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Reply to "JC Leroy (as Terence put it)"

After the book ended with a big boring splat of existential vacuity (Sartre did that nausea so much more poetically), I decided to see the film again as it did seduce me into reading the book.

Now the movie does extract the best lines from the book... there is no doubt observing those 80s-style fatuous yuppies ruling the universe is weirdly exciting. It's a ruling class, after all, and sadistically joyous. He details them very well. Christian Bale is a great cast and when he cracks up and confesses into the answering machine, that sweaty mess he becomes, the hysteria... "I had to kill alot of people..." just stunning.

Seeing shots of World Trade in the background, it came to me this material could now be viewed as a very mordant political satire. That Patrick Bateman's self-indulgent, homicidal, shallow soul = America, and his many victims could be boiled down (hmm?) to aspects of the rest of the world -if anyone was up to analyzing the variety of mutilations. And the expensive eating habits are so revolting as compared to famines the world over, etc. (Now you see where JT got some ideas, possibly, for the high-faluten Doves Diner in "Sarah"!)

In other words, I don't think the forms the murders and sadism take are just random 'filth'... An American Psycho: a paradigm obsessor over details, uber-consumer, fuelled by cocaine, who cares only for appearances, who destroys others unfeelingly... actually 'American Psyche.'

Totally agog at the reviews on the back of the book where Norman Mailer compares ha' to Dostoyevsky. Please. The style is jerky, unwieldy, emotionally gawky, and I too would have ditched the book after the third description of what the fuck couture they were wearing, if I hadn't had the gorgeous Bale in my head as an activator... But there ARE people who read couture the way the 'Psycho' does, and base entire value judgements on an outfit. In your opinion: are they insane?

Yes, the book is disgustingly misogynistic, but alot of American men are. The detailing of this 'horror of the female' is pretty total. Bret is very conversant with evil-mindedness, and could himself be cruel, e.g. the torturing of the bums. But I don't think that matters... because he's revealed to us some of the secrets of his sick brotherhood.
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