Psycho Masculinity

American Psycho has the distinction of being the last novel to cause a true moral panic. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 glimpse into the mind of Patrick Bateman, a wealthy investment banker who moonlights as a sadistic serial killer, was dropped by Simon & Schuster, its initial publisher, boycotted by the National Organization of Women, and widely panned by the press, decades after Lady Chatterley and Alexander Portnoy were accepted back into the fashionable fold. Yet 35 years after publication, Bateman lives on: a stage adaptation is currently in a sold-out run at London’s Almeida Theater, Mary Harron’s 2000 film adaptation starring Christian Bale has entered the horror-comedy canon, and Bateman looms in the common consciousness as memetic shorthand for blank, pitiless narcissism. No other character from the last half-century of literary fiction has so permeated the wider cultural world. Among the many memorable serial killers in the last few decades of pop culture, and the many fictional figures of Wall Street greed, Ellis’s combination of the two sticks in the mind, anticipating and reflecting all the insurgent male archetypes of the 21st century.