The ‘American Psycho’ President
Donald Trump and the post-modern serial killer who idolized him
American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a rapist and a murderer. He is a wealthy, pre-Occupy, Wall Street-era investment banker playing in 1987 New York City, obsessed with trendy restaurants and ever-so-slightly off-white business cards. He follows a rigorous beauty and fitness routine that includes an herb mint facial mask, anti-aging eye balm and stomach crunches done to a soundtrack of horror movie screams. He has a penchant for Valentino suits and Oliver People glasses. And he idolizes Donald Trump.
But would Patrick Bateman be pleased with the idea of a Donald Trump presidency? Brett Easton Ellis isn’t so sure. In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this year on the 25th anniversary of his controversial bestselling novel turned movie turned cult classic, the American Psycho author noted that “Trump today isn’t the Trump of 1987. He’s not the Trump of Art of the Deal. He seemed much more elitist in ’87, ’88. Now he seems to be giving a voice to white, angry, blue-collar voters. I think, in a way, Patrick Bateman may be disappointed by how Trump is coming off and who he’s connecting with.”
In Bateman’s original 1991 literary incarnation, the adulation is at its most prevalent. The word of Trump settles a multi-page debate between Bateman and one of his almost-interchangeable colleagues, Craig McDermott, concerning the crispiness of Pastels pizza: Upon hearing that “his hero” Donald Trump called Pastels pizza the best in Manhattan, Bateman concedes the argument, because “if the pizza at Pastels is okay with Donny,” well then of course it’s okay with him. He agrees to attend a U2 concert only upon finding out that Trump is a fan of the band, and in a moment of uncomfortable silence, he recommends what at the time would have been Trump’s recently released book, The Art of the Deal, to a detective questioning him on the whereabouts of his self-appointed nemesis, Paul Allen.
In the film, which came out in 2000, the copious references to Mr. Trump were toned down but included nonetheless. (“Is that Donald Trump’s car?” Do you honestly think you just saw Ivana Trump at Texarkana? Please, Marcus/Patrick/Paul whatever — get serious.)
When the serial killer story got the Broadway treatment this past spring, smack in the middle of Trump’s campaign, references to the then presidential candidate numbered five or six during previews, before ultimately being culled down to two well-placed barbs. Audiences reportedly ate them up, and Ellis said at the time that might be because Donald Trump and American Psycho both tap into the same thing: white male anger.
“It’s very much of the moment because it’s a deconstruction of the 1% white male rage, anger and frustration and bankers as serial killers — all of these things resonate right now,” Ellis told Heat Street on the show’s opening night. The musical ended its abbreviated run in June.
The movie adaptation, which has come to be recognized as cult classic, almost didn’t happen. It took the better part of eight years to go from page to production, changing writer/directors more than once before sticking with Marry Harron. At one point, Johnny Depp was attached, and later the role was offered to Leonardo DiCaprio—without Harron’s knowledge or consent. Ultimately Harron got her preferred Bateman: a largely unknown, pre-Batman Christian Bale took the role, despite being told that it was “career suicide”
Indeed, the coal-black postmodern satire, which in its cinematic incarnation excelled at mixing dark comedy with over-the-top horror (just gonna go ahead and drop a chainsaw on your head now, thanks), does tap into a rampant consumerism, narcissistic societal vanity and general social one-upsmanship that has not disappeared since American Psycho’s Reagan-era ‘80s heyday; it has only evolved. (“I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” declared Bateman’s 80s idol almost 20 years later, during the 2015 speech announcing his campaign. Take that, Reagan. You make America great; we’ll make America great again.)
If American Psycho were set in 1997, Patrick Bateman would have simply been the founder of a number of dotcoms, Ellis recently explained to Town and Country. If the subtle-serial-killer-that-could existed during this past decade, he “would have been working in Silicon Valley, living in Cupertino with excursions into San Francisco or down to Big Sur to the Post Ranch Inn and palling around with Zuckerberg and dining at the French Laundry, or lunching with Reed Hastings at Manresa in Los Gatos, wearing a Yeezy hoodie and teasing girls on Tinder.” What photo filter app would he use to perfect his profile pic, I wonder? You know he would have a preference, complete with companion monologue cataloging the many precise steps required to take a perfect selfie. And as for that anxious rage Patrick Bateman so convincingly channels? It’s still alive and well, and manifesting itself all over America. (And just like that, everything was great again — stop it — great again, damn it.)
But just how many of the gruesome crimes detailed in the novel or messily depicted in the movie does Bateman actually commit, and how many are mere deranged fantasy? Ultimately we don’t know, because Bateman’s words, much like those of his idol, cannot be taken at mere face value. He is, from first introduction, an unreliable narrator, and for a man who strives to be as precisely in control of his specifically yuppified existence as Bateman, the realization of this is far more stressful than the thought of having committed any number of sadistic acts ever was. Despite what he would have us believe, an ATM surely did not instruct him to “Feed Me A Stray Cat,” and the chances of him actually having blown up a police car with a well-placed shot are … slim. And with one well-timed sidewise look, Bale lets us know that Bateman knows it, too. (Also, why does no one notice the incredibly loud sound of the aforementioned chainsaw ricocheting through an uptown apartment building in the middle of the night?)
Ultimately, Bateman’s unraveling culminates in a sobbing answering machine confession to his lawyer, a frantic listing of barbaric acts we’ve both seen on screen and not, including the alleged murder of Paul Allen, Bateman’s Pierce & Pierce colleague who had the nerve to repeatedly mistake him for Marcus Halberstram and — even worse — casually boast about securing a reservation at Dorsia on a Friday night. But when Bateman sees his lawyer the next day, he is in for quite the surprise: not only does his lawyer mistake him for someone else entirely (a well-played running joke throughout the film), he also heartily dismisses Bateman’s voicemail confession as little more than a prank, in part because he thinks, as he is quick to share, that a “dork” like Patrick Bateman simply couldn’t be capable of such bold and brazen acts. Oh, and the attorney also happened to see Paul Allen a couple of days ago in London, so clearly, he couldn’t be dead. Unless the Paul Allen he says he saw was also a case of mistaken identity—at which point we’re all back on that uncertain hamster wheel of did he or didn’t he actually do it?
And that uncertainty is precisely the point, according to both Bateman’s original creator, Ellis, and his director, Harron. “It was 400 pages in the mind of this guy and he’s a completely unreliable narrator,” Ellis explained on a WTF with Marc Maron podcast in 2014. “You don’t know if some of these things happen or not. You don’t even know if the murders happen or not. Which to me is interesting. To me it’s much more interesting not to know than to definitely know.”
Harron, for her part, tried to capture Bateman’s increasingly distorted viewpoint on screen in order to match the palpable uncertainty present at the end of the novel, and ultimately worries she may have taken it too far. “One thing I think is a failure on my part is people keep coming out of the film thinking that it’s all a dream, and I never intended that. All I wanted was to be ambiguous in the way that the book was,” she told Charlie Rose. “I should have left it more open ended. It makes it look like it was all in his head, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s not.”
The real point is perhaps that Bateman repeatedly admits his violent tendencies throughout the story, to his friends, to his fiancée, to strangers gathered around bottle service-laden tables, but no one pays him any mind. (“Murders and executions” or “mergers and acquisitions?” So similar, yet so different. Please, go on.) Whether or not he has committed murders becomes inconsequential. In the end, the body count doesn’t matter. What matters, in Bateman’s elitist bubble, is appearance.
And so in the end, Bateman sits, shocked and humbled in the restaurant where he’s sat so many times before, unable to get anyone to give his confession any credence and wondering if it matters. He’s still here, after all. Much like his idol, Trump, who the British weekly, New Statesman, deemed a veritable “American Psycho” this past March. But confessions, hot mics or just hot messes aside, he’s still found his way inside one of the most exclusive rooms in the world. Probably sweating, like Bateman, ever-so-slightly at the temples, humbled. (Or not.)
Because as Bateman numbly intones in closing, “There are no more barriers to cross … all the mayhem I have caused, and my utter indifference towards it, I have now surpassed.”
