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Is American Psycho a misogynist text?

Introduction

The essential premise of American Psycho is probably not a sexual one, and to focus on Bateman's sexuality is to risk missing the point. The caricatured inhumanity of the central character focuses on markers of maleness, a pre-metrosexual 1980's masculinity defined by materialism. While it is true that perverse or extreme sexuality are very evident in the character of Bateman, they are used more as striking symptoms of his psychosis than as general identifiers of his male character. He is a psycho who happens to be male, rather than a man who has become psychotic about his maleness. If anything, the implication would seem to be that he is psychotic about his American-ness and the masculine, sexual, manner in which his psychosis manifests is a product of his socio-cultural location. Perhaps we are supposed to notice that Bateman is American before he is psychotic, that he is American before he is male, and that American-ness, maleness, and psychosis are inextricably and hierarchically- if usually hermetically- linked.

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Bateman himself may well be a misogynist, but whether the text can reasonably be read as some kind of misogynist propaganda depends on many more factors: how sympathetic he is; what the realist agenda of the story is; how the female characters are portrayed; what the express intentions of the author are, etc. Looking cursorily at the realism, for example, it is quickly obvious that Bateman is not supported by the style of the book. The writing is surely darkly comic- a feature made even more apparent in the film.

Nevertheless the film is not exempt from accusations of misogyny. The core of the discussion about American Psycho and many other texts related to it lies the question of whether it is truly possible to have a male protagonist and not to expect the audience to identify with him, ultimately in some way condoning his actions. The same debate surrounded the openly woman-hating In the Company of Men, which was nevertheless defended by the director as being a demonstration of "how awful men can be". In Laura Mulvey's view, the reader will identify with the male protagonist, as the apparatus of cinema is synchronous with societical ideologies to the extent that it indoctrinates us into the dominant paradigm.

The swaggering and posturing of the indentikit guys like Bateman and his peers can be convincingly interpreted as a kind of hollow self-inflation that actually only highlights weakness, sameness, and never autocratic power. If the men display elements of misogyny, they appear to be acts of distinction- ways in which they move the spotlight off themselves and onto a lesser other in order to validate that they are still men. Bateman is not significant in his individuality, so the point cannot be that he, or indeed Ellis, hates women: Bateman is a representative, a syntagm- part of a symphonic group of people so fatally embroiled in the monotony of their worlds they must ultimately, desperately, seek an other by which to define themselves. Unlikely Hitchcock's Psycho, Bateman's violence does not appear to be a way of compensating for his emasculation- he is sexually primal and irresistibly alpha. Yet all the sex in the world will not compensate for the real emasculation that the book in concerned with. Bateman is finds himself trapped in an inescapable and torturous pattern of grovelling and bootlicking in order to hold onto his job and material possessions. As David Reilly writes,

"American Psycho" lets us envy the lifestyle while pretending to criticize it. Neither the book nor, apparently, the movie, actually satirizes these guys' greed. The target is their swaggering masculinity (making the old, old Andrea Dworkinish point that just being male is an act of misogyny). We're left with a loophole: Lives built around money and expensive consumer goods are only bad if you're not a woman or a sensitive male who would never hurt a fly or open his.

In fact there may be another level to this. Misogyny is not necessarily apparent only in exhibitions of homogenous maleness; many of the most emphatic displays found in homosexual culture represent barely concealed disdain for womankind. American Psycho is a homosexual story to the extent that it is about the price of fabulousness, the irresistible capitalist encroachment on individual style. Since the lifestyle and trappings of flamboyance require money, capitalism will always ask subcultures to forfeit their marginalized chic, if they wish to survive in society. In this way, underground culture has been rapidly appropriated by dominant society, and capitalism has transformed former subcultures into the reining style. Ellis's novel is an extravagant cautionary tale about the fragility of human desire and its propensity to buckle and warp quite readily under pressure. Even the content of their bizarre conversation is alien to the men, they have become strangers to everything that is supposed to identify them as unique: their clothes, their homes, their business cards, words, are all governed by a complicated rule system that has come to represent nothing more than income. As Turner says,

Fabulousness exists merely as a free-floating marker of cultural capital, obscuring its subversive origins and capitalizing on a raced and classed cultural history without acknowledging the fierce politics behind it.

Sexism and misogyny is still present among gay men, who enjoy certain privileges as men in a patriarchal culture. Turner suggests that characters like Carrie in Sex and the City provide gay men with a portal into the heterosexual norm. They enable a degree of acceptance by giving them some use beyond their usual isolation. The sense of "shame" attached to homosexuality is alleviated through the homosexuals' efforts towards assimilation into heteronormative society and as such, flamboyance and caricatured femininity may be a system of neutralization. It seems that Bateman and his colleagues are subject to this homosexual compromise in society in two ways: their desire to be individualized only makes them more normal; and it leads them to a cold impersonation of femininity. By traveling so far up the scale of feminine affectation, homosexuals appear distanced from the bodily acts of sex and to the extent that everything is about appearances, are accepted into the sanitized, sexless subjectivity in mainstream culture.

Turner has characterized the pseudo-boyfriending of male homosexuals as a kind of apologism, and Bateman's relationship with Jean- particularly as it is represented in the film- resonates with Turner's words,

Homophobic notions of immoral, seedy gay lifestyles are de-clawed through relationships with straight women.

The most comical moments in Ellis's novel are those where men behave like women; where they compare business cards, or discuss clothes or facials, and whether we are misogynists just for appreciating the joke is another question again. Bateman even comes out of these exchanges relatively well, sometimes subtly undermining his competitively superficial peers,

'You should match the socks with the trousers,' Todd Hamlin tells Reeves, who is listening intently, stirring his Beefeater on the rocks with a swizzle stick.

' Who says?' George asks.

' Now listen,' Hamlin patiently explains. 'If you wear gray trousers, you wear gray socks. It's as simple as that.'

' But wait,' I interrupt. 'What if the shoes are black?'

' That's okay,' Hamlin says, sipping his Martini. 'But then the belt has to match the shoes.'

' So what you're saying is that with a gray suit you can either wear gray or black socks,' I ask.

Conclusion

The real horror, (and the real tragedy) of this novel is revealed in degeneration of the human into a floating signifier. It is terrifying that a murderer can be invisible to all his closest peers, but it is more terrifying that he can also be invisible to himself; that any person can be reduced to a system of component markers and still pass as a person in our society, as if all that constitutes effective personhood can be bought with a credit card. Bateman is a fatality of post modernism's agonising infinite semiosis. As Alex Blazer puts it,

He has so filled himself up with hype, pomp, pretense that his identity is nothing more than an advertisement, an illusion, a mask under which no human character dwells. While John Berryman's Henry may well be ironic, Bateman cannot fathom irony because he has no layers, no sense of depth. He cannot differentiate between products and people, consumption and affect: he's flat, superficial, and ultimately in-fathomable. His character is a mask covering a void; his identity is an aberrational reaction to the abyss of being that founds his existence.

Unlike modernist culture, which followed the psychic economics of Freud and Marx, with its obsessive identification of neurosis and of alienation from society, family, and oneself, post modernist culture embraces the alienation unlovingly, at the expense of itself. It is truly the child of Freud of Marx, Bateman is truly the child of Freud and Marx, rebelling against both parents and ultimately proving them both right. Freud's concern is with unmasking illusions, revealing and unravelling and, while the path is painful, the eventual reconciliation will be peaceful and whole. Bateman, however, is trapped in on the path: he is the postmodern child unable to overcome his neuroses because he is unwilling to even begin. He is trapped in the aporia of contemporary desire: recognising no origin and no future; fixated on images of hyper-real and driven to inhabit a world of synthesised pleasure and faux contentment that leads only to more pretence. The signals of post modern signals are hardly disguised in this novel- the last line is an unforgettable momento mori of post modernism, and a hypogram in itself:

Above one of the doors covered by red velvet drapes in Harry's is a sign and on the sign in letters that match the drapes' color are the words THIS IS NOT AN EXIT

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.

Blazer, Alex E. Chasms of Reality, Aberrations of Identity: Defining the Postmodern through Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho in Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Volume 1, Issue 2 (2002) http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/blazer.htm

Derrida, J. Aporias, Stanford University Press: Stanford (1994)

Ellis, B. E. American Psycho, Vintage-Random: London (1991)

Reilly, D. Salon letters page, Reilly, D. Salon letters page, http://archive.salon.com/letters/2000/04/18/libertarians/