Corporate Zombies, Opinionated Commodities, and the Spaces of Monstrous Finance
in Mary Harron’s American Psycho
Iona Sharp Casas 10854908
Thesis rMA Cultural Analysis Supervisor: Joost de Bloois
Second reader: Noa Roei Date: 27/06/2016
Introduction...1 Chapter 1: Work as Construct: Immaterial Labour and Corporate Zombies...9 Chapter 2: On Consumption: The Digestion of the Sign and the Agency of the Insubordinate Commodity...23 Chapter 3: Understanding Space: The Agential Properties of Non-Places and the Reach of Finance Capitalism...38 Conclusion...57 Works Cited...62
Introduction
1. Capitalism, Camera, Action
This project is born from an eagerness to explore what happens when cinema, everyday reality, and our heavily financialised capitalist system intersect. Much has been written about the latter two; about the causes, consequences, and development of these, and about how they are expressed through cinema. In this thesis, however, film will not be treated as a mere passive cultural representation of what happens when these two ingredients merge into one another; but as a third, active and capable object that produces a particular affective expression. Quoting Steven Shaviro, “I am interested in the ways that recent film […] works are expressive: that is to say, in the ways that they give voice […] to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today” [emphasis in the original] (7).
The movie dissected here is “American Psycho” (Harron 2000), an ongoing favourite of mine. Having watched the movie several times, I wonder: what does “American Psycho” express about everyday life in Wall Street, and how does this expression seem to mirror our current reality? One could say, then, that this thesis stems from a certain interpretative failure – the movie has lingered in my mind since the first time I saw it several years ago, and for several reasons I have never fully explored nor understood it in depth. Hence, this project is born from a personal desire to have a proper talk with the movie. This conversation will unravel throughout the project, eventually becoming a platform through which I will investigate both my enthusiasm for this film, and my peculiar mania with the late capitalist system. These intentions merge in order to discuss the following question: how does
“American Psycho” produce, shift, or contest our ideas of what it means to live (to be alive) under finance capitalism1?
1 Throughout this thesis, ‘finance capitalism’ is understood as what it metonymically stands for: the economy (La Berge 4). Finance capitalism is, arguably, the stage of capitalism we are in; a phase that started in the 1970s and 1980s with the “crisis of growth of Fordist capitalism” (Marazzi 28) and the transition to “stock managerial capitalism” (30), and has continued until now. Following Christian Marazzi’s words, “we are in a historical period in which finance is consubstantial with the very production of goods and services” (27 – 28). In other
2. “An uneven movie that nonetheless bristles with stinging wit and exerts a perverse fascination” (Travers)
“American Psycho” is a movie directed by Marry Harron, released in the year 2000 and set in the late 1980s. It is based on the 1991 novel written by Bret Easton Ellis, a book “dropped by its original publisher, reviewed by The New York Times under the headline “Snuff This Book”, [and] booed by Gloria Steinem and other feminists” who interpreted it as glorifying gender violence (Phipps et al). The movie, released nine years later than the book, has been reviewed as “a film of gleaming, impossibly perfect surfaces, devoid of comfort or warmth” and “a dry comedy of matters splattered with blood and viscera” (Phipps et al); as well as “the best monster movie in years” (Thompson, qtd. in Bride 3). This “mean horror comedy classic” (Holden) portrays the life of Patrick Bateman, a young urban professional who lives in New York and works in mergers and acquisitions – a branch of corporate finance dealing with the merging and strengthening of Wall Street companies. Bateman enjoys a successful financial career that allows him to hide his true amusement – he is a psychopathic murderer (“I’m into murders and executions”, he utters smilingly).
The movie depicts Bateman’s downward spiral and loss of control, a decline that is triggered by his murder of Paul Allen (one of his co-workers) and the detective investigation that follows. Up to that point Bateman is portrayed as leading a relatively quiet and seemingly controlled life, albeit being part of a perplexing and disturbing atmosphere, and having gruesome hobbies. He works in his father’s Wall Street company, and is surrounded by colleagues who are uncannily similar to him – they wear the same clothes, hang out in the same places, and speak in the same manner. As I will explore in depth throughout this thesis, in this “cocky, carnivorous sang-froid” Wall Street world (Holden), Patrick is continually mistaken by his colleagues – this sometimes plays in his favour, and sometimes does not. One
words, “the financial economy today is pervasive, that is, it spreads across the entire economic cycle, co-existing with it, so to speak from start to finish” (27). Unless stated, finance capitalism will also be referred to as ‘late capitalism’.
of these misunderstandings is initiated by Paul Allen, who mistakes Bateman for a colleague – an error that eventually allows Bateman to murder him, consumed by envy and greed. From that point on, his killings increase dramatically, to the point that he cannot hide them
anymore: he murders several prostitutes, a model he meets in a bar, and even one of his so-called friends. Slowly but steadily, the situation gets out of hand: after killing several people on a shooting spree, Bateman eventually confesses his crimes to his lawyer on the phone. Nevertheless, despite this confession, by the end of the movie his disclosure is neither taken seriously nor has any repercussion. By not specifying a resolution, judgement, or catharsis of the main character, “American Psycho” ends on an ambiguous note: the viewer does not know if Patrick Bateman’s Wall Street colleagues are trying to conceal his story by pretending they do not believe him, or if they believe him at all – perhaps the story has simply not taken place.
3. The Everyday Psycho
In order to explore the role “American Psycho” will take in this project, I want to first contextualize it by delving into my plans and expectations for this exercise. How can Patrick Bateman’s story make us reflect on our everyday reality? As mentioned throughout my introduction, I believe “American Psycho” produces certain particular expressions of our current times that should be acknowledged attentively – a process I unravel throughout this thesis. To be able to analyse how the movie produces these insights, I focus particularly on ideas related to what everyday life is, or how life seems to be distributed, in the era of finance capitalism.
When speaking of everyday life, I am borrowing notions from a branch of knowledge known as “everyday life studies”. Ben Highmore – one of the field’s most well-known contemporary names – defines everyday life as a concept pointing “(without judging) to those most repeated actions, those most travelled journeys, those most inhabited spaces that make up, literally, the day to day” (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory 1). Nevertheless, everyday
life is also that which we do not know or cannot decipher; the making of “the unfamiliar familiar […] for adjusting to different ways of living” that “marks the success and failure of this process” (2). I am here interested in exploring how Bateman’s life can reflect on ours: I do not wish to focus so much on the movie’s specific social and behavioural expression of corporate, Wall Street high-class traders, but on how the film reflects on the everyday life and rituals of a particular subject. This subject – Patrick Bateman – belongs in an era of blooming financialization and flourishing Wall Street enterprises (the 1980s) that was already
developing into the finance capitalism we know of today. To think of everyday life in “American Psycho”, then, allows me to “disentangle this contrary mixture of forces [the familiar and the unfamiliar forces we encounter every day] to see how their entanglement figures the everyday as both known and unknown, comfortable and uncomfortable” (4): what notions does Bateman’s Wall Street reality question and produce, and how do these mirror our everyday lives?
Therefore, and borrowing from Highmore’s projects, one of the intentions of this thesis is to make the unnoticed dynamics of everyday life noticeable (23); focusing particularly on the effects, realizations, and development of late capitalism. This thesis pursues this goal by “finding the strange within everyday life” (12) in “American Psycho”, and reflecting it on our everyday reality. Quoting Michel de Certeau’swidely known text “The Practice of Everyday Life”,
this goal will be achieved if everyday practices, ‘ways of operating’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity, and if a body of theoretical questions, methods, categories, and perspectives, by penetrating this obscurity, make it possible to articulate them. (xi)
Along these lines, the chapters that follow can be read as an attempt to articulate the role of capitalism on Patrick Bateman’s “everyday practices” (xi). In order to do so, this project
contends that the discourses and ideas the movie embraces are part of something bigger: “American Psycho” will not be read solely as a movie, but as an expression of a certain awareness that can be located in our contemporary, late-capitalist world.
By placing the movie in dialogue with accounts of what it means to live in our current times, I am making this project resonate with Steven Shaviro’s book on “Post-Cinematic Affect” (2010). Adopting some of the ideas Shaviro states in his book, I am interested in analysing to what extent cinema can constitute a particular understanding of our everyday reality; thus “develop[ing] an account of what it feels like to live in the early twenty-first century” [emphasis in the original] (7). Hence, and in line with Shaviro’s work, I am not interested in exploring how “American Psycho” might represent, visualize, or explain certain concepts; but in how the movie produces a particular understanding of what these concepts mean. In Shaviro’s words, my aim is to study this cinematic object as an “affective map [that] constructs and performs the social relations, flows, and feelings that it is ostensibly ‘about’” (Shaviro 11)2. Therefore, this thesis will explore how the movie embraces, contends, and transforms certain ideas that can be found at the core of our heavily capitalised, twenty-first century life. Herein lies one of the main purposes of this project: to convince the reader that, sometimes, we may want to turn to cinema to grasp our lives differently, thus creating an alternative awareness of what our reality can possibly entail.
4. Workers, Commodities, and Apartments
In order to structure this thesis smoothly, I have chosen to divide it into three chapters. These chapters correspond to three major themes in the movie: labour, consumption, and space. They act as three self-contained essays that are, nonetheless, linked to and built on each other through a dominant thread: how is (everyday) life presented and produced in the Wall Street world of “American Psycho”? I have chosen these three concepts as chapters not only
2 Shaviro borrows Massumi’s definition of affect as an “asignifying, unqualified, and intensive” force (8) and Fredric Jameson’s representational and cartographic projects to speak of “post-cinematic affect” as “an aesthetic of affective mapping” (11).
because they are of great importance in the movie, but also because of the weight they have in our capitalised reality. In line with this, throughout these three chapters I bridge theories belonging to the studies of everyday life – such as theories on labour and consumption, which are important concepts in the field of everyday life studies3; as well as particular approaches to space4 – with certain posthuman, object-oriented, and new materialist arguments that move away from humanist research in order to focus on the life and agency of entities and things. I do this not only to avoid focusing solely on the human subject (in order to expand my analysis of what life under capitalism entails); but also because, as I explore in my thesis, non-human and seemingly lifeless entities share our everyday life with us in more ways that we might initially expect.
My first chapter – “Work as Construct: Immaterial Labour and Corporate Zombies” – starts by discussing the importance of labour (work) in the movie. Throughout this chapter I call on theories written by Maurizio Lazzarato, Silvia Federici, Cederström and Fleming, and others, in order to contend that “American Psycho” reflects a very particular type of labour: the production of immaterial products in the financial sector. By close-reading a well-known scene of the movie – the “business card” scene – I argue that the type of immaterial labour that appears in “American Psycho” renders its workers as de-humanized, neither-dead-nor-alive subjects. I end my first chapter by discussing in what manner the kind of labour represented in the movie produces the financial worker as someone whose life is entirely devoted to Wall Street; thus questioning certain binaries that might otherwise be taken for granted – such as work and life, human and non-human, or life and death.
In my second chapter – “On Consumption: The Digestion of the Sign and the Agency of the Insubordinate Commodity” – I introduce the counterpart concept of (immaterial)
3 Without going into further detail, Marx himself appears often in this area of study; as well as other authors writing on consumption in everyday life such as De Certeau (Highmore 2002, 2011).
4 Authors such as De Certeau (1984) and Lefebvre (Highmore 2002, 2001) have frequently explored the notion of space in relation to everyday life.
production: the exercise of consumption. In order to develop my argument, I use three different short scenes of the movie in which consumption is the central topic. Following theories and texts of David Graeber, Jean Baudrillard, and other authors, I discuss the exercise of commodity consumption in “American Psycho” as a meaning-making process: not as the passive analogue of production, but a process of signification. Analysing the commodity as a sign – and not a bare, lifeless object – allows me to explore Patrick Bateman’s cannibalistic inclinations as one of his ways of becoming more human, and the commodification of human bodies as an extreme meaning-making mechanism. I end this chapter by questioning the autonomy of both the human subject and the commodity; since in this “American Psycho” reality the agential properties of both seem to have distributed.
To speak of the agential properties of seemingly lifeless elements introduces my third chapter – “Understanding Space: The Agential Properties of Non-Places and the Reach of Finance Capitalism”. In this chapter, I use Marc Augé’s concept of non-place to explore some of the most important spaces in the movie: Patrick Bateman’s and Paul Allen’s apartments. I first analyse Bateman’s flat as possibly sharing certain characteristics with Augé’s notion of non-place. One of the most important features of non-places – the fact that they are not an absolute representation, but a degree of measurement – further allows me to study both Bateman’s and Paul Allen’s apartments as spaces that become more of a non-place in order to disorient our main character. I then call on Karen Barad’s definition of agency to be able to explore how, by becoming spaces that disclose non-place features, these domestic spaces enact a certain amount of agency – whilst Bateman is deprived of any accountability
whatsoever. Following Gean Moreno’s essay “Notes on the Inorganic”, I eventually close this chapter by imagining how the agential properties of space in “American Psycho” reflect the transformation of space into non-place in our prevailing reality.
I end this thesis by proposing, together with other authors (Moreno, Holert), that perhaps it is best to think of finance capitalism as a strange, shapeless body that develops monstrously, affecting everything it handles and generates. As mentioned previously, throughout this project I aim to explore what the movie “American Psycho” produces in relation to our current lives; the ideas it develops, and its distorted but strangely accurate commentary on our everyday reality. Further on I conclude that, in line with my chapter analysis, “American Psycho” questions several notions that might usually be taken for granted; such as the conceptual relationship between ideas of life and lifelessness (alive and un-living) under capital. My intention, then, is to lay these questions bare; and interpret in what way the movie produces these ideas. Needless to say, this thesis is indebted to everyone who explores a reality in which set differences between certain concepts might not be valid anymore. After all, life under late capitalism may not be what it seems; nor be found where it is assumed to be found.
Chapter 1: Work as Construct: Immaterial Labour and Corporate Zombies
What is it about working today that produces a person who exists between life and death, a figure whose only hope is that it might soon all be over? (Cederström and Fleming 5)
1.1. Introduction
In this chapter, I argue that “American Psycho” is a movie about work. This argument is ingrained in a bigger project that wishes to explore in what manner “American Psycho” depicts everyday life under late capitalism, and why this cinematic depiction is important. I choose to start this project by exploring the role of labour in the movie because I believe it is a fundamental notion to consider when interpreting how everyday life relates to the economic system. Throughout decades (and centuries), labour has been the – repetitive and exhausting – constitutive structure of the subject’s everyday reality: in Henry Lefebvre’s poignant words, “we work to earn our leisure, and leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work” (qtd. in Highmore Ordinary Lives 86). According to Ben Highmore, “the most common analogy for characterizing ‘everyday life’ within modernity […] is the assembly line” – a classic rendition of what labour has meant for a very long time (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory 6). Nevertheless, as I will discuss further on in this chapter, in our current age dominated by finance capitalism, features such as assembly lines, Fordist labour structures, and other aspects of industrial capitalism have gradually dissipated into the background: now “we all sit in front of a screen and move our fingers across a keyboard” (Berardi 74). With this, the makeup of the everyday has undoubtedly changed; and some of its consequences will be explored throughout this chapter.
In this study I discuss how the film frames a particular type of labour and explores its integration into the worker’s life. In doing so, I argue “American Psycho” opens questions of what working actually means in an industry that does not produce material goods but
immaterial, financial products. In response to this, I ask the movie the following question: what type of subject is the labourer of the financial sector? I contextualize labour in
“American Psycho” by analysing one particular scene and the consequences it has throughout the movie – the ‘business card’ scene. This scene allows me to point towards how labour in the financial world of “American Psycho” produces the worker’s identity; rendering the main character and his colleagues as distorted, zombie-like subjects. In other words, the corporate world in the movie is characterized as de-humanizing subjects through labour. Hence, I argue that by expressing these ideas “American Psycho” ultimately interrogates what is left of the human whose life has been reduced to Wall Street, distorting set definitions such as work/life and life/death, as well as notions of humanness. De-stabilizing the notion of the human worker in this chapter will then allow me to continue questioning what life under Wall Street means throughout the rest of my thesis; thus examining how “American Psycho” produces and expresses these ideas in relation to our everyday lives.
1.2. “Most guys I know who work with mergers and acquisitions really don’t like it”
As discussed previously, “American Psycho” portrays the downwards spiral of Patrick Bateman, an “80s Wall Street serial killer” (Gopalan). In order to examine the role of labour in the movie, it is useful to first situate the film in place and time: its portrayal of Bateman’s vicious, psychopathic activities has been read as “a seating satire of yuppie culture5 and the excess of the 1980s. It’s an indictment of a society that values economic prosperity over any sort of discernible morality” (Pliskin). “American Psycho”, then, is a movie about 1980s yuppies for whom Wall Street – the heart of the activity in the financial sector – was not only
5 A “yuppie” is defined as “a young person who lives in a city, earns a lot of money, and spends it doing fashionable things and buying expensive possessions” (“Yuppie” Cambridge Dictionary Online).
a work space, but a lifestyle. Bret Easton Ellis himself, the author of the 1991 novel (American Psycho) that would later be adapted into film by Mary Harron, once stated the following: “When I moved to New York in the ‘80s, I realised the city had been taken over by Wall Street and the yuppies” – it was this realisation, together with his desire to not be
immersed in this atmosphere, that brought him to write the book (“The Story Behind American Psycho”). Hence the cultural and social background of “American Psycho”: it is, arguably, a movie about Wall Street workers taking over New York in the 1980s.
The financial atmosphere of the 1980s that serves as a context for the movie can be interpreted as part of the beginning of the late capitalist context we are ingrained in today. As many notable critics of post-Fordism have pointed out in recent decades (including names such as Hardt and Negri, Marazzi, Virno, Berardi, etc), something happened in the 1970s and 1980s that brought capitalism as we knew it to a dead end and subsequent regeneration. The Fordist industrial system, based on mass material production and consumption, long assembly lines, and life-long working conditions, ceased to function. During these years, and “rocked by a number of crises that were internal (debt and stagnation) and external (the oil embargo)” (Cederström and Fleming 13), capitalism underwent vital changes: entire countries were massively de-industrialized, paving the way for the growth of the service industry. As a consequence, industrial production was reduced to 6% of all production (Federici 65). Moreover, the economic environment was transformed: in the early 1970s, the so-called Bretton-Woods system, in which “the world-economy was regulated by a dollar-gold standard” (McNally 145), was abandoned. This meant that global financial capitalism “lost any anchorage in gold” (145), currencies floated freely, and speculation in the foreign exchange market exploded – thus seemingly offering “the capitalist utopia in which money breeds money” (160). In this context the activity of currency trading grew enormously, thus becoming “an end in itself” (160), and welcoming the financialization of late capitalism.
Around those times, unmistakable social and organizational changes surfaced too. As mentioned previously, in the Western sphere of labour the “concomitant growth of service work” (Cederström and Fleming 13) took over classic models of industrial production; to the point that production itself “appears to have been replaced […] by tie provisions of services and [by finance’s] capacity to control space, time, and the flow of money. In short, by
the market and by speculation”6 (Comaroff and Comaroff 17). These shifts signify a change from material to immaterial production, as new types of labour produce “non-physical objects – codes, data, symbols, images, ideas, knowledges, etc” (Federici 59). Hence the general shift in the nature of labour: from material to immaterial; “immaterial labour [becoming] the dominant form of work” (Federici 59)7.
Immaterial labour is a concept coined by Maurizio Lazzarato, and defined as “the labour that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (132). It involves skills such as “cybernetics and computer control”, and includes “a series of activities that are not normally recognized as work” (132). This will further mean that “contrasts that characterized labour in the industrial era [such as] labour/leisure, life-time/labour-time, waged/unwaged work, vanish” (Federici 60). Moreover, immaterial labour needs command to reside “within the subject” (135) – it is not characterized by a series of vertical instructions from top to bottom, but by a constant communication within the subjects, both horizontally and vertically. As a result, “innovative labour, the one that effectively produces value, is mental labour” (Berardi 75). To sum up: under the post-Fordist financialization of capital the worker moves away from producing industrial-like commodities and becomes a producer of
6 As Comaroff and Comaroff argue, it is not that production has disappeared, since “there is no such thing as capitalism sans production” (18). However, classic ideas of production have been problematized “in the age of global capital” (18), and the mass industrial production of earlier years seems to have been displaced from Western capital. It is worth noting, then, that whilst post-Fordism might be read as a mainly Western
phenomenon, the displacement and re-organization of capitalism in the past decades has brought “a widespread shift, across the world, in ordinary understandings of the nature of capitalism” (17)
7 I here want to reference Keti Chukrhov to argue that one needs to be careful in stating these general
transformations in the field of labour. I do not mean to say immaterial production has erased material labour off the face of the earth. What I am arguing is that industrial, manual labour has fallen into background of
communication (data, information, knowledge). With this shift, capital escapes the office and becomes “the template for all facets of society […]: We are the job. Even when the work-day appears to be over” (Cederström and Fleming 7).
The dominant aspects of labour in the 1980s Wall Street of “American Psycho” point towards this new work paradigm that surfaced. Throughout the movie we are confronted with Wall Street brokers whose job is to produce information, data, knowledge, and means of communication – Bateman and his colleagues work in mergers and acquisitions, a branch of corporate finance that deals with corporate restructuring and “the consolidation of companies” (“Mergers and Acquisitions – M&A”). This does not mean that Wall Street finance and investment markets did not exist before the 1970s and 1980s. However, the massive birth and growth of corporate finance structures that allowed for the ‘yuppie’ culture to exist is
unmistakeably tied to all these changes I have outlined until now: the financialization of capital, the displacement of industrial production, and the towering phenomenon of immaterial production and labour. As Lazzarato argues, “the enterprise does not create its objects, but the world within which the object exists… The enterprise does not create its subjects, but the world within which the subject exists” (qtd. in Cederström and Fleming 17). Wall Street companies such as Pierce & Pierce (the company Bateman works in) create the uncannily realistic Wall Street world of “American Psycho”; a world in which the production of value through material goods has disappeared, and given way to the production and
consumption of financial data, information, services, and cognitive capitalism.
1.3. Patrick Bateman, Vice-President
When it comes to Patrick Bateman and his Wall Street colleagues, an eerie atmosphere develops: throughout the movie, we only see this group of workers dressed in the same manner (suit and tie) and having the same banal conversations (about girls, accounts, where to have dinner) wherever they are (in the office, restaurant, or club). This suggests general
patterns of corporate financialization and de-materialisation of the work space into wider territories – work becomes life, and vice-versa. Still, the role of labour in “American Psycho” does not end with a description of how the movie can be read as a paradigm of changes in late capitalism. The viewer may realize there is something else at play; a darker, suggestive force. The Wall Street world of Pierce & Pierce has other overshadowed dynamics; and these come to play through (and on behalf of) Patrick Bateman – whose murderous impulses push him to commit vicious crimes. In order to identify, examine, and develop the nature of Patrick Bateman’s labour in Pierce & Pierce in depth, I will explore one of the movie’s most well-known scenes – the business card scene. This is one of the movie’s most iconic moments, greatly cherished by the film’s fans and recently dissected in the section “Anatomy of a Scene” of the New York Times (Murphy). This scene happens early in the movie (around minute 17:00), after Bateman’s customs have been introduced; and is the first time the viewer meets Bateman’s most emblematic victim, Paul Allen.
The opening shot presents Patrick Bateman and his colleagues sitting around an oval table in an office room belonging to the Wall Street firm they work for, Pierce & Pierce. The classic Wall Street skyscraper scenery can be spotted in the background, outside the glass windows; a persistent reminder of finance contextualising the setting. Paul Allen walks in the room together with a group of workers, and walks directly up to Bateman (fig. 1). When Allen salutes him, Patrick realizes he has been mistaken for someone else, as his ‘voice off’ narrates: “Allen has mistaken me for this dickhead Marcus Halberstram. It seems logical, because Marcus also works at P&P and in fact does the same exact thing that I do. He also has
a penchant for Valentino suits and Oliver People’s glasses. Marcus and I even go to the same barber – although I have a slightly better haircut”. During this narration the camera is
momentarily directed towards Halberstram, and we see that he looks very similar to Bateman – as a matter of fact, most of these Wall Street men do. The conversation continues, and the characters speak about work accounts and their fiancées. At the end of the dialogue,
Bateman’s colleague Bryce asks Allen if he wants to play squash with him sometime soon: “Friday?” Allen can’t make it on Friday – he has a reservation at Dorsia, a restaurant Bateman wants to go to but cannot manage to book a table in. As a response, Allen gives Bryce his business card (“call me”).
In what seems an attempt to regain attention, the next shot focuses on Bateman showing his own, new business card to his colleagues: “New card – what do you think?” The camera then moves to a full shot of Bateman’s new business card, which is received
positively by the men in the conversation. Bateman proudly presents the card to the camera, which reads: “Vice President”, along with his contact details. However, his proudness does not last too long, since his colleague Van Patten also has a new card to show. The card is positioned next to Bateman’s in a full shot of both; the viewer can appreciate how the work title (“Vice President”) and the contact details are exactly the same (fig. 2). Now that our main character starts sweating and getting nervous, Bryce equals his colleagues’ moves and reveals his new card, which is uncannily similar to the others. Incidentally, the card also reads “Vice President”. In a trembling voice, Bateman utters: “Impressive, very nice. Let’s see Paul Allen’s card”. Bryce uncomfortably exposes Paul Allen’s card fully to the camera whilst still holding it in his hand; only to discover that this object is the best of them all – although, to the viewer’s eye, the differences are still minimal. The card also reads “Vice President”, and although the layout of the contact details is slightly different than on the other cards, the information is exactly the same. Patrick Bateman’s reflection follows: “Look at that subtle off-white colouring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh my God. It even has a watermark”. The
scene ends with him sweating, the card dropping out of his hand; whilst one of his colleagues asks him if something is wrong.
This scene becomes paradigmatic of the type of labour that appears in “American Psycho” for several reasons; moreover, it holds the key to understand why labour performs such an important role in the movie. Let us remember that in the system of immaterial production that dominates the period of late capitalism, productive labour becomes mental labour (Berardi 75). With the displacement of physical labour and the demand for immaterial labour, the worker’s thoughts are not free from work: they become work. In Lazzarato’s words, when living labour8 becomes central to production, “the worker’s personality and subjectivity have to be made susceptible to organization and command” (134). This means there is an imperative for all workers to become subjects, since capital needs these
subjectivities to produce immaterial goods (data, information, knowledge) in order to survive (134). As I have pointed out previously, corporate finance (the Wall Street context of
“American Psycho”) is characteristic of this new way of capitalist production, since it is based purely on financial data and immaterial products. This focus on the construction of
subjectivities in order to feed the cognitive needs of late capitalism is portrayed in the
importance Bateman and his colleagues give to their business cards: these pieces of paper are not mere contact facilitators anymore, but representations of the workers’ material existence. In other words, the business card is a representation of Bateman: not of his work, but of his identity, since his work has taken over his identity. As Lazzarato states: “in a sense, life becomes inseparable from work” (137). Hence, as we see at the end of the scene and throughout the rest of the movie, having a more appealing business card (and material identity) becomes enough of a reason to murder.
8 The notion of “living labour” relates back to Marx’s theory of labour value, according to whom
value is embodied by two types of labour: living labour (the amount of hours workers dedicate to produce a commodity) and dead labour (the machinery and materials used in this production) (Marx)
Moreover, and in line with this, there is something else about these business cards that makes this scene eerie. These paper objects show the workers’ labour and status inside Pierce & Pierce; however, in what seems like a grotesque reversal of the imperative to become subjects, the information that appears on them is exactly the same. Not only are they all Pierce & Pierce workers, but they are all Vice-Presidents too; thus neutralizing all attempts of becoming separate subjective identities, both in and outside the workplace. This inevitably ties into the fact that Bateman’s co-workers seem to constantly mistake each other: Paul Allen mistakes Bateman for a third colleague (Halberstram), a move that allows Bateman to have an alibi when detective Kimball investigates the night of Allen’s disappearance. Kimball
believes Allen was having dinner with Halberstram (instead of Bateman), since the
information was written on Allen’s agenda; moreover, Bateman’s colleagues seem to mistake him for someone else, since they tell the detective that he was with them having drinks downtown (although he was actually having dinner with Paul Allen, and later murdering him). Nonetheless, this game of mistaken identities backfires when Bateman tries to confess his murders to his lawyer at the end of the movie: first he does not recognize Bateman, and thinks his confession is a joke9; and then he says that Allen’s murder is “simply not possible” – since he had dinner with him twice in London ten days ago (after the murder was
committed).
Therefore, the repeated information on these business cards points towards how identities are regularly mistaken throughout the movie, and towards how these confusions do not allow Bateman to have a stable, material, and subjective identity. This is a condition that starts with Paul Allen’s confusion and the portrayal of identical cards, and ends with
Bateman’s failed confession and impossibility of redemption. This impossibility is portrayed in the movie’s last shot, which is a close-up of Bateman’s face whilst his voice narrates:
9 Bateman confronts his lawyer after leaving a message on his answering machine, and his lawyer
answers: “Davis, I’m not one to bad-mouth anyone. Your joke was amusing. But come on, man. You had one fatal flaw: Bateman is such a dork. Such a boring, spineless lightweight.”
“Even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me… and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant… Nothing”. If, like Cederström and Fleming write, “life itself is now something that is plundered by the corporation, rendering our very social being into something that makes money for business” (7), all corporate beings end up becoming similar subjects. Echoing Marx, workers become “mere appendages of [the system], dismembered body-parts activated by the motions of the grotesque corpus of capital” (McNally 142).
1.4. The Zombie Subject
At this point, it is necessary to address in what way this game of misguided identities relates to the corporate finance system of immaterial labour that has been discussed
throughout this essay. As mentioned previously, in this regime of post-Fordist production mind, language, and creativity have become “primary tools for the production of value” (Berardi 21). This means that “the subject of techno-social domination” (99) has spread from the workplace into the worker’s body itself: we are our job. With this comes the total
inclusion of the worker’s subjectivity in the act of value creation – as Silvia Federici states, “every articulation of social life [including the worker’s identity outside of the workplace] becomes a point of production, and society itself becomes an immense work-machine producing value for capital” (60). In “American Psycho” this is portrayed by depicting
Bateman and his co-workers performing the same activities in and out of the office, dressed in the exact same way – if Bryce and Allen were playing squash on Friday, it would most likely be in their suit and tie, still chatting about their fiancées, accounts, and expensive restaurant experiences. It is as if their entire (Wall Street) world was a living office. It is not hard to imagine, then, how in a system of immaterial, de-territorialized, 24/7 production “we are alienated from our own subjectivity”10 (Larsen).
10 “Alienation” is a Marxist concept denoting the loss of control over one’ work and life; signalling
Along these lines, the imperative to become full-blown thinking subjects in the service of capital – in order to produce information, data, and knowledge – translates in the workers’ subjectivity being modelled by capital itself: Bateman must become a subject, but one that serves the production of Pierce & Pierce11. Thus the subject becomes a particular type of
zombie-like body12: colonized by capital, the immaterial, cognitive labourer estranged from the idea of personal subjectivity becomes a “caricature of an ideal being [Vice-President], incarnating mobility without nervousness” (Larsen). As David McNally writes when
interpreting Marx, “the exchange of labour with capital turns out to be life-denying” (146) – the subject’s material identity is at the service of labour. Hence the uncannily repetitive performances and constantly mistaken identities of “American Psycho”: automatized by the labour of finance capital, Bateman and his colleagues are occupied competing to become the subject – displaying their business cards – that fulfils the only identity their corporate world tolerates. Therefore, as a result, they all develop into the same eerie body: A Wall Street society of corporate Vice-Presidents who, by attempting to become distinct working subjects, are slowly but steadily turned into a swamp of similarities.
The analysed ‘business card’ scene portrays a final fundamental component to understand how immaterial labour distorts the construction of identities of these Pierce & Pierce workers: although they are pictured in the office – a classic work space – we do not see Bateman or his colleagues work. This lack of visible working activity is depicted throughout the whole movie: we see these characters speaking of work, going to work, and even
pretending to work, but we never see the action of labour. It is as if their labour had become so immaterial that it cannot be represented; it is ghostly, like finance itself13. In a Wall Street
11 In a different scene of the movie, Bateman bluntly tells his fiancée that he cannot take time off
work to marry her because he wants to “fit in”.
12 According to Deleuze and Guattari’s famous assertion, “the only modern myth is the myth of
zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason” (335)
13 I am tempted to change Alberto Toscano’s question, “what is it we see in fact, when we ‘see’ the
world where “there is no more need to push the boundaries of [material] production, only to extend the reach of capital” (Locke), the boundary between life and work has vanished, and with it the possibility of creating something tangible. Thus the viewer encounters a body of zombie-like corporate labourers who, far from being engaged with material production, are intangibly propelling the financial system with the goal of expanding its barriers. This is an activity that, like finance itself, cannot be represented – but its consequences are felt. Thus the labour they perform is immaterial, invisible, ghostly; and it requires them to become distorted copies of an ideal Wall Street human being. Hence the de-stabilization of Bateman and his colleagues’ human identities under the umbrella of corporate finance labour: they are a mass of zombie-like workers, constantly impersonating an ideal identity and performing an unobservable activity.
Once these considerations have been outlined, I believe in this uncannily ghoulish world of “American Psycho” Patrick Bateman’s murders must be read as an attempt to produce a tangible, material, and corporeal move. The viewer might recall that the first person Bateman murders on screen is a homeless man, whom he stabs after telling him to “get a goddam job” (“You got a negative attitude. That’s what’s stopping you”). In what seems a celebration of self-hatred for the Wall Street world around him – a world created by the corporate ideal he is becoming – Bateman then murders a model, several prostitutes, his co-worker Paul Allen, and one of his old University friends. He then goes on a killing spree and shoots everyone that gets in his way, including an old woman, a security guard, and a police squad. His need to confess and be heard at the end of the movie points towards his pursuit of wanting to become something real, distinctive; there must be material consequences to his acts. This need is depicted by the desperate conversation he has with his lawyer: “I did it, Carnes [the lawyer]. I killed him. I’m Patrick Bateman. I chopped Allen’s fucking head off. The whole message I left on your machine was true. […] Don’t you know who I am? […] I
killed Paul Allen, and I liked it. I can’t make myself any clearer.” Nevertheless, Bateman’s exigent call for material consequences is thwarted by the system he belongs to: he will not be redeemed because the bodies have not been found and Paul Allen is not recognised as dead; he had dinner with Carnes in London (twice) a few days before.
The zombie-like nature of these corporate workers reaches its peak when Bateman is desperately trying to turn away from them: it is as if Paul Allen was a walking-dead character, since killing him does not make a difference. Like a neither dead nor alive monster, he will not die when killed. In a move that resembles a classic horror-movie plot, we see the gruesome murder of Paul Allen with our own eyes and yet we are told that he is not dead; thus rendering him un-human, and un-dead. Hence the ultimate monstrous loss of humanity of Bateman’s Wall Street world: any attempt of breaking away from the corporate norm is futile and trivial, even if it involves several murders. To quote Lars Bang Larsen’s study once more, “it is irrelevant if you kill [the zombie] (there will always be ten more rotten arms reaching through the broken window pane)”.
Throughout this chapter I have argued that “American Psycho” de-stabilizes the notion or idea of humanness by presenting characters that, although seemingly human in their appearance, are portrayed as not entirely human through their activities. Due to the recent shifts in capitalist production this film is ingrained in – from industrial, material creation to post-Fordist, financialised, immaterial production – these activities are reduced to constant, cognitive labour (or the impression of it). However, as I have argued throughout this paper, it is labour itself that produces the nature of these workers as something other than living human beings; these are characters that escape classic notions of what it means to be human. This problematization of the human/non-human – as well as the alive/dead – paradigm by caricaturizing and zombifying working characters is the first step towards a comprehensive analysis of how the notion of life is assembled in “American Psycho”. This assembly is not
mere work of fantasy or fiction, nor have I read it as such: it is a response to the current state of affairs in our 21st century reality. Thus, by depicting immaterial labour as a type of de-humanizing force that reflects “24-hour capitalism” (Hardt and Negri, qtd. in Cederström and Fleming), I believe “American Psycho” is expressing, (re)producing, and collecting a certain feeling or perception that is well alive outside of the cinema: late capitalism problematizes classic stable understandings of what everyday life is. This exploration continues in the following chapter, in which I move away from focusing on (immaterial) production and zoom in on Bateman’s pattern of consumption.
Chapter 2: On Consumption: The Digestion of the Sign and the Agency of the Insubordinate Commodity
To a rationalized, expansionist and at the same time centralized, clamorous and spectacular production corresponds another production, called ‘consumption’. The latter is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed by a dominant economic order. (De Certeau xii – xiii)
2.1. Introduction:
In my previous chapter I discussed how the nature of labour in “American Psycho” forms and de-humanizes its subjects, thus rendering Patrick Bateman and his colleagues as neither dead nor alive, neither human nor monstrous workers. As explained previously, these characters are best understood as a mass of zombified similarities whose labour is reduced to pushing the boundaries of financial capital. My analysis ran along the following lines: their work on Wall Street requires them to strive to become a distinct subjectivity (“Vice
President” of Pierce & Pierce); and these constant attempts to embody the immaculate Wall Street worker make Bateman and his colleagues become undistinguishable from each other. Moreover, their corporate work has become so immaterial – so far removed from any kind of material production – that it is invisible: like finance itself, we know it is there, but we find it impossible to represent. Not being able to stand apart from this body of immaterial, labouring similarities ultimately erases the characters’ humanity: Bateman’s murders become
unimportant, as if they were never committed14.
14 A different interpretation of “American Psycho” believes that Bateman never actually committed the crimes – he only imagined them. As far as this project goes, I do not believe this interpretation is invalid; however, the ambiguity of the film’s end in itself (not knowing if the murders were committed, if Bateman’s co-workers are consciously giving alibis for him or have simply mistaken Allen for someone else, etc.) is enough of a reason for me to undertake this project. Even if Bateman did not murder (some of) his victims but only imagined certain crimes (such as Paul Allen’s), the nature of his work would not change; and he would still be trapped in trying to
Hence the nature of work under the Wall Street world of “American Psycho”: it delivers a group of zombified, corporate Vice-Presidents who not only perform an immaterial production, but also produce acts that are ultimately rendered invisible. It is as if the border between immaterial labour and material leisurely time disappeared, thus transforming everything into an immaterial, invisible production. Hence, if the first chapter of this project was concerned with issues surrounding the daily performance of production – immaterial labour and the corporate exercise of pushing the boundaries of capital –, the second chapter will centre around the activity of consumption. I explore this concept because it is the counterpart of production – under capital, there is no production without consumption, and vice-versa. Moreover, examining consumption seems to be an essential approach for a project that focuses on everyday life and its relation to the economic system, such as this one15. Therefore, throughout this chapter, I will focus on discussing the following question: what are the patterns of consumption in the movie “American Psycho”, and in what manner does this consumption add to, or question, our ideas on what it means to live under late capitalism?
In order to spark this discussion, this chapter calls on three different small scenes of the movie “American Psycho”. This will mean that instead of analysing one particular scene in depth (as in the first chapter of this project), I introduce three brief pieces of “American Psycho” in which, I argue, consumption is both a central concept and a process of
signification. Hence the outline of this chapter: firstly, I call on an explanation of the word ‘consumption’, following David Graeber’s essay “On Consumption”. I do so in order to establish the ground through which my analysis will proceed; since Graeber’s account on the concept allows the reader to explore and dissect the notion of consumption in an acutely productive and detailed way. After this, I introduce a first scene in order to explain the
materialize something that has forcibly been rendered invisible and unimportant – either the rest of his crimes, or his dangerous and deadly imagination.
15 As my opening quote by De Certeau states, consumption is inevitably tied to both production, and the “dominant economic order” (xii – xiii) – which, in this case, is finance capitalism.
importance of the notion of consumption in the story of “American Psycho”: the “morning routine” scene. Here, I argue that consumption in the movie should be understood as a process of signification, and not as the passive counterpart of production. Accordingly, I interpret the commodity as a sign, not as an object fulfilling a useful need.
The second scene I will introduce is brief – perhaps a few seconds long – but important: with it, the viewer comes to understand that Bateman consumes human bodies. Throughout my analysis of this I argue Bateman’s cannibalism (his consumption of human bodies) is a tool to become more human: he eats bodies in order to become one. Moreover, and echoing Amy Bride’s thoughts on “American Psycho”, I read Bateman’s cannibalism as a product of excessive commodification taken to the extreme: every possible entity becomes an object of consumption. Along these lines, and bringing into play the “dissolving autonomy of the object” that takes place during the exercise of consumption (Graeber 491), I end by questioning what happens to the notion of consumption if one of these commodities rejects being consumed – as is the case in the last scene I will introduce, the “Dorsia reservation” scene. This chapter will conclude by posing the following question: what ideas are displaced or troubled if the autonomy of the commodity is not only not dissolved; but it actually speaks – or laughs – back?
2.2. What we talk about when we talk about consumption16
As mentioned previously, I will first introduce some initial thoughts that link the ground of this chapter together. Consumption – the exercise of consuming – is widely understood in Western societies as “the opposite of production” (Graeber 492). In his essay “On Consumption” (2011), Graeber points out how the widespread opposition between producing and consuming only came to be in the political economy literature of the late 18th century, “when authors such as Adam Smith […] began to use it” as such (492). A few
16 Title borrowed from Raymond Carter (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) and interpreted for the sake of this project.
centuries later, this opposition has been firmly established in the West; herein lies the classic assumption that the main activity people perform when they are not producing (working) is to consume (491). Moreover, “consumption” is one of those terms that is seldom defined by those who use it (491). According to Graeber, it is adamant to understand both meaning and history of the term before adopting, embracing, or critically denouncing it – a remark I strongly support, hence this brief introduction to the concept. Further on, in searching to clarify the etymology of the verb “to consume”, David Graeber explains that the action of consuming involves “to seize or take over completely”, as well as “being overwhelmed to the point of dissolving autonomy of the object itself” (491). Consuming also means,
etymologically, “to destroy, to make [the consumed entity] burn, waste away” (492) – one of the defining features of capitalism, the author writes, is that “endless cycles of destruction” must occur in order to make way for production (492).
If consumption can mean destruction, Graeber constructively echoes George Bataille in stating that “our own consumer society is largely organized around the ceremonial
destruction of commodities” (492). Along these lines, Graeber’s text continues on the premise of questioning how consumption has become “our key idiom for talking about material desire” (493). He ends by asserting that notions of possession and consumption have made possible the following assumption: to own something means to have the power to destroy it – to consume it (499). Consumption, then, is inseparable from the concept of destruction; it means to attain that which is desired, and to subsequently adopt, embrace, destroy, or eat it – in both a metaphorical and a figurative sense. As Graeber writes, “when you eat something, you do indeed destroy it (as an autonomous entity), but at the same time, it remains ‘included in’ you in the most material of senses” (499). With this rich and suggestive image of what the exercise of consumption entails, I now wish to return to the object of this thesis, the movie “American Psycho”.
2.3. Devouring Beauty Products
In order to begin the analysis of consumption in the movie, I describe a first scene of “American Psycho” that hopefully sparks a discussion that will be followed throughout the rest of this chapter. The piece, named “morning routine”, occurs at the very beginning of the movie (around minute 04:45); and it can be interpreted as one of the viewer’s first instances of familiarization with Bateman’s character. This scene starts with the camera sweeping through Bateman’s white, generic New York apartment. The camera then meets Bateman’s semi-naked body (presumably he has just woken up), and follows him through his morning routine: we see him on the toilet, in the shower, and in front of the mirror. Meanwhile,
Bateman’s voice off narrates a list of beauty products that he uses every morning, followed by an introduction to his (lack of) identity:
I live in the American Gardens building, on West 81st Street on the 11th floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an icepack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the icepack, I use a deep-pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water-activated gel cleanser. Then a honey-almond body-scrub. And on the face, an exfoliating gel-scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial masque, which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm, followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion. There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman. Some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me. Only an entity – something illusory. And although I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you
can even sense our life styles are probably comparable, I am simply not there. (Harron, American Psycho)
I believe this scene is characteristic of the type of consumption that is represented in “American Psycho” for several reasons.
I wish to start this analysis by arguing Bateman’s description and use of this long list of beauty products must be interpreted as an expression of the shift in the nature of the commodity: from matter to sign. Let me momentarily recall Marx’s theory on the commodity, in which ‘use value’ (pure usefulness) and ‘exchange value’ (the value for which the
commodity can be exchanged) meet at the heart of the object17. As Sonia Baelo Allué has written in her article on consumerism in “American Psycho”, for Marx “this rupture between use value and exchange value [in the commodity] was the most distinctive feature of capitalist societies” (83). Baelo references Baudrillard in arguing that in late capitalism exchange value progressively takes over use value, thus resulting in “commodities becoming signs in a Saussurean sense” (83). As signs, commodities do not have fixed use and exchange values; and as such, their meaning fluctuates.
Following Mark Poster’s work, one could argue that this shift was a result of a new mode of signification in the second half of the 20th century (“Semiology and Critical Theory: from Marx to Baudrillard” 279) that moved away from focusing on production and embraced focusing on consumption, as well as on the semiotic meaning of commodities themselves. Moving away from production and concentrating on the consumption of the commodity as a sign resulted in the belief that “the consumption of an object has more semiological than material significance” (280). By disapproving of production as the only mode of signification, one of the main theorists of this shift, Jean Baudrillard, argued for a change in focus from the
17 In the first chapter of the first volume of “Capital”, Marx writes: “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. (…) Use-values are only realized in use or in consumption. (…) Exchange-value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind.” (126)
Marxist commodity to the sign itself (283): capitalism not only controls production, but the consumption of meaning too. Therefore, if under capitalism commodities do not mean what they are meant to mean (283), and if signifiers, like money, “constitute a semiological level of capitalist exchange” (282), what do a list of shampoos, beauty products, and facial scrubs mean for Patrick Bateman?
Along these lines, I believe Bateman’s consumption of beauty products does not stem from their pure usefulness – their ‘use value’ – but from his desire to signify: he uses these products in order to perfectly embody the identity of Patrick Bateman. As a matter of fact, according to Baudrillard, usefulness in itself – or, more concisely, the distinction between use value and exchange value – becomes an ideological speculation. As his widely influential text “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign” argues, there is no such thing as a natural conception of need: “far from the individual expressing his or her needs in the economic system, it is the system that induces the individual function and the parallel
functionality of objects and needs” (67). This means that, as mentioned previously, one must move away from the Marxist conception of the commodity (based on use and exchange value) in order to understand what consumption can entail. In the “morning routine” scene of
“American Psycho”, Bateman’s morning habits encompass a carefully calculated and executed exercise in which every product must be specifically consumed because of what it signifies. Bateman narrates this list of products only to then describe his lack of existence, thus implying that he uses these goods in order to create Bateman’s illusory identity. This identity is a necessary part of his Wall Street world, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Bateman’s use of beauty products in order to construct his Wall Street identity becomes definitive at the end of the scene, when he peels off his facial mask in front of the mirror whilst stating his lack of existence (fig. 3). In this shot, image and words come
together to represent the manner in which his facial mask becomes his real mask: he uses it in order to become Patrick Bateman18. The mask signifies the “idea of Patrick Bateman”, as the rest of the beauty products do. Therefore, consuming these products becomes a matter of signification for our main character, as his identity is carefully built in the midst of the process of consumption. Consequently, through the “morning routine” scene the viewer is confronted with a representation of commodity consumption that is grounded in
understanding the commodity as a sign, and the process of consumption as a process of signification.
As author Martyn Lee has argued, “Bateman’s consciousness is assembled from fragments of the commodity-form and his experiences are channelled through an endless succession of commodity signs” (qtd. in Baelo 84). Therefore, the pattern of consumption of “American Psycho” can be read as a performance in which, in Firat and Dholakia’s words (and echoing writings on postmodernism), “the consumer renders products [as] part of himself, becoming part of the experience of being himself” (qtd. in Poster “Consumption and
18 Interestingly, this mask is transparent (not mud-coloured); as if stressing the symbiosis between his beauty products and himself.
Digital Commodities in the Every Day” 9). Now that consumption in “American Psycho” has been outlined as an active and productive exercise, and not as the passive counterpart of production, I wish to introduce a second brief scene of the movie in which the viewer is familiarised with Bateman’s other type of consumption – that of human bodies.
2.4. Digesting Bodies
The small instance I want to discuss occurs around the minute 59:30, and it is framed in a bigger scene that starts when Jean (Bateman’s secretary) goes over to his house in order to have some drinks before they go out for dinner. During this scene, we see Bateman planning different ways of murdering Jean without her realizing; whilst she is asking him if he has ever wanted to make someone happy (“I guess you could say I just want to have a meaningful relationship with someone special”, answers Bateman), he points a spray gun at her from behind. Nevertheless, Bateman’s bloodshed plans are seemingly interrupted by a voice message from his fiancée. Whilst I do not wish to analyse the entire scene, I am specifically interested in discussing a brief camera shot that occurs at the beginning of this piece – when Jean arrives at Bateman’s apartment, and Bateman asks her if she would like to have sorbet (he will not have any, because he is on a diet). Patrick opens the fridge to reach the sorbet, and whilst the fridge is open, the viewer catches a small glimpse of something else in there: a blonde woman’s head. The viewer might recall this woman from a few scenes before – she was a model Bateman met at a club. This is the first of other instances of
“American Psycho” in which the viewer understands Bateman literally consumes some of his victims. As a matter of fact, by the end of the movie – when he confesses his murders to his lawyer by phone – Bateman utters the following statement: “I even, um, I ate some of their brains… and I tried to cook a little”.
As discussed previously, I argue our main character compulsively consumes
for his Wall Street environment. His pattern of consumption involves consuming commodities not because of their use value, but in pursuit of becoming the identity he embodies. In this context, I wish to read the act of consuming – referencing Graeber’s text; seizing, destroying, dissolving and eating (499) – human bodies as a two-fold analysis. Firstly, one could argue that Bateman’s cannibalism is a tool to overcome his inhumanness: since he uses
commodities to signify a corporate Wall Street identity, he consumes human bodies as a way of becoming (or seeming) more human. In reading the Gothic in “American Psycho” Amy Bride interestingly compares Bateman with the blood-sucking vampire, and states that if “Bateman is without humanity because of his lack of identity, his attempts to counteract this through the consumption of commodities – in order to construct identity – then mirror the vampire’s drinking of blood to sustain life, or the appearance of humanity” (emphasis mine, 11). Moreover, if the “construction of his identity from commodities demands constant reaffirmation and […] continuous consumption in order to keep it alive” (14), destroying and eating human bodies can be interpreted as yet another frantic attempt to signify humanness19. Nevertheless, Bateman is not only seemingly mirroring a vampire (or zombie) behaviour, since this consumption is not figurative – it is literal. In addition, it important to stress how the consumed body part of this scene is a human brain (not a leg, arm, finger, etc.). It is as if Bateman wanted to benefit from what the brain classically symbolizes: humanity, identity, personhood, and rationality (the latter, essential in our neoliberal culture).
Following Graeber’s text, by consuming these bodies Patrick Bateman is also
appropriating “the autonomy of the object [body] itself” (Graeber 492). Herein lies the second point this discussion raises: the complete objectification and commodification of whatever he consumes. Let us recall that in his frantic desire to signify his identity, Bateman “consumes in
19 Here, it is also interesting to point out that we only see Bateman consuming female bodies. Furthermore, at one point in the movie the main character finds himself incapable of murdering his gay colleague: he runs away disturbed by his advances. A gender-queer reading of the movie would probably not find it hard to conclude that there is something quite queer in Bateman’s character.
all possible ways: buying, eating and destroying” (Baelo 71). This results in a complete erasure of the thing that is consumed. Furthermore, since whatever is consumed becomes an object of consumption, Bateman becomes “unaware of the difference between commodities and human life” (Annesley, qtd in Bride 15). This engenders an “intense commodification of the human form” (16): everything that is consumed by Bateman in “American Psycho” is appropriated by him as a signifier of his existence; and his approach is that of a monstrous, compulsive consumer that “literally sees no difference between a person and an object” (Baelo 87). Therefore, these bodies are extremely commodified; and as such, they become objects of consumption. In describing the commodification of human bodies in Bateman’s world, Baelo quotes Baudrillard’s opening paragraph of “Consumer Society”: “[Today] men of wealth are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects” (29). Although in this passage Baudrillard was reflecting on the concept of alienation in our society of mass consumption20, a literal interpretation of his words reverberates well with Bateman’s practices: he is no longer surrounded by other human beings because they have become commodities; and as such, they are possible objects of consumption.
Consequently, it is safe to say Bateman’s Wall Street world in “American Psycho” is a world of outrageous commodity consumption. This consumption does not arise from a human conception of need, nor from a Marxist rendition of use value. It is a tool to become the identity Bateman must be to fit in his corporate finance world. Here, both objects and human bodies are appropriated, consumed, and internalized because of what they signify for Bateman in order to become Bateman. As a result, everything that is consumed (bodies, commodities) becomes an object of consumption; and in the consumption process itself, the object’s autonomy is dissolved (Graeber 492). Needless to say, in this process all the agential power
20 Before closing the first paragraph, Baudrillard beautifully writes: “we have come to live in less proximity to other human beings, in their presence and discourse, and more under the silent gaze of deceptive and obedient objects which continuously repeat the same discourse” (29).
