American Psycho: Murder, Trump, and New York City

The Book Club

The hosts explore the dark, satirical world of Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, set against the backdrop of 1980s Wall Street. The

Key takeaways

• The novel serves as a critique of 1980s American capitalism and the worship of wealth.
• Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt were part of a literary group that met at Bennington College.

Main topics

• American Psycho
• 1980s Wall Street Culture

Notable quotes

Greed is good, greed works.

Conclusion

An insightful analysis of how literature can mirror and satirize the s

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) you Speaker 5 (0:10) I 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? Speaker 3 (0:24) Whoa. Speaker 5 (0:25) McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. Speaker 2 (0:30) Very nice. He Speaker 5 (0:32) hands it to Van Patten. Speaker 2 (0:34) Cool coloring. Speaker 5 (0:35) That's bone, I point out. And the lettering is something called Cillian Rail. Speaker 2 (0:42) It's very cool, Bateman. Speaker 5 (0:45) Van Padden says guardedly, the jealous bastard. Speaker 2 (0:48) But that is nothing. He Speaker 5 (0:50) pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. Speaker 2 (0:53) Look at this. Speaker 5 (0:55) 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 Padden says, smugly. Speaker 2 (1:04) Eggshell, with Romalian type. Speaker 5 (1:07) Nice. I croak. Jesus. Price says. Speaker 2 (1:11) This is really super. Speaker 5 (1:13) How Speaker 2 (1:14) did a nitwit like you Speaker 5 (1:15) 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. Speaker 2 (1:25) But wait. Speaker 5 (1:27) Price says. Speaker 2 (1:28) You ain't seen nothing yet. Speaker 5 (1:30) 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. Speaker 2 (1:50) Ray's lettering, pale nimbus white. Speaker 5 (1:53) 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 Speaker 3 (2:02) am unexpectedly depressed that I started this. Speaker 5 (2:05) So hello everybody, that was from American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis published in 1991. Dominic and I there 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. This episode is brought to you by Klarna. Speaker 2 (2:39) Tabby, as I was saying to you the other day, I don't get to do as much daydreaming as I used to. I used to go into these great reveries when I'd come up with my best ideas. I don't have a chance anymore because I spend so much time doing my life admin. It's the same for you, isn't it? You Speaker 5 (2:52) know, I used to spend a lot of time rewriting my favourite books so that I would get the endings that I'd always hoped for. But Speaker 2 (2:59) you know how you can get that time back, Tabby? I've started using Klarna to handle my real-world money. admin and that gives me the headspace for the more important things like thinking about books. Because Speaker 5 (3:10) their app lets you view all your finances in one place. You can set budgets, stay on top of reminders and manage your payments so you don't have to worry about any plot Speaker 2 (3:21) holes. And you know the other thing about the app, when you shop through the app, you unlock exclusive deals and you can get cash back on things that you are going to buy anyway. Speaker 5 (3:30) Download the Klarna app so you can stay on top of your money and think about... Well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cash back points. Limitations, terms and conditions apply. 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 modelling 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. But 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. Speaker 2 (4:23) 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 um and uh 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 yeah um 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 emphasize for listeners, this is, of course, a very violent book. So we'll be talking about some very grim. things. 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 Speaker 5 (5:46) 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. This was about five years ago, I think, four or five years ago. And so I hurriedly 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. Speaker 2 (6:27) So on brand. And his Speaker 5 (6:28) 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 Speaker 1 (6:40) I Speaker 5 (6:41) 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 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. Speaker 2 (7:02) Okay. But Speaker 5 (7:03) there is someone who's a very, very big fan of this. And I think you can see the correlation between his work and Bret Easton Ellis's. And that's a guy called Irvin Welsh. And he's the writer of Trainspotting. Exactly. And he describes it as... As a book that holds a mirror up to a particular age, it 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 tell us about the context of American Psycho, because this is 1980s America, capitalism, the Wall Street boom. Think Wolf of Wall Street. Speaker 2 (7:40) 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-fueled consumerism of the late kind of Reagan and then Bush years in America. So to give people a bit of historical context, Speaker 1 (8:03) the 60s have been a period of great idealism, of course, civil rights movement, the movement against the Vietnam War and stuff. Speaker 2 (8:08) Then you had the 1970s. Stagnation, Nixon being brought down by Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the hostages in Iran and so on. 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. Speaker 5 (8:42) You see that in this book quite starkly. You do indeed. Speaker 2 (8:44) 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. Terrifyingly Speaker 5 (8:55) white teeth. Speaker 2 (8:55) Very white teeth. Yeah, it looks good on a horse though, Tabby. Not Speaker 5 (8:59) as good as Putin, but yeah, a man can dream. God Speaker 2 (9:02) 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 Speaker 1 (9:27) hair. Speaker 5 (9:28) Bad fashion. Speaker 2 (9:29) 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, telling the set on Wall Street. 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 done before. And this has been reflected in the media, which is a self-undergoing, a big change at the time because of the rise of cable TV and so on. So what you have is a kind of general culture, particularly in New York and particularly on 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. Speaker 2 (10:36) unrepentant consumerism, the worship of wealth. In the film Wall Street, the character Gordon Gekko, who's played by Michael Douglas, gives this speech, you know, 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. 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 in a way are 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 civil rights marchers or they might have been students smoking dope and going on marches against the Vietnam War. But now their kids, they've done quite well. Their kids have gone to university. They go to law school. They end up on Wall Street in some swanky law firm or something. The old values of their parents 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. And actually the man who epitomizes this is not so much Ronald Reagan, it's Donald Trump. Speaker 5 (11:55) Yeah, because this is a time when people could make that unusual transition from being Wall Street executives to celebrities. Speaker 2 (12:03) 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 in American Psycho. Trump is actually there throughout the book. He is. Speaker 3 (12:34) Like Speaker 2 (12:34) Patrick Bateman is obsessed with Donald and Ivana Trump and is always kind of looking over his shoulder to see if they've come into the restaurant. Are they at Dorsey or whatever? 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. Speaker 3 (13:14) Yeah. So Speaker 2 (13:14) 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 Speaker 5 (13:29) 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, this long obsession, the decades-long obsession with consumerism, the out-of-control corporate greed. And it's almost like he's chanting like serial killers are just the... the next step, the logical conclusion of that greed. That's kind of the leap that Brett Easton Ellis is making in this. The Speaker 2 (14:13) idea that 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, then they cast them aside. And this is obviously what Patrick Bateman is doing. Speaker 5 (14:29) Traditionally, the traditional view of serial killers is kind of... Speaker 5 (14:34) isolated losers full of self-loathing and therefore it's from that position that 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 Speaker 2 (14:56) on gentleman's quarterly way of living. So GQ is one of those magazines that really captures the yuppie lifestyle in the late 80s. Speaker 5 (15:05) Yeah, it champions that kind of elitism, doesn't it? Handsome people wearing the best clothes, wearing the right shoes. But speaking of Bret 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. His parents were divorced in 1982. And it's interesting because during the publicity for American Psycho, Brett Easton Ellis said that Patrick Bateman was based on his father, which is... Speaker 2 (15:38) God, I'm reading. That's an Speaker 5 (15:41) extreme claim and it's definitely not complimentary. Your Speaker 2 (15:44) son's written a book about you. Speaker 5 (15:46) 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. Donna Tartt. Donna Tartt. 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 Camden College, which features in several other of Brett Easton Ellis' books, is based on. And there he studied music and he was in a band. More importantly, though, it was there that he met Donna Tartt because they were both in this very artistic class of 1986. It's called a bit of a myth. a mythos of its own now. Speaker 2 (16:34) There's a podcast about it. There is a podcast Speaker 5 (16:36) about it, yeah, about all their crazy drug-filled 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. 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 Speaker 2 (17:06) 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? Speaker 5 (17:18) Yeah, it does do very, very well. And both books feature thinly veiled... imitations of their classmates at 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. Brace Nelson himself was famously hedonistic, loved a party, loved a drink. And he actually published his first book, book at Bennington when he was only 21 so very young like Donna Tartt and this was less than zero and this is very debauched but nothing on American Psycho. Speaker 2 (18:01) So he's got less than zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho. So Speaker 5 (18:05) American Psycho is his third book and by far his most successful but it took a while to take off. Speaker 2 (18:10) 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