American Psycho

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On the episode I listened to, posted in February just a few days before the Oscars, Ellis rants for almost half an hour about how Best Picture nominee Black Panther received its nod only because the Academy, succumbing to a “diversity push,” has been “shoveling” hundreds of unqualified young women and people of color into its ranks. It's just so funny and full of satire that I couldn't NOT love it, it really appealed to my dark sense of humour.

It helped that they were able to show what Ellis could only describe, and when a work is all about superficial appearances, that’s an enormous advantage. One supposes that the last freethinking men of ancient Sumer, lamenting that cuneiform had ruined their political discourse, must have longed for the good old days of throwing rocks at each other’s heads. The story is told in the first-person by Patrick Bateman, a wealthy, narcissistic, vain Manhattan investment banker who supposedly lives a double life as a serial killer. For years, Ellis has been perseverating about “ideology versus aesthetics” on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast, where he plays the thinking man’s shock jock, talking about movies with that lush transcendence that enters a man’s voice when he is no longer forced to endure the inconvenience of talking over someone else.Bateman’s worst crimes are clearly the ones where he tortures, murders, mutilates and abuses the bodies of young women, sometimes with the assistance of small rodents. Eyes are said to be the keyhole to the soul, and by taking these away it gives a chilling image of a lack of identity. they wouldn't allow any alcohol other than their own wine to be drunk, so everyone compensated with dimebags and eightballs. The drawing of Patrick Bateman in this cover takes away his eyes, which shows his lack of conscience. In this Blink, we’ll break down the plot and symbolism of this controversial classic, and let you decide for yourself.

Author Bret Easton Ellis is setting the stage: The transition between verbal and physical violence will be seamless. In a particularly absurd episode, he is chased by a squad car after his random shooting of a busker, commandeers a cab (killing its driver), crashes into a Korean deli, kills a cop who tries to disarm him, escapes from the armed police who seem to have him surrounded, shoots dead a janitor and a night watchman in a nearby building, and (as a Swat team arrives in a helicopter, just too late) sits in his office confessing his crimes ("thirty, forty, a hundred murders") to his lawyer's answering machine. The book ends as it began, with Bateman and his colleagues at a new club on a Friday night, engaging in banal conversation. Bateman most definitely harbors no feelings or sympathy towards women, he deconstructs the women he meets, piece by piece, until they're reduced to just a sum of boobs, ass and vagina. He goes to the office Halloween party "as a mass murderer, complete with a sign painted on my back that read MASS MURDERER".The first mention of safe spaces is on page 9; helicopter parents, also page 9; participation trophies, page 17. The thesis of White is that American culture has entered a period of steep, perhaps irreversible decline, and social media and millennials are to blame.