American Psycho/Patrick Bateman

[Parsifal]

I'm reading Bret Easton Ellis' novel 'American Psycho' for the second time now. I take it that a lot of you have either seen the movie or read the book. Apart from a psychopathic killer Patrick Bateman is also a master DJ:

*His date Patricia changed the plans for the evening. She wants to go to a gig, he knows he only gets to bone her if she's coming with him for dinner:
"Listen. What are you doing?" I ask. "If you're not coming I have to call someone else. Do you have Emily Hamilton's number?"
"Oh now now, Patrick, don't be… rash." She giggles nervously. "They are playing two more nights so I can see them tomorrow. Listen, calm down, okay?"

*His date Courtney is annoying the crap out of him. He responds:
"You should take some more lithium or have a Diet Coke. Some caffeine might get you out of this slump."
(this one is classic... I used it once )

*The break up part with his fiancee is priceless:
"Evelyn," I sigh. "I'm sorry. You're just… not terribly important… to me." (...)
"But what about the past? Our past?" she asks again, uselessly.
"Don't mention it," I tell her, leaning in.
"Why not?"
"Because we never really shared one"


*And in case you're still wondering if you should pay for dinner:
"Where are you going?'.' she asks again. (...)
"Libya," and then, after a significant pause, "Pago Pago. I meant to say Pago Pago," and then I add, "Because of your outburst I'm not paying for this meal."

I'll try to post more of these quotes later, but feel free to add them yourself!

 

[PeoplesChamp]

Bret Easton Ellis is a very different kind of author. I enjoy his style somewhat; it's Palahniukian in many ways, he zoned in on the yuppy culture of the 80's similar to how Palahniuk lampooned consumer culture in fight club. I haven't read American Psycho but I have read "Rules of Engagement." Which is about going to an upperclass, private college in New England. It was made into a movie as well with James Vanderbeek (the dude from Dawson's Creek) playing Sean Batemen. If remember correctly Patrick is his older brother in that novel. There are a lot of great lines in that books as well.

 

[Julian]

that book owns. im reading hamlet now which is harder then getting into dorsias.

 

[DonJuanMonk]

There's a difference between fiction and fact, my friend you are blinded by fiction.

 

[PeoplesChamp]

If you're having trouble with Hamlet I recommend going to your local video store and renting Hamlet with Mel Gibson in it and/or the Spaghetti Shakespeare Hamlet with Ethan Hawke. Read along with it and be sure to have your remote by your side.

 

[Visceral]

Patrick Bateman is not someone you want to emulate, no matter how much of a DJ he may be.

He kills because his charmed but shallow yuppie life has so drained him of his humanity that he will do anything to feel alive.

Remember that the next time you find yourselves wanting a life like his.

 

[nosexbox]

Doesn't anyone find it ironic that a character like Bateman is a kick butt DJ? Not that he's not a total mysoginist, primping, *sshole.

 

[Parsifal]

Bateman explains his fiancee why he doesn't want to get married. Very plausible reason:

"Because trying to fvck you is like trying to French-kiss a very... small and... lively gerbil?" I tell her. "I don't know."
"Yes?" she says. "And?"
"With braces?" I finish, shrugging.

 

[Postmodern Sleaze]

You know, guys, it's not beyond my capacity to drive a lead pipe repeatedly
into a girl's vagina... but compassionately.

 

[DinoCassanova]

PB: "You know what Ed Gein said about women? "

PB's buddy: " Ed Gein, maitre'd at Canal bar ? "

PB: " No. Serial killer, from Wisconsin. "

Another buddy: "What did Ed say?"

PB: " He said, When I see a really pretty girl, part of me wants to go up to her , be real nice, buy her flowers, take her out. And then another part of me wonders what her head would look like on a stake. " (PB laughs hysterically, while his buddies just kind of stare at him).


In his latest novel, Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis has to deal with "Patrick Bateman" yet again, and probably for the final time it seems. Lunar Park, by the way, while not Ellis's best book, is an intensely personal book which you can tell he wrote, had to write, mainly for himself. It's worth a read if you're a big Ellis fan, and it is a little spooky in a way, at times. As usual, Ellis does the outre quite well in my opinion. Anyway, in Lunar Park, Ellis talks alot about American Psycho, and alot about Bateman, and he says that if you read that book the way it was really meant to be read a good case can be made that Bateman actually committed no crimes. That Bateman was, in reality, a fairly ineffectual individual, just a metrosexual yuppie/clone basically, who was perhaps slowly losing his mind, and that he "daydreamed" all of those awful things , basically, while sitting at his (very under-stimulating but extremely overpaid) office job all day long. That's, in my opinion, the gist that the movie brings across as well. That, at the end, he hasn't really killed anyone, only fantasized about having done so. Clearly he's not all there, but he hasn't actually acted on his bizarre fantasies. I tend to read it that way; to agree with that interpretation. Of course that's just one interpretation. It can be read more literally , obviously, as well. In Lunar Park, in fact, Ellis discusses a criminal case, an investigation, which was apparently going on a few years ago, when he was living with his (now ex) wife in upstate NY, where a strange man began emulating Bateman and committing murders based to a tee on murders described in American Psycho. The killer even searched the NY phone books for names that were identical to Bateman's victims' names and then killed them exactly the way they had been killed in the book. Very strange, although I don't remember hearing about it, and I haven't been able to locate any online literature about such a case having occurred, but Ellis indicates in Lunar Park the killer was eventually caught. So who knows? Incidentally, however, I don't think Bateman was a DJ or a player really. I think he was just "cold and distant", as he said in the movie version, due to the fact that he was slowly degenerating into complete lunacy.

 

[DJ_in_making]

He's not so much of a Don Juan a he is a Sociopath

 

[diablo]

AE...