American Psycho and Society: Bateman, Gacy, and Consumer Culture

Introduction: The Serial Killer as Social Mirror

In his seminal work American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis uses the character of the yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman to criticize American consumer culture while simultaneously challenging readers to confront their own responses to that culture — responses that Ellis seems to suggest are removed from the sociopathic actions of Bateman only in degree, rather than in kind. To see how Ellis uses Bateman to explore the dual role of the serial killer as liberated individual and microcosmic representation of society, one may compare Bateman to the real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who managed to keep his multiple murders secret for the better part of the 1970s. Examining Bateman's characterization alongside the history of Gacy's murders and seemingly normal civilian life helps demonstrate how the fascination with the two-faced killer ultimately stems from a deep-seated acknowledgment that any given serial killer is only as monstrous as the society that produces him — and furthermore, that the public actually craves figures like this in order for them to serve as simultaneous symbols of liberation and condemnation.

Before examining Bateman and Gacy in greater detail, it is helpful to further explicate the larger thesis of this essay, because one cannot appreciate Ellis' social critique without understanding the complex role played by serial killers in the public consciousness — a role that is often misunderstood. The novel itself has been derided as "a monstrous book with a monstrous thesis" due to its graphic content, but this criticism is ultimately based on a misunderstanding of the role serial killers play in the public consciousness. Put simply, this critique and others like it treat the graphic representation of violence, and the fact that Bateman is never punished for his crimes, as indicative of approval — as if the novel were attempting to present Bateman as a hero whose actions should be lauded, if not at least understood (Rogers 231). Instead, one must consider Bateman, and the impunity with which he commits his crimes, as a reflection of the real world, in which punishment is almost never meted out to the majority of those responsible. While lower-class criminals are captured and tried with zealous determination, the powerful rarely experience the law in the same way.

The Public Fascination with Serial Killers

This is why the first dialogue in the novel belongs to Bateman's friend Timothy Price, who declares: "I'm resourceful, […] I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highly motivated, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I'm an asset" (Ellis 3). All of these statements could apply just as easily to Bateman, and in fact, aside from age, they could be self-applied by any number of powerful people who have committed or authorized acts of violence, torture, and murder with impunity. Thus, to read American Psycho as "a monstrous book with a monstrous thesis" is to buy into the very same hegemonic social standards that allow the powerful to act with impunity in the first place, and to miss the central satirical statement of the novel. Its thesis is only monstrous insofar as it reveals the monstrosity of Western society, and the monstrous way in which society is "both attracted to and repulsed by the threatening monster" (Kooijman & Laine 55).

While the actions of serial killers can be — and are — condemned based on any number of easily recognizable ethical standards, this does not mean that they represent an aberration. In many ways, the serial killer represents the natural distillation of a society's larger ethos into the individual psyche, and in doing so "both determines and refutes the boundaries of what is and is not civilization" (Rogers 231). Thus, the image of the perfectly two-faced killer — apparently healthy and normal on the outside but murderous and cruel on the inside — has fascinated the public not out of fear of a killer lurking just below the surface, but because in many ways this character gives expression to urges and reactions that are otherwise suppressed by contemporary society.

This is not to suggest that everyone secretly harbors sociopathic urges, or that interest in serial killers is necessarily an interest in their violent actions. Rather, it is to note that the serial killer who escapes punishment by maintaining a facade of normalcy intrigues the public precisely because he gets away with it. The serial killer is viewed almost as a kind of superhuman being — able to indulge his vice of choice while ostensibly maintaining the same societal standards that keep everyone else in check. Furthermore, the serial killer implicitly reveals the ways in which society itself commits crimes just as atrocious, and how the "normal" members of the public are complicit in widespread atrocities in much the same way as the killer is guilty of his own crimes.

Society's Violence and the Killer's Crimes

This is why serial killers are the subject of such intense and simultaneous interest and revulsion, celebration and condemnation. The successful serial killer reveals the arbitrary nature of social convention precisely by maintaining it, and forces the public to consider whether its own observance of social convention is merely a way of covering up the atrocities committed on a grand historical scale. For example, American Psycho was published in 1991 and takes place during the 1980s, and although the topic is not dealt with explicitly in the novel, one cannot read it without considering the contemporaneous AIDS pandemic that was claiming lives at an alarming rate, primarily due to a lack of societal and political interest in what was deemed a "gay disease" and therefore not worthy of official intervention. Bateman's actions are cruel, vindictive, and violent, but no more so than the cruelty inflicted upon thousands of people suffering from AIDS as a direct result of the social conventions that determined those victims were unworthy of assistance. Similarly, John Wayne Gacy committed the majority of his murders between 1972 and 1978, in the shadow of the Vietnam War and Watergate. Again, while Gacy's crimes were horrendous by any reasonable ethical standard, they are clearly no more horrendous than the atrocities committed during the Vietnam War — atrocities made possible only by the complicity of the American public.

Thus, the violence of both Bateman and Gacy cannot be considered an aberration, but rather a natural reification of the violence committed by the society in which they find themselves — with the only difference being that they do not feel compelled to commit that violence through socially acceptable channels. In this way, the serial killer figure gives expression to those urges the public wishes it could express but suppresses out of devotion to social custom, while simultaneously serving as a monstrous scapegoat that can be condemned in order to reestablish the authority of those social conventions and ultimately legitimize the monopoly on violence and cruelty that official society claims for itself.

Recognizing this helps explain why, after a serial killer's actions have been uncovered, there is a rapid and extremely shallow attempt to identify the underlying reasons for the crimes. For example, Gacy's crimes, like those of many other serial killers, are frequently explained as the result "of psychological and physical abuse perpetrated on the criminal as children," but this explanation only serves to contain the blame within a single family, thereby implicitly shielding society from any responsibility (Campbell 131). This is part of the "pervasive, recognizable rhetoric of serial killer narratives" that works to characterize serial killers according to a set of assumptions and images that implicitly protect dominant society from genuine criticism (Hantke 179). While it is extremely common to blame serial killers' actions on abusive childhoods, it is far less common to hear anyone connecting those abusive childhoods to broader cultural forces. When a serial killer is discovered, the public must search for any reason to isolate and quarantine that killer from the larger society — to condemn the killer without having to confront any of the societal implications of his existence.

Patrick Bateman, Yuppie Masculinity, and Consumer Culture

This process of condemnation is precisely why Ellis chooses to make Bateman a successful, popular yuppie financier rather than a loner, as is often the case with serial killers. By making Bateman a young, powerful individual, Ellis demonstrates that the characteristics necessary to be "successful" in contemporary America are precisely the characteristics necessary to become a serial killer, thereby forcing the reader to confront the inextricable connection between killers and society that is so often disregarded in popular treatments of the serial killer as monster. In this way, Ellis is playing off of the "1980s financial narratives in fiction, autobiography, and economic journalism" that sought to portray the new generation of financial brokers as representatives of a new kind of masculine power — a white-collar predator conceived to counter the perceived emasculation resulting from the gradual transition from a manufacturing to an information and service economy (La Berge 273). Bateman exists not as the product of one family's dysfunction, but as the child of an entire culture — a culture he reflects in every aspect of his being, including his appearance, his job, and his masculinity, which is "anachronistic, intolerably volatile, and in crisis" (Schoene 379).

The reader is thus forced to consider Bateman's character — and in particular his sexual potency and violence — not as a perversion of standard social norms, but rather as the natural progression of the standards implicitly maintained by society. This is best exemplified by the practice of calling sexually attractive women "hardbodies." Although nearly all of Bateman's male associates use this term, it carries an additional connotation with Bateman himself, since he literally sees other people as bodies to be used and abused. Thus, when Bateman says "I'm bored so I go for the bar without excusing myself to ask the hardbody I want to cut up for some matches," the casual misogyny of his male colleagues is effortlessly amplified into the murderous misogyny of the serial killer, demonstrating that Bateman's perception of the world merely represents the next point on the spectrum of acceptable social convention (Ellis 61). In some ways, John Wayne Gacy's crimes can similarly be considered as the natural amplification of preexisting social standards regarding sex and gender, though in his case Gacy proceeds from homophobia rather than misogyny.

Conclusion: Condemning Society Through the Serial Killer

Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is so intriguing because it intentionally confronts the way serial killers function in the public consciousness, and in particular the way in which society attempts to separate itself from the serial killer as a means of implicitly celebrating the killer's disregard for social controls while explicitly reinforcing those controls. By comparing Ellis' Patrick Bateman with the story of John Wayne Gacy, one can better understand how American Psycho uses violence and terror not to celebrate the serial killer, as some critics have asserted, but rather to condemn society for its continual role in creating and subsequently condemning serial killers as a means of avoiding its own complicity in violence and murder on a far grander scale. The relative success of Patrick Bateman is not the novel celebrating his skill or prowess, but is rather a reflection of the fact that society often elevates the most violent, power-hungry individuals to the highest levels of authority, and that the only difference between presidents or corporate leaders and serial killers is that the former destroy people in much greater numbers — and do so with the explicit support of the larger society.