‘American Psycho’ at 25: Bret Easton Ellis on Patrick Bateman’s Legacy

Before American Psycho came out, 25 years ago this month, it was already the most controversial novel of the Nineties. Its vivid depictions of gruesome murders of women, men, children and animals preceded wherever it went. The original publisher dropped it and told author Bret Easton Ellis to keep the money — but to please go away. The New York Times titled its book review “Snuff This Book!” On the opposite coast, Los Angeles Times begrudgingly wrote that “Free Speech Protects Even an ‘American Psycho.'” The National Organization of Women attempted to organize boycotts. Stores refused to order it. And Ellis, who turned 27 around its release, received death threats.

Despite the initial uproar, the book has enjoyed an unusual afterlife. At its heart, American Psycho is a caustic satire about materialism and the empty feeling that comes with chasing it. It’s a first-person account of a callous, vain Wall Street yuppie named Patrick Bateman who loves the pop music of the day (Whitney! Huey! Phil!) and has trouble coming to terms with his murderous inclinations. And it’s been translated into different media in sometimes unusual tones, notably a 2000 movie starring a smarmy Christian Bale, which presented the story as more of a black-comedy thriller, and most recently a tongue-in-cheek Broadway musical.

Over the past quarter-century, Patrick Bateman has also become a cult character, rearing his sleek-haired head in the imagery of Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown” video, in the lyrics of the Misfits and Fall Out Boy songs and in the dialogue of TV’s Dexter, How I Met Your Mother — even Keeping Up With the Kardashians. His catchphrase “I have to return some videotapes” has become a meme, as has an image from the movie of Bale with wide grin and an axe. Moreover, Ellis – who first introduced Bateman as the brother of The Rules of Attraction’s druggy college kid Sean Bateman – later revisited the character in a cameo in his 1998 book Glamorama and in his 2005 meta-novel Lunar Park, where a fictional Bret Ellis seals Bateman’s fate.

“You cannot control the popularity of your work,” Ellis says in a perfectly enunciated, Batemanesque way. “And you cannot control the influence of your work. I am sure that 99 percent of writers wish their work was more influential than it ultimately was. I have written books that have disappeared. And it’s not as if this book is a blockbuster: It hasn’t sold whatever Fifty Shades of Grey or All the Light We Cannot See or Gone Girl has. So for a book like this to somehow connect with the culture … you can’t not be kind of amused by it.”

The author, now 52, recently sat for an in-depth interview with Rolling Stone about the legacy of one of fiction’s most notorious – and best-groomed – dissidents.

Has the way that Patrick Bateman has become a cult character surprised you?
What if I said, no? [Pause.] I’m kidding [laughs]. Of course, it was surprising to me. American Psycho was an experimental novel. I wasn’t really quite sure, nor did I care, how many copies it was going to sell. I really didn’t care who connected with it.