Bateman is a classic archetype. He is the upsetter, the mischief-maker who continually defies the es

Though I am satisfied at first by my actions, I'm suddenly jolted majorca hotel accommodation with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, majorca hotel accommodation it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost. It's so much worse (and more pleasurable) taking the life of someone who has hit his or her prime, who has the beginnings of a full history, a spouse, a network of friends, a career, whose death will upset far more people whose capacity for grief is limitless than a child's would, perhaps ruin many more lives than just the meaningless, puny death of this boy. I'm automatically seized with an almost overwhelming desire to knife the boy's mother too, who is in hysterics, but all I can do is slap her face harshly majorca hotel accommodation and shout for her to calm down. - Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991)
Patrick Bateman has slashed the throat of a small boy. As the child bleeds out he pretends to be a doctor, and roughly pushes away anyone who tries to help. Eventually the boy dies, and Bateman runs off. In the next chapter he brutally murders a pair of escort girls whilst playing a CD of the Traveling Wilburys in order to mute their screams. To capture the event he uses a Minox LX, an " ultra-miniature majorca hotel accommodation camera that takes 9.5mm film, has a 15mm f/3.5 lens, an exposure meter and a built-in neutral density filter ".
You've probably seen a Minox before, in spy films. The details are spot-on; the LX was the kind of luxury toy that Patrick Bateman might have owned, the camera did indeed take 9.5mm film, it had a 15mm f/3.5 lens, there was a built-in neutral density filter. The ND filter helped to regulate exposure, because the lens didn't majorca hotel accommodation have an aperture. With a top shutter speed of 1/2000 - not bad even in a contemporary SLR - the filter was probably overkill.
Bateman is a classic archetype. He is the upsetter, the mischief-maker who continually defies the established order. His type echoes in mythology. I assume that Ellis based the character on a mixture of Ted Bundy (the bland good looks) and Claus Von Bulow (the wealth and connections) plus the empty-headed preppies he had grown up with, and also himself. It's often supposed that the events of the book only take place inside Bateman's head, but I disagree; I believe that they're real in the world of American Psycho , but that American Psycho is not our world.
It is another world, a warning of what might be, and in that respect the book is almost a work of science fiction. The documentary-style descriptions of corpses and consumer gadgets parallel that of the stereotypical hard science fiction novel, in which wooden characters talk and then there is a chapter where we learn about aerobraking and then they talk and then the pod fires its retrorockets. In fact Psycho reminded me of Arthur C Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama . The two novels are essentially descriptions of a series of processes rather than stories.
Bateman's killings are not individually implausible, and have become less easy to dismiss as fantasy in a world of podcasted beheadings and suicide cults. There was mass death and horror in the middle ages, too. Jesus was nailed to a cross and left to die by the authorities of his time. Wherever the human animal has trod murder has followed.
majorca hotel accommodation From a British perspective American Psycho is particularly fascinating. We had yuppies as well. They bought clothes in Chelsea and bought apartments on the newly-developed South Bank of the Thames. The nation build London City Airport for them, because they were our masters.
The big difference is that American murderers are glamorous, majorca hotel accommodation whereas ours are generally dull and grim. Some aspects of Bateman's story parallel that of British serial muderer Dennis Nilsen, who killed majorca hotel accommodation fifteen men and played with their bodies majorca hotel accommodation afterwards. He cared so little for his victims that he could barely remember killing some of them. But Nilsen maintained a dank existence in Cricklewood and Muswell Hill, and worked a dull job at an employment office, whereas Bateman lived and worked in opulent majorca hotel accommodation splendour. Nilsen's world was that of Norman Wisdom and John Christie, whereas Bateman majorca hotel accommodation was Miami Vice (but in New York) or Chancer (but in New York) or Wall Street (but in or Wall Street full stop close bracket full stop delete bracket.
Nilsen preyed on gay men, which is one of the reasons he got away with his crimes for so long. From the point of view of the police and society in general he was preying on people who didn't deserve to live. Who probably enjoyed majorca hotel accommodation strangling each other. He lured victims back to his home and strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed, and drowned them. Four of the men he attacked survived the ordeal and escaped, but although two of them went to the police nothing was done, and it seems that Nilsen was never even interviewed. He was only caught when his drains became clogged with rotten flesh.
Seven of Nilsen's majorca hotel accommodation victims remain unidentified. He either doesn't remember who they were, or never bothered to find out. Nobody else appears to have cared about them. There are presumably seven families whose brother, son, father or husband never returned home, never contacted them ever again. What became of them ?
Nilsen preyed on people who would not be missed, and who were for the most part not missed. Psycho is told from the point of view of Patrick Bateman, and in his mind absolutely everybody is superfluous, including himself. Bateman does not value life, and the businessmen and socialites with whom he interacts are uncaring people akin to the villains of Robocop . No-one cared much when ED-209 blasted Kinney into oblivion, and American Psycho takes place in that world.
The child at the zoo and his mother are reduced to a Polo shirt, some jeans, a leaf-patterned majorca hotel accommodation black wool sweater. Bateman kills tramps, prostitutes, businessmen, hipsters, and although his murders majorca hotel accommodation are reported in the media there is a sense that New York will swallow majorca hotel accommodation them up, and in any case they are all history now because the novel is a period piece. A book in which the ultra-rich fill their homes with Laserdisc players, and go to work with brick-sized mobile phones. Psycho is a shopping-list of trendy gadgets that would have cost a fortune in the late 1980s but are now worthless junk.
Would any of it still be valuable today? The twentysomething yuppie bankers of the late 1980s are, I assume, still extremely wealthy, and would be in their fifties, sixties by now, some of them might still be working. majorca hotel accommodation Carl Icahn and Ivan Boesky, the "vulture capitalists", are very old men, but they were old men in the 1980s. The clothes might be worth something, but who remembers D F Sanders or Arnold Scaasi today? majorca hotel accommodation The restaurants, majorca hotel accommodation if they were real, presumably closed long ago.
The BMW E32 750iL might possibly have had the best engine around in 1991 - we have to assume Bateman was talking about the V12 - but it's a maintenance timebomb on the used market. The E32's target market in the late 1980s don't buy used cars; the kind of people who might want a used E32 probably can't afford to maintain it. High-end, but-not-classic luxury cars are poor investments.
It's not just men. Women have their handbags majorca hotel accommodation and shoes. Ellis' novel takes place in a world where objects have value and meaning but people are empty. There is some debate as to whether Bateman was supposed majorca hotel accommodation to be a personification of Reagan-era America, and his victims symbolic of that decade's bogeymen. He kills a homeless beggar and a gay man; the one person who catches him and seems likely majorca hotel accommodation to bring him to vigilante justice is a taxi driver who lets him go after robbing majorca hotel accommodation him of his Rolex, his Ray-Bans, and three hundred majorca hotel accommodation dollars majorca hotel accommodation in cold hard cash. A disappointing five hundred dollars in modern money.
Ellis' point is that even though the taxi driver majorca hotel accommodation seems pissed at Bateman for murdering (presumably) another taxi driver, he too lives in an unsympathetic world where human life is... if not exactly worthless, then not worth a great deal. "You're a dead man", says Bateman, to which the taxi driver responds that Bateman is a Yuppie scumbag, the implication being those two states are equivalent.
On another level the book defies serious analysis, because Ellis is clearly messing with our minds. At one point Bateman delivers a right-on tirade to a table of his fellow businessmen, who stare in shock as he waffles on about the need to " provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women but change the abortion laws to protect the right to life yet still somehow maintain women's freedom of choice ". It works far better as humour than satire, something that Mary Harron spotted when she turned the book into a film. (The scene implies that Bateman is immoral rather than amoral majorca hotel accommodation , and at the same time it sits oddly today, with the implication majorca hotel accommodation that bad evil bankers are in favour of crime and drugs and also illegal immigration, which is probably true but politically unacceptable).
When I was very young I was aware that there was such a thing as a Yorkshire Ripper, a man with a terrible beard who had killed several women. In Yorkshire, majorca hotel accommodation which is far away . He targeted prostitutes, or at least that was the theory. It turned out much later that he had assaulted dozens of women picked simply because they were alone. Sutcliffe's fifth official victim was a 16-year-old shop assistant on her way home in the middle of the night. " He has made it clear that he hates prostitutes; majorca hotel accommodation many people do ", said Assistant Chief Constable Jim Hobson, " but the Ripper is now killing innocent girls ". Over time the phrase became infamous. Innocent majorca hotel accommodation girls.
The police majorca hotel accommodation investigation of the Ripper case remains notoriously awful; if there is a suggestion that the police majorca hotel accommodation did not care very much for his victims, it must be borne in mind that even after Sutcliffe began to kill "innocent girls" it took four years of blundering to catch him. It s