http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/01/american-psycho/#more-35417
by Gregory Hood
Obviously, most viewers are missing even the intended anti-capitalist satire . . . but there is something subversive inherent in the material. Bret Easton Ellis is perhaps one of the most biting trolls of Twitter, poking fun at the new taboos of the internet age. When Dan Savage received a media assist in his transformation from sexual degenerate to Civil Rights Leader (hey, it worked for Martin Luther King) and debuted his “It Gets Better” campaign, Ellis tweeted, “Can we get a reality check here? It gets worse.” He also called Glee “a puddle of HIV.” The howls of prissy hysteria from the white knights of cyberspace read like Bateman’s exposition on morality to Stash and Vanden. Though he’s hardly a Traditionalist, Ellis at least sees that the urgent moral imperatives of our time are so much tripe. Like Ellis’s characters in The Rules of Attraction, Americans frantically drug, drink, rut, and amuse themselves away from the nothingness of American life and the bankruptcy of its moral code.
Ellis noted that when he was writing the book, it was as if being possessed by a dark spirit. That specter still haunts the continent. Objectively speaking, crime is down, violence as a whole is declining worldwide, and despite the struggling economy, we still live in a country where one of the most serious problems is people can’t stop eating all the food that’s available. Yet we are bound with invisible chains regulating every aspect of our behavior, envious of the human debris at the top of our social pyramid, outraged at the bestial creatures that have ravaged our major cities (and our budget), and disgusted at what passes for a culture.
There’s a dark passenger separated from compassion, empathy, and love within many Americans, breaking free in outbreaks of nihilistic horror. The country has become ugly – spiritually, morally, even physically – and while everyone disagrees on the cause, the undercurrent of fury in American life seems to be a constant. Millions sense it, even if they don’t know what it means. As Patrick Bateman says, “Something horrible is happening inside me, and I don’t know why.” When you build a country upon a lie, a state without a real nation, people, or culture, then “greed and disgust” is all that remains.
Patrick Bateman has a dark appeal because we understand this disgust with what the country has become. We share his shameful greed for the luxuries that secretly appeal to us. We sympathize with his anger and we can’t help but admire his style, even as we despise ourselves for it. While thrown into a ruthless world of all against all, we are expected to respect social conventions and egalitarian cant. We are told to avoid physical aggression even though the social conflict and personal destruction is as real as any medieval battlefield. The serial killer dressed in Valentino suits literally cutting through the hypocrisy and pretense of the corporate caste system with axe and chainsaw at least openly displays what he is.
In Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, he notes that those possessing strong “megalothymia,” the desire for recognition of superiority and greatness, can only channel it into commercial enterprises in our Brave New World. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger’s comment on academia, the competition for status in our society is so fierce precisely because the stakes are so small. Of course, even though Bateman supposedly exemplifies the “yuppie,” we don’t see him chasing the dollar. We don’t actually see him doing much of anything at the office, except making reservations at restaurants, watching talk shows, and filling out crossword puzzles in disturbing ways.
