crimeculture
Fractured Reflection: Representations of the Psychopath and Society in Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me
Joseph Dargue, Royal Holloway, University of London
There have been numerous representations of the psychopath or serial killer in crime literature. Many texts depict this figure as a metaphorical embodiment of his society’s moral deviations, or consciously use his killings as part of an elaborate social critique of the world’s corruption and emptiness. According to Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, ‘He moves amongst ordinary people unrecognised, ‘abnormally normal’ […] in his appearance and behaviour’[1], satirising and critiquing his society by indulging in possibly schizophrenic and often homicidal activities. Patrick Bateman, of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991), and Lou Ford, from Jim Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me (1952), are just two examples of this type.
What sets these texts apart, however, from standard crime fiction is that neither adheres to traditional investigative frameworks and are even almost totally devoid of investigative narrative, because they ‘stay within the mind of the killer’ in such a way that makes them ‘effectively disturbing’.[2] To an extent, there is really no moral voice that balances out the serial killer’s viewpoint or mind in either American Psycho or The Killer Inside Me. At least, especially not in the same way that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot might, because narrative is totally subjective for Patrick and Lou and restricted to the subjective and ‘disordered imagination.’[3]
Cinematically-adapted in 2000 by director Mary Harron, American Psycho is grounded in the cocaine-addled, consumer-crazed Wall Street America of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Very much a reflection of the period, there are many characters, mostly investment bankers, who enjoy abundant wealth, wear almost identical designer suits and ‘even go to the same barber’[4]. This jungle of inseparable young urban professionals, or yuppies for short, therefore provides the perfect anonymity for the psychopath alienated in a loveless, greedy and money-driven ‘commercial oversaturation in which the most common reaction is one of ‘total and sheer acceptance’[5].
Patrick Bateman lives in a world of superficiality and vacuous extremity and through this the author ‘makes devastating use of the serial killer to launch an attack on 1990s consumer culture.’[6] Indeed, the film juxtaposes horrific images of dead bodies and Bateman’s own blood-lust with phatic conversation and innocuous consumerism that seems even to overtake and subsume the former. In this way, like the society it mimics and critiques, the film manages to desensitise viewers to a point where they accept killing and violence as they would business card designs or eloquent monologues concerning Huey Lewis and the News, Phil Collins and Whitney Houston.
In a particularly expressive moment, Patrick exposes the futility of morality in a world like this, incongruously calling for ‘a return to traditional moral values’ and greater promotion of ‘general social concern and less materialism.’[7] He speaks these lines with purposeful irony, knowing that he, like his friends Bryce and others, sipping their Martinis and smoking their cigarettes with sneering eyes, do not truthfully believe in any of it, and do not even care. In thirty seconds, he has revealed the ‘hollowness’ of ‘conventional social forms’ which are superficially supported by society. Like Lou Ford from The Killer inside Me, he can see through the transparent and ‘the ‘pretendsy’ […] nature of most people’s adherence’[8] to any sense of social-conscience or moral investment, including his own.
In the scene directly preceding Paul Allen’s murder, Patrick calmly admits his inhumanity to a drunken Paul over dinner: ‘I like to dissect girls… Did you know I’m utterly insane?’[9] Paul’s ignorance to this statement is representative of society’s ‘damning failures […] to see the beast under the blandness’[10], and instead compliments him on his ‘great tan’[11]. Even Evelyn, Patrick’s fiancée, does not notice his crude drawing of a woman’s death on a restaurant table; rather than listen to his words, that he needs ‘to engage in homicidal behaviour on a massive scale’[12], she is distracted by a friend’s designer bracelet. Like Patrick, society ‘feels nothing, believes in nothing, and, other than what [it] acquires from style magazines, knows nothing.’[13] He lives in a landscape of individual anonymity, alienation and communication breakdown where many of the characters only come together through the cold emptiness of dinner reservations.
New York society is being placed in direct relation to Patrick’s sickness and inhumanity. Although of different kinds, Patrick’s is the articulated form of his society’s own implicit and explicit aberrations and as he continues through this apparent waste land, his ‘inner and outer reality’[14] blurs to the point of indistinction. The film is attempting to show the two worlds of Patrick’s interior and exterior as merging forces that in effect render the society in which he operates a place ‘Emptied of every human value’ and as ‘the ultimate urban hell’[15]. There is even the suggestion in the film that he ‘killed Paul Allen with an axe in the face’[16] out of jealousy, simply because Paul could get tables at Dorsia, the hot new restaurant. As Patrick uses the axe, he screams ‘Try getting a reservation at Dorsia now, you fucking stupid bastard!’[17] This is an expression of socialite consumerism taken to its end-extreme.
Patrick’s vitriolic mental torture by the film’s conclusion is haunting as well as foreboding, and perhaps ‘indicative’ of a nation’s awakening hangover from a decade of ‘non-contingent crimes, a question mark and the purported end of history.’[18] His internalised imprisonment inside ‘the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil’[19] passes over completely into the soullessness and nothingness of the external world in this scene with such an extreme impact, and in effect, he is threatening us as viewers with his pain and torture; with the ‘punishment [that] continues to elude’[20] him:
My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone.
In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no-one to escape.[21]
It is in this hell that Patrick is forced to live, and this society that he has tried to murder and even cannibalistically devour. Whether he is happy living his life in this climate of moral bankruptcy and social fragmentation is a subject for debate, but it is clear that his ‘killing can be seen as an expression of [his] inability to cope, but more fundamentally it is an expression of the dehumanization of the society to which he wants to belong.’[22] By the end of the film he wants his entire generation, responsible for its own smothering and strangulation, to feel the pain he has felt and to receive his constant punishment; to make society realise at last its own ‘dehumanization’ and moral death.
Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me places its psychopath at the heart of a sleepy, semi-urbanised town with high moral values on the surface and a sinister underbelly of corruption hidden from its townspeople. Lou Ford is perhaps a representation of this split, being an outwardly-respectable deputy sheriff with ‘His next-door-neighbour banality’[23] by day and an inwardly-clever murderer with a secret ‘sickness’[24] by night. In this sense, Thompson is able to draw a dark satire and critique of southern towns in the 1950s, which were not always as they seemed.
In the same way that American Psycho uses first person monologue, The Killer Inside Me is similarly subjective. Readers are forced to see Thompson’s world through Lou’s own fragmented, ‘teasing and unreliable’ mind, and, by proxy, themselves become solipsistic psychopaths: each reader becomes the ‘I’ of the story. As Lou observes his landscape, the reader therefore also assumes ‘the alienated position of a psychopath who is also a scathing observer, stripping off illusory surfaces and denouncing what he sees.’[25]
In the same way that Patrick Bateman is dismissed out of hand as the serial killer type, most believe Lou to be incapable of murder. This again echoes the fact that the psychopath is able to move in and out of society undetected; anonymous in that he portrays no personal interest to those around him. Like Patrick, who is described as ‘such a boring, spineless lightweight’[26], Lou’s friend and boss Sheriff Bob Maples cannot believe what kind of human being he might actually be.
‘I know what you are, don’t I, Lou? Know you backwards and forwards. Known you since you was kneehigh to a grasshopper, and I never knowed a bad thing about you. Know just what you’re goin’ to say and do, no matter what you’re up against…’[27]
Bob is here clearly in denial and is trying to convince himself of Lou’s ‘typical Western-county peace officer’[28] innocence, usually taken for granted. However, in the process, he is subconsciously negating the idea that society is itself metaphorically psychopathic, corrupt and sham; a suggestion represented as a physical embodiment by Lou’s psychopathic mind. Indeed, as Lou asserts, ‘it’s a screwed up, bitched up world’ and ‘no one, almost no one, sees anything wrong with it.’[29] Almost no one except, of course, himself.
As Lou Ford operates on both sides of the law, his position is unique in that he is able ironically to view his society from an objective view-point, albeit with a subjective eye. But it also again echoes this concept of a split personality; that ‘Lou represents his schizophrenia as an internalisation of society’s hypocrisy…’[30] and his peripheral view of that society lends his thoughts and actions a satirical touch. Indeed, his dark double-life is a critically satirical and ‘blackly comic’ reflection of Central City’s own Jekyll-and-Hyde duality, because it is ‘a tension that manifests itself in [Lou’s] straight-faced parodies of cliché and in ironies that only he can fully understand.’[31]
Lou eloquently critiques this small-town hypocrisy during his speech to Jonnie Pappas in the jail cell, just before murdering him, and partially uses it as an explanation for the necessary split of his personality. After all, one can not really avoid becoming a schizophrenic in a place where ‘The police are playing crooks in it, and the crooks are doing police work’; where ‘The politicians are preachers, and the preachers are politicians’, and where ‘The tax collectors collect for themselves.’[32] Perhaps his psychopathic murdering can be justified as the ‘logical conclusion’[33] for a society in the throws of moral self-contradiction, and therefore, ‘The killer, like the detective’, in this case, ‘can be seen as a protagonist working towards revelations’[34] and trying to expunge the corruption inherent within his society’s framework. This is a world that, consequently, like Patrick’s, has pushed Lou to its own end-extreme and his killings are a representation of the individual’s struggle against a society of alienation and decay.
This is perhaps underscored by the way in which Jim Thompson has juxtaposed descriptions of brutal killing with the clichés of small town gossip and worries; brutal killings that therefore represent the unspoken darker underbelly of this seemingly pleasant and lawful town. In particular, Lou’s horrific murder of Amy, who is also his girlfriend, underscores Thompson’s purposefully-drawn antithesis between the violence and the peace/harmony that divides society.
She smiled and came toward me with her arms held out.
‘I won’t darling. I won’t ever say anything like that again. But I do want to tell you how much ––’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘You want to pour your heart out to me.’
And I hit her in the guts as hard as I could.
My fist went back against her spine, and the flesh closed around it to the wrist.[35]
This passage craftily juxtaposes Amy’s unspoken love for Lou and his almost instantaneous violent reaction; and while graphically shocking, his violence is highly emblematic of the social critique that Thompson is trying to make. The quaint fantasy of small town life where childhood sweethearts live happily-ever-after is brought into tension by its equally gritty reality of death, back-hand dealing, lies and corruption; the reality that Lou seems to want to expose, hidden, as it is, just underneath the surface of Central City.
Both the screen version of American Psycho and Thompson’s novel The Killer Inside Me are fraught with damning social commentaries that literarily employ the ‘schizophrenic personality as an image of the psychosis of an entire society.’[36] In this sense, they attack not only its cultural, political and moral apathy and bankruptcy, but also its potential for base violence, self-mutilation and destruction.
American Psycho nicely and satirically juxtaposes its world’s ‘uncontrolled consumer urges with the psychopathic imbalance of a modern cannibal’[37], whereas Thompson’s text frenetically explores the mind that purposefully splits itself between good and evil: Lou is the deviant outcast whose skewed narrative and subjective views, actions and even murders implicitly ‘critique the socio-political world that he stands against.’[38] Serial killers in these texts are therefore used as caricatures to articulate and explore the nature and ramifications of such alienated, burnt-out societies that are fuelled by their own hypocrisy. Both men’s appalling sensibility for murder is metaphoric and reflective of this amorality, and therefore, in the end, perhaps justifiable.
Copyright © 2009 Joseph Dargue
Bibliography
American Psycho, dir. Mary Harron (Lions Gate Films, 2000)
Haut, Woody, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999)
Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller (Chippenham, Wiltshire: Palgrave, 2001)
Horsley, Lee, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (London: Orion Books, 2002)
Notes
[1] Horsley, Lee, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.127
[2] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.119
[3] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.190
[4] American Psycho, dir. Mary Harron (Lions Gate Films, 2000), T 00:17:08
[5] Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller (Chippenham, Wiltshire: Palgrave, 2001), p.222
[6] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.188
[7] American Psycho, T 00:11:29
[8] Horsley, The Noir Thriller, p.123
[9] American Psycho, T 00:25:10
[10] Horsley, The Noir Thriller, p.222
[11] American Psycho, T 00:25:15
[12] American Psycho, T 01:13:33
[13] Haut, Woody, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1999), p.219
[14] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.191
[15] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.191
[16] American Psycho, T 01:19:44
[17] American Psycho, T 00:27:11
[18] Haut, Neon Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, p.220
[19] American Psycho, T 01:32:15
[20] American Psycho, T 01:33:47
[21] American Psycho, T 01:32:28
[22] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.190
[23] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.127
[24] Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (London: Orion Books, 2002), p.22
[25] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, pp.129–130
[26] American Psycho, T 01:28:11
[27] Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.70
[28] Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.23
[29] Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.105
[30] Horsley, The Noir Thriller, p.123
[31] Horsley, The Noir Thriller, p.123
[32] Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, p.105
[33] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.130
[34] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.128
[35] Thompson, The Killer Inside Me, pp.164–165
[36] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.130
[37] Horsley, The Noir Thriller, p.221
[38] Horsley, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p.117