American Psycho

The essential premise of American Psycho is probably not a sexual one, and to focus on Bateman's sexuality is to risk missing the point. The caricatured inhumanity of the central character focuses on markers of maleness, a pre-metrosexual 1980's masculinity defined by materialism. While it is true that perverse or extreme sexuality are very evident in the character of Bateman, they are used more as striking symptoms of his psychosis than as general identifiers of his male character. He is a psycho who happens to be male, rather than a man who has become psychotic about his maleness. If anything, the implication would seem to be that he is psychotic about his American-ness and the masculine, sexual, manner in which his psychosis manifests is a product of his socio-cultural location. Perhaps we are supposed to notice that Bateman is American before he is psychotic, that he is American before he is male, and that American-ness, maleness, and psychosis are inextricably and hierarchically- if usually hermetically- linked.

Bateman himself may well be a misogynist, but whether the text can reasonably be read as some kind of misogynist propaganda depends on many more factors: how sympathetic he is; what the realist agenda of the story is; how the female characters are portrayed; what the express intentions of the author are, etc. Looking cursorily at the realism, for example, it is quickly obvious that Bateman is not supported by the style of the book. The writing is surely darkly comic- a feature made even more apparent in the film.

Nevertheless the film is not exempt from accusations of misogyny. The core of the discussion about American Psycho and many other texts related to it lies the question of whether it is truly possible to have a male protagonist and not to expect the audience to identify with him, ultimately in some way condoning his actions. The same debate surrounded the openly woman-hating In the Company of Men, which was nevertheless defended by the...