, someone flicks a switch. I mean, we're talking about in Manhattan. in New York, which is a place of enormous contrast between an enormous disparity between rich and poor in this period. So massive homelessness, massive crime, but also tremendous wealth. You see that in this book quite starkly. You do indeed. You absolutely do. This is a book about Reaganism in many ways. So Reagan, he's the former Hollywood movie star who becomes governor of California in the 1960s.

10:50Terrifyingly white teeth.

10:51Dominic Sandbrook: Very white teeth. Yeah, looks good on a horse, though, Tabby. Not as good as Putin, but yeah, a man can dream. God almighty. So Reagan comes in in January 1981, and he and his presidency, they become identified with this sort of revitalization of the American dream, with an obsession with wealth and aspiration and ambition and so on. The Reagan presidency is all about luxury. It's all about big shoulder pads, big hair. Bad fashion. Well, it's bad. I mean, you say bad fashion. It's very glitzy fashion. It's very over-the-top fashion. There's a cult of materialism. You see this reflected in things like the film Wall Street, tellingly set on Wall Street.

11:36Dominic Sandbrook: And that's because the Reagan revolution, so-called, this is a period when manufacturing, traditional industries in America, as in so many places in the Western world, are in real trouble. But it is actually the financial sector that is driving a lot of the economic growth of the time. So you have a very lax kind of regulatory regime, which allows banks and stockbrokers and whatnot to invent new kinds of products. So money is kind of flooding into the stock market. People are making money in ways they've never known before. And this has been reflected in the media, which is a self-undergoing a big change at the time because you have the rise of cable TV and so on.

12:16Dominic Sandbrook: So what you have is a kind of general culture, particularly in New York and particularly in the island of Manhattan and kind of lower Manhattan which is where Wall Street is you have this culture of shiny suits loads of money unrepentant consumerism the worship of wealth in the film Wall Street the character Gordon Gekko who's played by Michael Douglas gives this speech and greed is good greed works this kind of worship of materialism that to people, particularly, I think, sort of people on the left or people who are from the Rust Belt or people who remember the idealism of the 1960s feels very shocking.

12:56Dominic Sandbrook: You know, it feels like America has kind of gone backwards to this Victorian worship of the free market and so on. And this is the age, you know, the people that they blame, the people that become the scapegoats for this and where the yuppies. There is this phenomenon that you get in the 80s of people rebelling against the values of their parents they're rebelling against the idealism of their parents who might have been you know civil rights marches or they might have been students smoking dope and going on marches against the vietnam war but now their kids you know they've done quite well their kids have gone to university they go to law school they end up on wall street in some you know swanky law firm or something that the old values of their parents they are destined for the scrap heap and they have absolutely no shame in kind of you know they're very proud of their gold American Express card or whatever, or their holidays in the Hamptons, or this sort of world.

13:48Dominic Sandbrook: And actually, the man who epitomizes this is not so much Ronald Reagan, it's Donald Trump. Yeah, because this is a time when people could make that unusual transition from being Wall Street executives to celebrities. I mean, Trump is identified with the revitalization of New York because he, you know, he's created Trump Tower. Trump has speculated and done all these developments a lot of which actually don't make any money but that's by the by and he becomes this sort of cult figure he's off on the front page of the new york papers you know day after day his love affairs his sort of lurid activities and whatnot he's a figure of fun really he's a kind of slightly comical figure in the 80s and and in american psycho trump is actually there throughout the book like patrick bateman is obsessed with donald and ivana trump and he's always kind of looking over his shoulder to see if they've come into the restaurant are they at Dorsey or whatever.

14:38Dominic Sandbrook: And Trump is a fantasy figure for Patrick Bateman, actually. I mean, you could say it's remarkably prescient. Yeah. And I suppose the one other thing I haven't talked about, which is the context is serial killers. This is kind of, it sounds a weird thing to say, but a kind of golden age of serial killers. There's great fascination with killers. Crime is very high in 1980s New York. Horror, crime, murder, violence are very prevalent in the popular culture of the day. It's the heyday of somebody we're going to be talking about actually on the show in a few weeks when we do The Shining, Stephen King.

15:10Dominic Sandbrook: So Stephen King's books, which are all about kind of reflecting the buried anxieties of this world of haves and have-nots. Stephen King's books are at the top of the bestseller list. You have Anne Rice and her vampire novels. You have slasher films. I think it's really interesting that this is a period that's big on horror because in books that we've done before in this show, so I don't know, Dracula, frankenstein horror has often expressed some latent fear in the society that those books are born of so in frankenstein human innovation and scientific discovery dracula foreign invasion and disease here it made me wonder if the way that he's using horror is kind of it's indicative of anxieties around excess the this long obsession the decades long obsession with consumerism the out of control corporate greed and it's almost like he's channing like serial killers are just the next step, the logical conclusion of that greed.

16:06That's kind of the leap that Brett Easton Ellis is making in this.

16:09Dominic Sandbrook: The idea that it's consumerism and capitalism, this model of capitalism is all about treating people as objects, using them up and then throwing them aside. I mean, this is obviously what serial killers do. They dehumanize their victims and they cast them aside. And this is obviously what Patrick Bateman is doing. Traditionally, the traditional view of serial killers is isolated losers full of self-loathing and therefore it's from that position you're able to dehumanize the rest of society and brett easton ellis himself said that american psycho came out of a place of severe isolation and loneliness and self-loathing i was pursuing a life you could call it the gentleman's quarterly way of living that i knew was bullshit so what does he mean by this just on the gentleman's quarterly way of living so gq is one of those magazines that really captures the yuppie lifestyle in the late 80s yeah it champions that kind of elitism doesn't it handsome people wearing the best clothes wearing the right shoes but speaking of brett easton ellis let's discuss my old friend my my best friend brett he was born in la in 1964 and la is actually often the setting of many of his novels um his parents were divorced in 1982 and it's interesting because during the publicity for American Psycho.

17:29Brett Easton Ellis said that Patrick Bateman was based on his father, which is...

17:34Dominic Sandbrook: God, what's he reading? That's an extreme claim and it's definitely not complimentary. Your son's written a book about you. Yeah, well, imagine. Yeah, you must be so proud. But then later he retracted that statement and he said, and he changed his mind. So that clearly is not true then he attended buckley school in the san fernando valley and then he attended a school that we have discussed before on this show and this is bennington college in vermont this arts donna tart because this bennington college is what the college from a secret history is based on and that is no coincidence and it's also what um camden college which features in several other of brettie snell's books is based on um and there he studied music and he was in a band And more importantly, though, it was there that he met Donna Tartt because they were both in this very artistic class of 1986.

18:27It's got a bit of a myth, a mythos of its own now.

18:30Dominic Sandbrook: There's a podcast about it. There is a podcast about it. Yeah. About all their crazy drug field shenanigans. And Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis became very good friends very quickly. And they actually met because they were set up on a blind date by their roommates who said that they were the only people who would be uptight enough for each other. but they did and obviously the date didn't work out um but they grew very very close so they were some of the earliest readers of each other's manuscripts they edited each other's manuscripts tart famously dedicated a secret history to brett easton ellis i mean they both have enormous success with an early book don't they so brett easton ellis's book that really makes his name is the rules of attraction donna tart's secret history and the rules of attraction is very controversial but it does really well doesn't it yeah it does do very very well and both books feature thinly veiled imitations of their classmates of bennington that campus the things that they got up to and they both became part of what has subsequently been known as the literary brat pack so a group of intellectual quite hedonistic young authors kind of making waves in the literary circles of new york and la or whatever it may be right um brayson ellis himself was famously hedonistic loved a party loved a drink and he actually published his first book at Bennington when he was only 21.

19:48So very young, like Donna Tartt. And this was less than zero. And this is very debauched, but nothing on American Psycho.

19:57Dominic Sandbrook: So he's got less than zero, rules of attraction. American Psycho. So American Psycho is his third book and by far his most successful, but it took a while to take off. So American Psycho, he gets the idea, doesn't he, at the height of the kind of Reagan boom, which is 1986. He's living in New York. He's having a very hedonistic lifestyle. And he said afterwards, didn't he, that he had wanted to write a book about what Wall Street was really like, this kind of world of Wall Street, the world of these young men in very shiny kind of Armani suits who are obsessed with brands and with wealth and with credit and consumerism.

20:33Dominic Sandbrook: A little bit like, actually, he himself, I think, has made the comparison with Oliver Stone's film, Wall Street. He said he'd wanted it to be like Wall Street initially. That's how he envisaged it. So he starts hanging around with these people. I mean you know these are all people who've gone to similar kinds of colleges probably liberal very expensive liberal arts colleges or kind of east coast colleges and then they've maybe yeah preppy exactly then they've done a law degree and then they've gone to work for a firm like Pearson Pierce which is what Patrick Bayman works for the sort of fictional company and he would hang around with them have dinner with them go to clubs and all of this kind of thing although funny thing is that he says they I never went to their offices and never actually saw them I never saw them doing actually any work which is true of patrick bateman patrick bateman never does any work no why they're even paying him is unclear well probably because we've discovered it's because of his family connections um but he said you know he what he would watch a parade of status one-upmanship who had the best suit who has the best house in the hamptons who has the hottest girlfriends and then bang the light bulb goes off in his head i thought patrick bateman is a serial killer and he's losing his mind and the novel's going to be hallucinatory we're going to be in his head instead of writing a third person novel about a sad sad banker so that's the that's the genius element of it that we are in patrick bateman's head and right from the start i think there's a slight uncertainty about whether or not we believe what patrick bateman is telling us anyway let's put that let's park that idea for a second the idea about the reliability or not the narrator he's a great noticer actually or or or a fabulist so he's constantly telling you what people are eating what clothes they're wearing he lists all the labels that they have on he you know he notices what kind of wallet they have their car all of these kinds of things we are in his head the whole time as he observes this world around him and brett east and ellis is living this at this time you know ostensibly for research and he describes it as he as 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 and worse about myself and this insecurity comes through in his portrayal of Patrick Bateman but Brett Easton Ellis struggled to write the book he said that during the process of writing it he felt depressed he felt isolated he tried to channel this and the insecurity that he was feeling into Patrick Bateman and I think he does do that successfully and he'd also been warned that in writing the book as he intended to it could end his career so he was he was afraid of that.

23:12Dominic Sandbrook: But the experience of reading some of these scenes stays with you forever they are unforgettable horrible scenes. That's what I was thinking I kept thinking how could you not feel a bit depressed writing some of the things that he was writing Anyway, he finally finished it in December 1989. So it took him three years to write. And then Simon and Schuster were signed on to publish it. But they withdrew. They drew out of the deal at the last minute. They cited artistic differences. But really, I think it's because they were uncomfortable with the violence and perhaps the sexism. And our old friend Irvin Welsh of Trainspotting fame is appalled by this in his essay that he wrote about American Psycho.

23:54he described it as an act of appalling of terrible cowardice anyway instead the book was acquired and published by vintage books in the u.s but how was it received you know he's obviously been afraid that it's going to end his literary careers quite promising literary career a few months before the book was published some of the pages from the manuscript were leaked to the media and these pages happen to be instances of the most appalling violence from the book so it's when patrick Bateman murders people or imagines murdering people. And critics assumed from this that this was representative of the whole book.

24:31And it fueled an outrageous response from a lot of reviewers, a lot of feminist critics, as we will see. And temporarily, Bret Easton Ellis truly did become a social pariah. There were accusations of misogyny, gratuitous violence, moral irresponsibility. Again, we'll delve more into this later. But he also quite chillingly receives death threats. many of which saw people drawing pictures of or describing doing to him what he describes

25:00Dominic Sandbrook: patrick bateman doing to people in the book turning it back on himself exactly so you know how do you feel about that yeah this furore did quite quiet and down once the book was published nevertheless as i said in the opening it was censored or banned in several countries it was deemed harmful to minors in Germany and sales were restricted between 1995 and 2000 and in Australia this is mental the book is still sold wrapped in cling film and you have to prove that you're 18 in order to get a copy I mean Brett Easton was unmoved by this criticism and he said in response I think it's adorable I think it's cute I love it the criticism well of course writers deep down any publicity is good publicity so the new york times critic uh roger rosenblatt absolutely slammed this book and said it was actually fine to shut it down because it was so terrible he said of american psycho it's the journal dorian gray another book we've done on the show that dorian gray would have written had he been a high school sophomore but that's unfair to sophomores and actually there is something quite dorian gray about patrick bayman isn't because patrick bayman you know rather like um dorian gray or of course our old friend brayden peters to be clavicular uh he's very he's obsessed he's obsessed he's obsessed with his looks isn't he i mean i was actually reading this for skincare tips were you he spent so long yeah the revelation that you shouldn't put after cologne onto your face because it dry after moisturizer because it dries it out i thought it was interesting why would you put cologne on your face anyway it's just spray it directly into your eyes this is where this is where you've been going wrong all these years this is why you wear glasses what because i've been dousing my eyeballs i have to say though if we all live like patrick bateman i mean we'd all be we'd all look as good as brayden peters we would although would you if you were eating out like multiple times yeah like there's that there's that well i don't know is it terrible there's that iconic scene in the movie when he's like i see that they failed to bring out the pork loin jello and the food in the book does get madder and madder anyway it was also a big hit with a certain group of people right exactly exactly because some people said you know this is exactly what we've been waiting for a novel that properly satirizes the excesses of the corporate capitalism of the 1980s and i think there are there have always been critics they love it as a transgressive book they like it as a book that challenges the reader it's taught in university literary courses though these days I think with the trigger warning and of course there was the film the film that actually made Christian Bale's name as an adult actor quite rightly I think so let's just give people a very very quick reminder of what actually happens and what makes it so controversial so we have Patrick Bateman he works for Pierce and Pierce from the very beginning he narrates his his life his Wall Street friends their culture of one-upmanship the goading teasing repartee that they have which recaptured in that reading about the business cards and they're all kind of beautiful wealthy successful waspish they're all yuppies their obsession with their expensive suits their expensive gyms their expensive restaurants their scorn and contempt for the poor or the homeless they spend all their evenings going to clubs and taking cocaine and eyeing up the waitresses and whatnot patrick is engaged isn't he to evelyn we will talk about a little bit evelyn as he I should say, through the book, through the first sort of 100, 150 pages, Bret Easton Ellis or Patrick Bayman drops clues that there is, you know, he talks about how he's carrying a knife.

28:38Or he's always reading about serial killers. Yes. Or there's a point where he says very, very casually, very nonchalantly, I took my shirt to my usual dry cleaners to get the blood out. Right, exactly.

28:50Dominic Sandbrook: Or he says, I don't know, such and such reminded him or whatever of a waitress that he assaulted in Aspen last year or this kind of thing. Or he says to people, I'm an evil psychopath. But they either don't hear him or they think he's joking or whatever. But the main thing to say, though, is that vast swathes of the book are just Patrick Bateman going about his day-to-day life, going to restaurants, meeting up with friends, going to the gym, his ridiculously complex facial regime, you know, whatever it may be. And then it's increasingly interspersed with these episodes of intense violence. Yeah, so if the book is, I don't know, what is the book, 400?

29:26Dominic Sandbrook: It's quite long. So the book is like, sorry, 400 pages long. So the violence really only kicks in after about 200 pages or so. And the episodes become, there are sort of, let's say five or six episodes of violence and they become ever more lurid and they reach an absolute pitch of savagery and horror about three quarters of the way into the book. And they're more frequent as well. Yes. So the more fevered he gets, the more his killing sprees escalate. Exactly, like he's trying to feed an addiction. And then we get to this point in the plot where we think it's kind of the climax or maybe the breaking point.

30:01And this is after killing a co-worker of his called Paul Owen, and he's using his flat to house the bodies of his victims. And he starts slipping into necrophilia and cannibalism and just awful stuff.

30:12Dominic Sandbrook: And actually, we've talked about Patrick Bateman, but his friends, the girls he meets, the people he works with, they are cut from quite similar cloth aren't they they're quite superficial they are hollow so Eve Evelyn his his uh fiancee in his version of her because of course we only ever see her through his eyes she is um a very uninteresting and uninterested person she spends most of her time thinking about Waldorf salad yeah there's a whole scene where she panics because she thinks her guests are enjoying a Waldorf salad she's like a walking mannequin a clothes horse she's beautiful and she looks right.

30:48Dominic Sandbrook: And their relationship. I find it deeply depressing. Anyway, there's quite a funny moment where he says, for the first time since I've known her, she's straining to say something interesting. And then she says, is that a Vanatrump? And that is the peak of her intellectual curiosity. And that epitomizes the plastic emptiness of this world. And I find the relationship very depressing because it epitomizes the lack of heart of the novel, the lack of moral heart, because this should be the most meaningful relationship in his life. His fiancée, I don't know, his friend, his confidant, whatever it may be.

31:23But there's nothing there. They use each other for their physical appearance, really.

31:28Dominic Sandbrook: And they just sit and watch shopping channels, don't they? She's dead inside. She's numb. And partly because she takes so many sleeping pills or antidepressants. So at one point he says, Evelyn is addicted to pornate and antidepressant. I lie there beside her watching the home shopping club. At glass dolls, that's telling. Embroidered throw pillows, lamps shaped like footballs, with the sound turned off. That's all the companionship they can expect from each other, watching the shopping channel in silence. And then he's got all his male friends, and they're sort of copies of him, aren't they? And actually, we'll get into the confusion of identities and the interchangeability of some of these people after the break.

32:04Dominic Sandbrook: They don't seem to do any work either. They high-five each other all the time, which is just... Or they compare their business cards. So lame. Which, as we will see, I think there is... something very suggestive about their constant obsession with ever bigger and better business cards but they judge each other entirely on the way that they look something that this book is quite famous for is these long lists these long descriptions of what people are wearing of skincare regimes so for instance this comes across in the movie i think that one of the most iconic scenes is patrick bateman getting ready in the morning it goes like this i take the ice mask off and use a deep pore cleanser lotion then a herb mint facial mask which i leave on for 10 minutes while i check my toenails then i use the probe bright tooth polisher and next the interplaque tooth polisher this in addition to the toothbrush which has a speed of 4200 rpm and reverse direction 46 times per second and it goes on and on and on and on with these seemingly banal descriptions of just a series of actions um and they very there's very rarely any commas it's so you get a sense of this flat monotone voice we will come in a couple of weeks to a book with a hero who who you know this where it's not meant ironically and a hero who is a male fantasy figure who does this at great length and that's james james bond so ian fleming one of the innovations of ian fleming's james bond books is he does use brand names a lot he will tell you what kind of he tells you what kind of jam James Bond always has for breakfast.

33:39Dominic Sandbrook: And this is an important part of the Bond book's appeal, though. They're kind of consumerist how-to guides for people reading in the 1960s. And Patrick Bateman is actually just carrying that to an extreme, this identification of kind of virility and handsomeness and attractiveness with particular brand names. And the idea that, you know, the first thing in the morning, you use all the right brands and then you go out. I mean, this is the, you know, you mentioned, we were talking about GQ earlier. this is the fantasy that magazines like GQ were selling in the 1980s. Yeah, it's aspirational, isn't it?

34:11Completely. So while you get these very intricate descriptions of tasseled loafers, pinstriped suits, Armani shirts, you learn absolutely nothing about people's eye colours or what their smiles are like or what makes them laugh. You know, friendship is defined by insatiable material competition. And Nicole made the very good point, for instance, that Bateman is constantly trying to win the affirmation or the praise or the respect of his male friends.

34:37Dominic Sandbrook: This is such an interesting point that actually all that Patrick Bateman does, his dress, his suits, his, you know, the skincare, it is done to impress the, what's the name, Paul Allen or like these other, McDermott, all these people, not Evelyn and women. He doesn't really think about what women will think of him because women are just objects. It's actually all about impressing his peer group. But Bateman wants to be the best. His blind, murderous rage is often triggered by someone having something better than him, a better tanning salon. And it's interesting that because you talk about Bond, one of the most glamorous characters in the world.

35:16But Patrick Bateman, by glamorizing him, you know, handsome and alpha male, high status. What Brett Yusnelis does, remember what we said about this being the golden age of serial killers, is he's distorting the idea of the serial killer as some kind of an inadequate, sullen loser. instead here he's turning a stereotypical model of american success the guy living out the american dream if you will yeah into a homicidal psychopath he's totally functional he is able to breeze through his own society with you know no one really noticing and that actually is this is this is one of the first books to do that and it became a bit of a trend the rise of these anti-heroes where the psychopath is recast as reactionary and cynical.

36:01The difference here, though, is that Patrick Bateman wholeheartedly buys into society. He's not reacting against it.

36:09Dominic Sandbrook: Although, Tabby, isn't there an argument, though, that you describe him as very successful, an alpha male, a kind of wish fulfillment figure, all this. But we only think that because he tells us that he is. We never have an external observer. And in fact, everything that other characters say about Patrick Bateman suggests something very different. A lot of people describe him as being very good looking, though. But they describe him as a loser, though, don't they? They describe him as a coward at one point. Yeah, but we'll dig more into this. But basically, I think what Brett Easton and Alice is doing is making the whole book reactionary.

36:41By turning a monster into someone that functions well in his society, it's, I suppose you could say, holding a mirror up to the society rather than the monster.

36:49Dominic Sandbrook: Patrick Bateman is not an outsider tilting against the values of society. He's actually somebody upholding them. He's the distillation of conservative values, you could argue. But then again, he's obviously not that functional because he does... Kill a lot of people. Viscerally kill and mutilate people. And as you said, we have these blasé signposts, you know, intercut with dinner party scenes. Someone saying you should stop reading all those Ted Bundy books or the Chinese dry cleaners, I usually send my bloody clothes to you, delivered back to me yesterday a Soprani jacket. and then it gets more and more explicit.

37:20So I have a serrated knife in my pocket. Cut his face off. The urge to kill McDermott passes. And it's building, building, building. So you start to think, is he actually going to kill someone? And it builds quite an unnerving tension.

37:34Dominic Sandbrook: And of course he does kill somebody and we'll find out who after the break.

37:42Dominic Sandbrook: Hi everybody, it's Dominic Sandbrook here from The Rest is History and we are here to tell you about a thrilling new series on the blood-soaked climax of the French Revolution, the reign of terror. So the French Revolution is one of the most significant episodes in the whole of world history. It essentially lays the foundations for contemporary politics as we know it, but it is also unbelievably dramatic. We'll be discussing the murder of the firebrand Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub. We will be going to the guillotine with Marie Antoinette. And in our final episode, we will be telling the story of the extraordinary and grotesque downfall of one of the chief architects of the terror, one of the most evil men in history, some would say, Maximilien Crobespierre.

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41:19Welcome back to the book club, everyone. Now, before we dive back into American Psycho, a reminder to join our own community of psychopathic capitalist killers and sign up to book club notes. And this is our beloved weekly newsletter, which has talking points, book recommendations. People can give whichever book we've discussed that week their own score, give their feedback. It's a bevy of insights from you, our book club community, delivered into your inbox every Saturday morning. And it's totally free. So you won't become a consumerist stooge by signing up. So do sign up at thebookclubhq.com.

41:55Now, back to the show, Dominic, how do we find out that Patrick Bateman is in fact, or he seems to be, a violent serial killer?

42:04Dominic Sandbrook: So, he's made reference to his husband, as you mentioned, but his first killing is actually a homeless person. So, this book is famous for violence towards women, but it's a man who's the first obvious victim. And actually, just to say, we're not going to be giving away the true depths of the violence in American Psycho. We're going to be giving you a kind of skim surface view. The murder takes place, he kills this homeless person, then he goes back to his normal lifestyle, doesn't he? He goes back to his normal routine of the restaurants, this obsession with getting reservations at the top of New York restaurants.

42:34The first thing he does afterwards is go and get a milkshake.

42:37Dominic Sandbrook: He will kill somebody and then he'll go and get a pedicure. The classic juxtaposition is, I put on a new suit, gave myself a pedicure and tortured to death a small dog I had bought earlier this week. It's just slipped in there. It's devoid of emotion, but it's very physical. It's merely a list of kind of actions with no sense of how this made him feel or whether he reflected on it or anything like that. And obviously what Breté Snellis is trying to do is a point we made in the first half. He's arguing, I think effectively, that this is the logical extreme of the dehumanized, alienated consumerism.

43:11Dominic Sandbrook: And this theme, the dehumanising effects, the soullessness, the lack of meaning of modern capitalism, it's a very popular subject in the sort of 1990s for writers. So you made the comparison to New Tabby with Fight Club. Yeah, I found that very interesting because Brett Easton Ellis says this himself. He acknowledges that what Chuck Paulanick is doing in Fight Club is very similar. The book was published a few years after American Psycho. Because what they're doing is they're both satirising the deadening effects of capitalism. and it's also transgressive fiction so these are books that deal with characters that are disaffected with suffocated by alienated from some form of society and so they seek to break free of its confines usually in some kind of illicit way in this case both these books are using violence violence is the psychological outlet that serves as the substitute for human connection because everything has been so deadened the difference though is that in fight club tyler Durden he's lower class he's without money or opportunity whereas in this as we alluded to earlier Patrick Bateman is an elite he he exists in a world of extreme wealth and privilege so in his world and in the world of American Psycho those with very limited or very low economic value all lacking in beauty are totally worthless they're as good as cadavers in his eyes they're expendable and this is why to bring it back to donald trump this is why he idealizes donald trump because he is in patrick bateman's view patrick bateman who as we've said you literally is so bought into this world that he can't get enough of it he has to channel his his his hunger you know his hunger for consumption into human bodies so in his perspective donald Trump is wealthy, successful, the archetype of the soulless capitalist tycoon and therefore, you know, this serial killer's hero.

45:03So it's a sort of twisted distortion of the American dream because it's where the pursuit of success becomes a hollow nightmare full of narcissism and consumerism and of course the loss of identity. And it's why, to go back to his first killing, it's also why he kills homeless people and it's why he kills so many prostitutes because they are the lowest of the low in Patrick Bateman's hierarchy of wealth.

45:26Dominic Sandbrook: But your point about hollowness is absolutely right, though, isn't it? Because it's not just born out of the 1980s and the wider culture. No. It's Brett Easton Ellis' own sense of, you know, he was adrift in the late 80s. There are points where Patrick Bateman actually talks about where he is reflective about himself. So Bateman says, everything failed to subdue me. Soon everything seemed dull. Another sunrise, the lives of heroes, failing love, war, the discoveries people made about each other there wasn't a clear identifiable emotion within me except for greed and possibly total disgust i had all the characteristics of a human being flesh blood skin hair but my depersonalization was so intense had gone so deep that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated the victim of a slow purposeful erasure and he goes on to say that he was basically just the rough resemblance of a human being with only a dim corner of my mind functioning i mean this is i think a very good description of somebody who's basically clinically depressed yeah absolutely but he also is clearly in a way wanting to be acknowledged in some way or another he wants something to get his blood pumping something to get his adrenaline rising because there are moments in the book where he quite literally tells people yeah he does that he's a serial killer so at one point he's chatting to some banal model in a club and she says so what do you do and he says murders and executions and the model he's talking to doesn't even notice.

46:51She just assumes that he needs mergers and acquisitions. Yeah. Well, you could read that as the implication is that perhaps they're one and the same or it could be that this society has grown so mindless, so numb that it doesn't even matter. You know, a monster, a killer can hide in plain sight and no one even notices.

47:10Dominic Sandbrook: And the hollowness and the sense of depression explains the flatness of the tone. Yeah, there's no variation between the facial regime and the murders. No, exactly. As time goes on, I mean, this could be an explanation, of course, of why the crime, everything becomes more extreme. He is feeding this sort of desperate, gnawing need for meaning and for sensation. He wants to feel something, but this is if Patriot Bayman exists. And of course, if what he's telling you is true, he's trying to do something. He's going to ever more extreme lengths in order to have some kind of emotional or intellectual or whatever reaction to what he's doing.

47:51Dominic Sandbrook: And he can't do it because he's dead inside. He literally starts eating people, you know. Yes, exactly. That's as far as it goes. We mentioned earlier, there's a funny joke that runs throughout about how, in a sense, he and his yuppie compadres, they're all just as meaningless as, I don't know, the prostitute or the homeless person that he kills because they're totally interchangeable. They're constantly mistaken for each other. Yeah, yeah. So he's mistaken. There's a very funny scene where, surely we've all been there to some degree or another, where he's mistaken for a guy called Marcus Halberstrom by Paul Owen, the guy who subsequently murders.

48:28And he just goes along with it.

48:29Dominic Sandbrook: So this happens again and again, doesn't it? The slippage of names. Now, we'll probably talk a little bit more later about the similarities or differences with Lolita. Because in Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's book, also very controversial, of course, there is a slippage of names. And Humbert Humbert's name keeps, people get it wrong. And Lolita's name changes and so on and so forth. I think in this book, it's a little bit less sophisticated as a point. it's simply that people keep getting patrick bateman mixed up with other people perhaps because either they're all the same or because actually he's very forgettable it could be that they're all just corporate stooges without soul without any distinguishable flicker of creativity or curiosity or as you say it could be because actually patrick bateman is a bit of a nobody and therefore sort of invisible but the writing it continues at this flat level pace there's no up or down there's no heightened emotion there's no um climax aside from the fact that the killings become more frequent and more ghoulish we're still waiting the whole time for the main event which never really comes particularly when the private investigator comes because that's when i thought reading it i thought to myself well now but now we're getting to the main event and i thought okay well is this going to be a cat and mouse chase in reverse is it going to see some kind of moral growth but it actually goes nowhere this would be my criticism of the book actually it's happy i was reading this as you know a few weeks ago on holiday i enjoyed it initially i actually you know i was in this kind of hotel this high-rise hotel in north america and it seemed like the perfect setting to be reading this book you know about 200 pages in i thought god i was the 200 pages of this because i feel like the point's been made i feel like the the equation you know it becomes slightly boring to just keep saying well this is consumerism on steroids this is a satire of corporate capitalism it keeps being a satire because it's a satire of corporate capitalism it's a satire of the traditional detective novel in some ways it's a satire of a classic romance because you kind of think at one point oh is he going to fall in love with his secretary the plain girl the unnoticed girl the forgotten girl and is that going to be his moral redemption that goes nowhere now the one thing i will say in its favor however yeah that it is often very funny i agree so some of my favorite bits so we mentioned the food the food becomes ever more bonkers possibly as patrick bateman loses his grip on reality yeah um and starts possibly just inventing mad stuff so two of my favorite things which i would love to recreate yeah at one point he has a lamb sausage salad with lobster and white beans sprayed with lime and foie gras vinegar fantastic which just sounds insane and also this one eagle carpaccio mesquite grilled mahi-mahi endive with chevre and chocolate covered almonds this and this weird kind of gazpacho with raw chicken in it i have to say i agree that it works very well as a black comedy and i found it much more palatable if i read it in that way and if i read his bizarre grooming routines and his lists of people's personal appearances and there are a couple of bits which are really inspired so there's a bit where he goes to his apartment block and he bumps into tom cruise and he says i loved you in that film bartender tom cruise looks at him and says there's actually cocktail yeah and i also love the genuine existential crises that he has the only times he ever questions himself for it was when um his personal appearance is in any way called into question so at one point um evelyn says to him why don't you get your hair styled that way you know pointing at some other guy and then he his internal monologue goes before this comment i was an automaton only vaguely paying attention to evelyn but now i'm panicked and i ask what's wrong with my hair in a matter of seconds my rage quadruples what the hell is wrong with my hair i touch it lightly yeah and then and actually this is a part of christian bale's characterization that i love he really brings out he's very funny he really brings out bateman's kind of sick zaniness you know his love for instance of um 80s pop artists totally misconstrued love of 80s pop artists where which he completely misunderstands all the time so when he says like genesis by far the most exciting band to come out of britain in the 1980s that's just an insane thing to say not least because there is like 10 years behind the times or when he says i hope hugh lewis in the news don't become one of these radical subversive bands like the clash or billy joel or blondie and at one point he thinks that the lead drummer or guitarist or something of you two they're kind of having a telepathic communication between them really deep powerful and yes yeah and and then then obviously there's dorsier which is a hilarious motif that runs throughout this is longing to get into dorsier in this embarrassing scene where he gets kicked out.

53:09But I think one of the funniest moments of all is when he decides that he's going to strangle this guy called Lewis Carruthers, who is his mistress's boyfriend. So he walks into the bathroom to strangle Lewis and he puts his gloves on and starts tightening his hands around his neck, only to discover that Lewis thinks that Patrick is hitting on him.

53:27Dominic Sandbrook: I start to squeeze, tightening my grip. Lewis stares... I'm doing it in Batman's voice. It's not Batman. Lewis stares at me and I tense the muscles in my arms, preparing myself for a struggle instead he looks down on my wrists and for a moment wavers as if he's undecided about something and then he lowers his head and kisses my left wrist and then he looks back up at me shyly yeah it's really good it goes on like this now i have a theory about this tabby which is that he's actually is cracking on to lewis caruthers and that what he's telling us is not correct i don't know maybe brettie snellis would say dominic's talking nonsense if insofar as i mean if betty snellis ever listened to this podcast at all i think it's possible that patrick bateman is gay and the violence towards women it's partly the fact that he's so conflicted about is yeah exactly all of this and that actually he really is cracking onto lewis caruthers and the stuff about wanting to kill him is a blind but you mentioned the violence against women and obviously we've been having a fun time with the dark comedy of the novel but it is ultimately an extremely violent horror novel and despite the dark humor and the cynicism and how comical the whole world is, Bateman's acts of violence do become increasingly repulsive.

54:38His cruelty to homeless people and animals, the things he does to his female victims, you know, it starts to make one feel quite uncomfortable and actually, for me, quite disturbing when it surfaced. It gets aggressively torrid, you know, fleshy corpses, physical writing, limbs, blood, torture, all described in this clinical deadpan way and it becomes also terrifyingly random like at one point he just stabs a boy in a zoo and kind of sort of his cocks his head almost intrigued when he hears this mother wailing and this is the thing that many feminists were opposed to with Americans on with American Psycho they saw the violence as anti-women and misogynistic and and many still do so for instance the feminist gloria steinham who actually bizarrely is christian bale's stepmother yeah anyway so she was a journalist and activist she was a leader of second wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s she was very very against the book's portrayal of violence against women and brett east and ellis's response to all of this yeah was i wasn't a misogynist when i wrote the book but the unearned feminist hysteria briefly turned me into one now i think

55:52Dominic Sandbrook: he's perhaps i mean i'm not going to say he's being disingenuous he's probably just being intentionally glib he's being intentionally glib there was a point when i was reading it this time where i did think this is actually very hard to read and as a has this crossed the line now into being gratuitous so there are a couple of scenes later on in the last let's say 100 150 pages there's a scene with two women called tori and tiffany that is so gory you know it's it's indescribable the stuff with nail guns and drills you know i i stopped reading it before going to sleep at night it was just getting too much or the girl with there's a stuff i mean we had 1984 with the rats and uh the stuff with the rat in this book um which is absolutely you know mind-boggling it's it's so horrific again you know what place does that come from in the author i mean do you need that to make the same point i guess that's the you know is this just for shock value or does it does it make the point more effectively precisely because it is so in many ways i actually do think that in its in its kind of model of of male perfection or whatever it is it's a certain strain of its misogyny it's actually quite ahead of its time i think you're You could argue that instead of glorifying Patrick Bateman's treatment and objectification of women, it's actually radically shining a light on the realities of a culture where patriarchal capitalism has gone this far.

57:22So it's a time when men generally have much more power in the workplace anyway. It's wealthy executives blistening their secretaries. You know, it's Hollywood's culture of sexism and sexual harassment or whatever. And even though it was published in 1991, so years before online culture, in Patrick Bateman's obsession with his physical appearance, the way that his values are all about attractiveness and success and muscles and tan, his obsession with being the best and having the best, it screams manosphere to me or what we would call toxic masculinity.

57:54Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I agree with you completely. And actually there's a scene in the movie, which I think, God, that could literally have been in Louis Theroux's documentary. And it's when Christian Bale is having sex and he's looking at himself in the mirror and he's looking at his abs. such manosphere behavior he's a man bateman is a man that would really thrive on knowing that his youtube video got more views than anyone else's and outperforming other men and dehumanizing women and it's all about the successful performance of uh an impressive masculine persona i completely agree with you and i'm reading this book again i thought to myself gosh we are you know this is Andrew this is kind of Andrew Tate level stuff the way that um Patrick Bateman and his friends think about women the way they talk about them the way they use them all of that kind of thing and in that respect didn't Irvin Welsh say if a woman had written this book it would be seen as a great visionary feminist work I don't actually think he's wrong about that I think if a woman had written this book people would perceive it completely differently and they would say well she is actually exposing the truth about how men behave and how they think about women.

58:58Dominic Sandbrook: But because it was a sort of wisecracking, very colourful, dissolute man who wrote the book, people perceived it differently. But I do think if you want to know where the kind of that world of incels and the manosphere and looks maxing, what the logical culmination of that is, this book actually is the answer to that. Absolutely. The trouble with these things is you can say I've written it as a satire, but some people would take it, frankly, as a how-to guide. And that, I mean, that's maybe being a bit simplistic, but there's a bloke who carried out a massacre in Sydney in 1991, Wade Francom. American Psycho was one of his favourite books.

59:35Dominic Sandbrook: He loved American Psycho. Canadian serial killer, Paul Bernardo. So he had a very controversial wife and a compass called Carla. She was also a big American Psycho fan. Yeah, so I think the question people asked at the time was, is it morally irresponsible? Is it setting in writing the very detailed, very graphics, violent and sexual scenes? Yes, while you are using them to make a point, you are also maybe providing a handbook. Having brought that up, I'm now going to disagree with myself. I don't think that you can put any of that on Bretty Snellis. No, neither do I. I absolutely don't. To go back to the person in Sydney, American Psycho was one of his favourite books, but so too was Dostoeus' Crime and Punishment.

1:00:15Dominic Sandbrook: And it would seem insane to blame Dostoevsky for a massacre carried out in Sydney in 1991. But you also, you can't run a society on the basis of the sickest people in that society, you know? Completely agree. But to go back to the issue that we raised, actually... Do you read it differently as a man and a woman? Because I already described it. When I first read it, I was reading it as a 17-year-old boy surrounded by other 17-year-old boys. And none of them, as far as I know, I can't remember anybody saying, this book is horrible, those poor women. oh in fact I remember quite the opposite that the boys were almost gleeful about about it and I think surely it must be a very different experience reading it as a young woman I think it's not like I think the women can still read those sex scenes and think those sex scenes are sexy whatever but I do think it is a different experience reading it as a man of a woman I think as a woman it's slightly more unsettling and I sometimes find myself thinking okay enough now you know I get what you're trying to say enough and I think particularly the stuff involving prostitutes that was quite disturbing and how easily overpowered they are by Bateman.

1:01:14Yeah. You know, when they're trying to run out of the room or whatever. And I know, you know, for instance, Irvin Welsh, he makes the point that, you know, sometimes you just get sensitive readers and sensitive readers just aren't going to like this kind of content. And I know I am quite a sensitive reader. You know, I don't like slashers. I don't like horror movies. So I was a bit sick to death of all the violence after a bit. And I was quite unsettled. But I think you're meant to be right by the fact that the sex scenes literally flowed directly into the violence. But I think that that's the point.

1:01:42I think that's probably quite an important point because they're very pornographic, aren't they, the sex scenes? So maybe Bret Easton Ellis is saying, well, you know, you think you're just having a bit of fun and watching porn, but then actually this is where it ends up.

1:01:53Dominic Sandbrook: It's published in 1991. It's published at a point before what you might call the pornographication of mass culture, before the rise of the internet, basically. So pornography is still off in its own little silo, really. And Bret Easton Ellis writes that the sex scenes are very obviously drawn from pornography they're very lurid they're they're wildly over the top they are pure kind of male fantasy so you know blokes with like multiple girls all kinds of stuff is happening in a very sort of exaggerated way but then as you say the very first example of this actually i was just having a look at it before we started recording so it's about four or five pages long the transition from the sex to the violence happens just like that yeah the one paragraph ends which is pure sex and then the next paragraph begins and sudden he says something like elizabeth is running she's covered in blood and i'm following her yeah and it's like i didn't like that it's like the transition in a dream where you don't really know how you got somewhere where an intervening bit has been lost and it happened and and that you see that leads me to think that these things didn't happen that this is all a dreamlike fantasy but anyway i think the effect of it because of course i think for a male reader now i think maybe this is different reading as a woman i think for a male reader particularly if you are a young man you're reading those scenes and you probably find them quite titillate you probably find them very titillating actually so you are complicit in it and then you turn the page and suddenly having been very titillated you are oh my god you're repulsed by yourself though as well in a way you're repulsed by yourself because of course you are invited to picture yourself as patria bayman if you're a male reader no i mean that's what i think and i actually think as well you know we spoke about you know what is that we spoke about this in the leader as well what is it in brett easton ellis that means that he's able to write these deplorable scenes i always think that's slightly kind of the wrong question to ask yeah portraying something is not the same as approving of it is it first of all the writers should be free to use their imagination however they like but also I think it's slightly disingenuous and dishonest of a reader to say gosh what sort of a person must Vladimir Nabokov or Bretty Snellis be to have an imagination as dark as this because well maybe I'm betraying myself here but if we're honest about ourselves do we not all have quite dark imaginations and dark corners of our minds that we wouldn't want to share with the world there's a reason that people are fascinated by serial killers and true crime and that's one of the biggest genres on Netflix and that you know the minute that news or tv was serialized commercialized you know people wanted to watch about serial killers and I think stuff like you do just have to separate the author from the art a lot of the time I think completely in the book Patrick Bateman is grotesquely homophobic Brett Easton Ellis himself is a bisexual I think now more openly gay man so that's obviously not a reflection of what he himself thinks but there is one other question that hangs over this the biggest question i think is whether or not this actually happened at all so we've we've compared it with elita a few times and fight club right and so there is a sort of genre novel in which you have an unreliable narrator who tells you an extreme story and the more it goes on the more you start to doubt whether it's whether it really happened at all and don't we we know from the very beginning that patrick bayman is a very very strange um narrator he calls himself a psychopath you know he's basically on drugs half the time.

1:05:13Dominic Sandbrook: He has hallucinations. He doesn't seem to do any work. His life appears to bear no relation to anyone's real life. Everything we know comes from Patrick Bateman's head. We know he is somebody obsessed with serial killers. His friends joke about how Bateman reads these biographies all the time, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, all of this kind of thing. So he's basically spending his evenings reading stories about serial killers. Is it therefore possible that he has constructed his own fantasy world there are moments in the book which seem clear fantasies you mentioned the car chase yes so this cinematic showdown exactly where it's you know helicopters bateman's causing explosions left right and center all of the police are onto him and it seems so fantastic also the perspective shifts suddenly you move into the third person and and it seems so fantastical that it's almost it's more like something that you'd watch in the cinema than than yeah yeah you know that is in keeping with the rest of the book that it causes you to question whether any of it is actually happening and then there's the whole bit at the end when he leaves that voicemail to his lawyer confessing everything paul owen's murder the murder of all the women it's in the movie as well and the lawyer just laughs and he says well obviously you didn't kill Paul Owen.

1:06:31You know, I was having dinner with Paul Owen that night and he mistakes Patrick Bateman for someone else. Again, the mistaken identities. And he says Patrick Bateman couldn't commit those murders. He's a coward. He could never do that.

1:06:45Dominic Sandbrook: I know you've done some reading up on what Brett Easton Ellis himself thinks of this idea. So what does Brett Easton Ellis say about it? So Brett Easton Ellis, he said that the ending isn't meant to reveal that the murders were all in Patrick's imagination. I.e. he's saying you weren't meant to come away from it thinking it was all made up and that he was surprised by how many people read it that way he actually said i always thought it was clear that patrick bateman was not imagining the murders instead he intended the novel to kind of remain ambiguous the point is rather the collapse of certainty there's no twist ending but then he's quite inconsistent on this because in the afterwards of the book he talks about those leaked passages those passages leaked to the media in which patrick bateman kills women or fantasizes about killing women and then he said in an interview with larry king when larry king asked him is this all a dream and he says when i was working on it i didn't know i had no idea i went back and forth i went back and forth i went back and forth and it wasn't interesting to me to answer that i.e it's not the point i think that's fair i think it's not the point and he wants it to be ambiguous i'll tell you now you know i have a theory of my own you as a reader are a detective reader you like to call into question your narrator me personally you like to call yeah you personally You like to call into question the whole plot.

1:07:57Dominic Sandbrook: Okay, so I'm not saying this is the truth. I'm just saying this is my take and this is what I like to think. I think there are clues throughout the book that Patrick Bateman, that the reality is very different. So I think there is a tension right from the beginning between what Patrick Bateman says about himself and what other people say about him. So as early as page 19, Evelyn says, Patrick's not a cynic. He's the boy next door, aren't you, honey? And Patrick whispers to himself, no, I'm not. I'm an effing evil psychopath now the thing is at that point in the book we are led to believe Patrick is telling us the truth and Evelyn has completely misread him but I think it's the other way around I think she is telling us the truth he is a goody goody he is the boy next door and he's pretending to be something he's not to himself by saying I'm an evil psychopath I think he's an incel I think he is there's a I think he's embarrassed about all sorts of things and he's messed up when his ex-girlfriend Bethany comes to have lunch with him and he she asks about his family and his father he shuts it down straight away he's anxious and embarrassed because he doesn't want to be reminded about his parents later on when she goes to his flat and she says to him you've hung this contemporary art thing upside down it's very embarrassing for him because she's exposed his gauche-ness yeah then that goes straight into a scene of great violence i think that scene of great violence is all in his head and it's a fantasy and it's a way of him compensating for his embarrassment he goes for dinner with his secretary jean she's got a crush on him i think this is the one point in the novel where he could realistically in real life have a sexual encounter because she invites him back to her apartment but he says no i don't want to go uh because i have to return some videotapes i think he's too nervous and then finally the end of the book you said uh the thing about the lawyer who says Patrick Bateman couldn't carry out these murders because he's, quote, a brown-nosing goody-goody.

1:09:50Dominic Sandbrook: And the lawyer says Evelyn dumped him, which is not what Patrick Bateman has told us. And the lawyer says he could barely pick up an escort girl. I think that's the truth about him. And I think everything else, the stuff with the escorts, the murders, the extravagant, decadent, violent lifestyle is in his head, and it's a massive act of compensation. See, I think you're half right, and I think that he's half right. I think he massively... He carried out half the murders. And I think that there is a real, like, sick creepiness in him that means that he does commit some of the murders. Some of the less lurid ones, but not the later ones.

1:10:25But I think the point is kind of more that this society is so deadened that even the woman who shares a bed with him, Evelyn, doesn't know that she's sharing a bed with a serial killer because she doesn't really care as long as she's got kind of her American Express and her legs are perfectly shaped and her hair's looking great. You know, it's about this kind of, the existential numbness of this world ultimately.

1:10:46Dominic Sandbrook: Well, the fact that it ends with nothing changing. Exactly. It ends where it began in a restaurant and they're chatting about horrid bodies. That's what they call waitresses. Yeah. And the sign, this is not an exit. By the way, I think that's a brilliant ending to end with the this is not an exit sign, which is basically there's no escape from the cycle of kind of capitalist consumerism. This hollow world will just continue. So after we've been just, or certainly I have been, very pretentious and pontificating about it. Bretty Snellis had the most brilliant way of summing this all up. He said, people finally read the book.

1:11:17Dominic Sandbrook: They found out it wasn't 400 pages of torture and mutilation advocating the death of women. It's just some boring novel. Yeah. Anyway, so is it a boring novel? I think we should rate it out of peanut butter soup with smoked duck dishes out of 10. Will I go first? You go first. I'm always going first. I think I'm going to give it six. the argument it's a satire of corporate capitalism in 1980s america fair enough but a satire should really make you think and challenge you make you think more deeply about something i would say and i felt like this didn't really do that it was a bit like looking at i reminded me it reminds me of an 18th century cartoon you know it's often very scatological very shocking but a cartoon you look at it for five minutes max and you're like well the point's been made and then you move on that's sort of how i felt with this i don't think it's anything like as sophisticated as a book like elita it's not a very literary novel though is it no is it a book that i would recommend to people i'd say oh you've got to read this it's a brilliant book it is not and so i'm marking it down for that reason for fairly similar reasons i'm also going to give it a six um i did find it very funny um and genuinely quite original you know it's not like i've read anything else like that but i like you did not find it an enormously pleasurable reading experience certainly from kind of the halfway mark i thought the point has been made you know call me sappy but i actually do like to root for something in my books i like to have someone to get behind and and there's no one in this to relate to or to cheer for or to be moved by it's just so incredibly cynical and coming from you that is that i know i know for me that's that's extraordinary do you like the movie by the way it can be quite funny and i think christian bale is very funny it is funny but i don't find it as immersive and of course because the film cannot show the i mean this actually goes maybe answers my rhetorical question about do we need the extremes of violence because the film doesn't show the violence in such gory detail because obviously it can't it's perhaps not as effective it's not as powerful it doesn't linger in my head to the same degree that was actually brady snell's problem with it actually he said lacking that interiority meant that you sapped the movie of its power and he also said that it made readers decide.

1:13:32It made viewers decide does it happen does it not happen. Yeah, but then he did actually meet Christian Bale during filming when Christian Bale was in Bateman mode and he said he got quite freaked out by how uncannily similar they were.

1:13:48Dominic Sandbrook: Wow. But on that note, don't forget to join our own community of psychotic consumer serial killers and sign up to Book Club Notes. Yeah, bookclubhq.com and Tabby, we will be trailing weren't we in book club notes all the things that we've got coming up but just a quick taste for people what are the books that are coming in the next few weeks Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte Goldfinger by Ian Fleming so that's Bond The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky and The Shining by Stephen King so two people that we mentioned in this episode coming up yeah exciting loads of fun things bye everybody bye

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