Patrick Bateman is hungry. In fact, he's starving. He goes out to dinner, but never touches his plate. His friends are vapid, he is desperate for conversation, for meaning. His associates don't recognize him, he is hungry for attention, for acknowledgement, for an individual identity. He already has power, money, fabulous clothes, an elite career, a desirable girlfriend and other women on the side. What he wants is a life and a persona that money can't buy. But it doesn't stop him from trying to get it and swallow it piece by piece.

Bret Easton Ellis brings us into the world of an American Psycho through the tradition of urban gothic fiction. It is a story of transgressions, sexual violence, fear and the cultural anxieties of 1980's Manhattan. The division between the haves and have nots is made obvious as stock brokers with wads of hundred dollar bills taunt the homeless outside of exclusive clubs. The war between the sexes rages on, with women being referred to as 'hardbodies' in order to diffuse their slow climb into corporate America, taking over jobs and threatening the club of elite white males. Race is another area of tension as Patrick and his friends spit upon the melting pot of New York, demeaning the Chinese, Jews, African Americans, Japanese and Middle Easterners.

Patrick is a modern Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, living one life on the surface and another underground, one personality the subversive half of the other. He can be a murderer one moment, a Wall Street playboy and amateur music journalist the next.

According to the History of Gothic Fiction (2000), "Boundaries or limits are both established and challenged in Gothic fiction. Blurring or disruptions of borders are common (e.g., inside/outside, illusion/reality, masculine/feminine, material/spiritual, good/evil)."

Ellis touches on all of these issues in creating Patrick, even though we are only given the most superficial portrait of him. Patrick is outside of society, due to his madness and violent behavior, but he still operates within it, holding down a job and being part of the yuppie in-crowd. He's one of the boys, at times acting hyper-masculine, smoking cigars, ogling women and having sex with the best looking of them. Yet he is feminized throughout the book with his use of numerous expensive bath products, manicures, facials, his obsession with his looks, and his treatment of food, as will be discussed later. In this way he is more completely made into the "other".

The division between good and evil should be the most clear one in the story of a psychopath, but even that line shifts and moves, is drawn and redrawn at times. There are not just two sides, but many categories of good and evil that characters can fit into. Patrick kills bums in the street, yet is offended by a joke about JFK and Pearl Bailey told by one of his cronies. "'It's not funny,' I say. 'It's racist.'" (37) But Patrick himself makes racist comments about his Chinese dry cleaners, Jews and even composes a racist haiku for his ex-girlfriend, Bethany (233). Another whole category of evil, according to Patrick, "Dan Quayle, who even I don't like." (327)

To blur the boundary between reality and fantasy, it is never made clear whether the events Patrick describes are real or just imagined. He proves repeatedly to be an unreliable narrator, slipping from the first to third person, getting facts wrong and telling us things that simply can't be true, "Bigfoot was interviewed on The Patty Winters Show this morning and to my shock I found him surprisingly articulate and charming." (381) As Elizabeth Young details, we cannot even be sure if Patrick himself exists, or in what form. "Is he perhaps Tim Price... Is Patrick one of the other guys in the book, fleetingly mentioned, always around? Might Patrick be Paul Owen whose apartment he appropriates? Could he possibly even be... Marcus Halberstam?! Who knows?" (118)

In the Handbook to Gothic Literature, Helen Stoddart says that, "certain Satanic characteristics are projected onto evil human characters... with the demonic being that which breaks, subverts, or falls on the other side of a given boundary." (44-5) Unlike Dracula or Jekyll and Hyde or other supernatural characters, Patrick is frightening because he is real. Everything he does is within the limits of human possibility and he lives among us.

What we want is to understand why someone like Patrick exists, how he was made, so that we may do our best to prevent a reoccurrence of these acts, but Ellis will give us no reasons or insight. "I don't think you can explain someone like Patrick Bateman - at least not within the context of a novel where the character is talking to you, narrating to you - without cheating... To me there is no reasoning. To me this creature just exists." (Rolling Stone,1991)

Therefore, as readers and critics we may not be able to figure out Patrick's motivations, the 'why' of what he does, but we can attempt to understand the 'how,' in how he goes about his crimes. We can put his violence into perspective of his character and the world he lives in, and even without a 'why' it begins to make sense.

As a character in a gothic novel Patrick is bound to commit some kind of atrocity, and there must be elements of horror in the scenes of violence. But today's standard of horror is different from that of Poe or Shelley. "I don't know if we're that shocked or that upset by viewing murder or killing anymore," Ellis said. "It seemed to me that I had to really get the point across... that these murders are painful, that they're terrible, that they're messy, that they're as ugly as possible." (RS, 1991)

Fine. Ellis wanted to include some really shocking scenes that would affect even his jaded generation. Now the challenge is that while the use of horror must fit the genre, it also has to fit the character. Patrick is built on a 1980's life of consumerism, consumption and excess. In his world you don't use one facial product when you can have 10, and you don't use 10 from the local convenience store when you could have 15 that are imported, overpriced and only available at high-end specialty shops.

Therefore, when it comes to murder Patrick must also be excessive. Poisoning, shooting and hanging are all too simple, too pedestrian. He must to go further. But Patrick doesn't do anything without checking with the experts first. He only makes reservations at restaurants that are approved by Zagat's. He only wears clothes and accessories that have received praise from the fashion authorities in his magazines and style guides. He would never risk an action or a purchase that might be considered passee or that wasn't tried and tested by an expert in the field.

Logically this attention to detail must extend to knowledge of the proper way of being a serial killer. Murder must be studied and executed with the same properness and precision as the wearing of a tie clip.

But this is where Patrick's conflicting desires complicate matters. Because along with this obsessive attention to detail and need to fit in is Patrick's desire for individuality.

A central piece of the Handbook to Gothic Literature's formula for Urban Gothic fiction is, "the alienation of the urban subject, leading to paranoia, fragmentation and loss of identity." (289)

This lack of individual identity is central to Patrick's need to strike out. "His agony consists of the way his interior life keeps leaking into the public arena only to be inauthenticated, so that he has to reinforce his 'self', his 'identity', in ever more extreme and violent ways." (118) Patrick repeatedly tells people he isn't well, that he thinks he's cracking up, but they either dismiss his ramblings or seem not to hear them at all. His actions must speak louder than his words to get him noticed.

In this way, the duality of Patrick's personality ruins things for him, again and again. At one point he tells Bethany that he works, even though he is so rich that he has no need to, because, "I... want... to... fit... in." (237) By studying the trends and behaviour of his social class he does fit in, but fits in so well that he completely disappears into the crowd. This ability to camouflage himself within his social circle completely undermines his own attempts to strike out as an individual. It becomes a vicious circle, one that becomes more violent and more vicious as the books goes on.

When it comes to being a serial killer then, Patrick rather pathetically gets it wrong. Rather than becoming a notorious murderer with a nickname and profile being splashed all over the news, he becomes a composite of serial killers, and nobody seems to notice what he's been doing. Even when he goes to the office Halloween party with a large sign saying MASS MURDERER on his back, nobody notices the blood on his clothes, and he seems disappointed that he doesn't win first prize (330).

The situation is similar to the way others mistake him for some nameless model or actor. "I could swear I've seen you in a magazine or somewhere," the gay man says before Patrick kills him. (165) Patrick is not particularly memorable, but could be any one of a number generic male pseudo celebrities seen on tv 'or somewhere'. This is a stark contrast to Patrick's run-in with Tom Cruise, who he, and the readers, can instantly recognize by sight or by name.

Patrick's murderous actions, although terrible and graphic, are unoriginal. He has no signature, no pattern, nothing that would significantly differentiate him from a dozen other killers. Sometimes he uses a nail gun, other times a knife. In one nightmarish scene he tortures a woman to death with a starving rat. But these are individual cases. He never sticks with one method, one manner of killing that is just his, one that will set him apart from everyone else.

Ellis is accused of putting too much gore in the book, of crossing lines that should not have been crossed, but there's nothing new about what he's written. He may be the first to put such graphic elements in a work of fiction, but really the violence is about as fictional as his descriptions of clothes or CDs. They are facts, encyclopaedia entries, simply being related by a fictional character.

As Jonathon Keats says, "Ellis treats violence the way Thomas Pynchon uses gravity -- as raw material with which to formulate art. Brutality is a fact of life as ineradicable as the rules of attraction, and Ellis is no more a cause of violence in America than Pynchon is accountable for gravity's rainbow." (Salon.com, 1999)

To prepare to write Psycho, Ellis says that along with men's magazines, restaurant reviews and stereo guides, he read numerous of accounts of serial murderers. So he was sure to come across the story of Andrei Chikatilo, also known as the Russian Hannibal Lecter.

"After luring [children] away from train or bus stations into the woods, he would stab them, stuff their mouths with mud, rip at them with his bare hands, and chew off their genitals. He also gouged out their eyes or bit off their tongues, and he often carried their organs away with him."

Patrick sometimes lures his prey away, once a child at the zoo, other times women to his apartment. He stabs them. "I rip open her stomach with my bare hands," (305) he says once. He chews at their genitals. He gouges eyes and keeps vaginas as souvenirs.

Another case of Ellis' art imitating, or cutting and pasting directly from, life, is the case of Japanese killer and cannibal Issei Sagawa whose story took place from the late 70's to the early 80's, just as Ellis was beginning to research and write Psycho.

In Cannibal Killers, Moira Martingale says that as a teenager, Sagawa had sexual fantasies of cannibalism. As a graduate student in Paris in 1981, he befriended 25-year-old Renee Hartevelt, because of her pure white skin, which he said he just had to consume. The two dined together a few times until finally Sagawa decided upon a plan to have her all for himself.

Martingale writes, "Upon arriving in Paris, he had purchased a .22-caliber rifle "for self-protection." He had it ready when Renee arrived. He seated her on the floor, Japanese-style, to drink tea. Into her drink, he put some whiskey to make her more pliant." Patrick also invites women to his home under the guise of harmless fun. He feeds them, gives them alcohol, sometimes tainted with drugs, in order to make them easier to manipulate.

Sagawa shot Renee in the neck, killing her. He undressed her, then, as Martingale continues, "He got a knife and used it to cut off the tip of her left breast and a piece of her nose. These he consumed. Then he got serious. Using an electric carving knife, Sagawa began to cut Renee into parts. He laid out strips of flesh to store for later and nibbled on a few pieces raw. Then he made a quick meal of fried human flesh with mustard."

Compare this to Patrick, "Elizabeth, delirious and probably overdosing on the Ecstasy, had been helping before I turned on her and chewed at one of her nipples until I couldn't control myself and bit it off, swallowing." (290) "I'm kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl's brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat." (328) Of course, in his case, it would have to be foreign, name brand mustard.

Both men attempt to cook body parts as well as eating them raw, although Patrick fails because he has never had to cook anything before.

Martingale says that hours after the murder, "Several large flies swarmed around the corpse, so Sagawa took that as a sign that he'd lost Renee. Yet even as he dismembered her, he grew excited, so he used her hand to masturbate."

Patrick uses the detached head of a victim for masturbation.

What's most remarkable about Sagawa's case is that unlike Jeffrey Dahmer or Chikatilo, who were executed for their crimes, he was a free man within five years of murdering and eating Renee. His wealthy father first arranged for him to be extradited to Japan for psychiatric care but the doctors there said he was both sane and guilty. From there he was shifted from one facility to another until, in 1985 he walked out, with strings pulled again by his father. Just like Patrick, he was able to get away with murder.

Rather than hiding from the media, Sagawa went on to appear on talk shows, similar to the fictional Patty Winters Show, to discuss his crime. He also wrote a book about the experience, In the Fog, published in 1983. It sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan. His descriptions are just as detached as Bateman's, just as precise and revolting, just as textbook.

Nothing Ellis writes seems quite as daring or brazen when you see that he had factual material like this to work from. The scenes may still be disturbing, but they are not the work of a sick man with a terrible imagination. They are just the results of research by an author who wants his character to stay consistent, treating each aspect of his life (dinner reservations, purchasing electronics, butchering corpses) methodically, clinically and precisely.

By the time Ellis began creating his story of Patrick Bateman, even the idea of writing a book confessing to murder, cannibalistic desires and sexual crimes was not original. It was simply the in thing to do for the serial killer of the 80's, a trend that Patrick would just have to be in on.

With this body of information in his head, Patrick recites the details of the slaughters as though he's giving a book report on them, with the same indifference he uses to explain the difference between spring water and natural water.

"What is left of Elizabeth's body lies crumpled in the corner of the living room. She's missing her right arm and chunks of her right leg. Her left hand, chopped off at the wrist, lies clenched on top of the island in the kitchen, in its own small pool of blood. Her head sits on the kitchen table and its blood-soaked face - even with both eyes scooped out and a pair of Alain Mikli sunglasses over the holes - looks like it's frowning. I get very tired looking at it and though I didn't get any sleep last night and I'm utterly spent, I still have a lunch appointment at Odeon with Jean Davies and Alana Burton at one. That's very important to me and I have to debate whether I should cancel it or not." (291)

Patrick tells us what kind of sunglasses the corpse is wearing, where he's having lunch and with who, but the rest of the description is just an inventory of parts. There's no emotion, no rage or pride or guilt. We don't get any clues as to how he feels about the events, other than that they have left him physically exhausted. Now that the killing is done it's time to move onto more important matters, like his lunch plans.

But why murder? Why cannibalism? Why couldn't Ellis have stopped with simple shootings, maybe a hanging or a quick stabbing? There are plenty of those stories to draw from, plenty of professional killers that Patrick could have copied. Did he have to take Patrick so far, to create such gore? Absolutely.

Once we know Patrick, once we see the extent to which he consumes everything around him, there is no way to put the brakes on this most primal aspect of his life. All his acts of material consumer consumption are not enough to fulfill him. Even consuming services - facials, manicures, personal training, limo drivers, prostitutes - buying people to perform for him, to own them and control their actions and identities for a few hours, is not enough. To become the ultimate consumer, an elite consumer of the rare and exotic, he must consume other human beings, both literally and in spirit.

Even before Patrick turns to cannibalism though, the murders are about more than just a desire to kill. With the homeless man, Patrick talks to him first, asks him questions, pretends to be sympathetic. He earns the man's trust for a moment, makes him hopeful that he might get some money. Once the mutilation begins, Patrick has taken the man's trust, hope, any dignity he may have had. Most importantly, by so disfiguring the man, Patrick takes a piece of his identity. He is no longer the man he used to be.

Patrick also speaks to the gay man with the dog before killing him. The man compliments Patrick, flirts with him, flatters him. This murder takes place in the chapter after Luis Carruthers has made unwanted advances at Patrick, who at the time deals with the situation awkwardly, uncomfortably.

"'I... I've gotta...' Stumped, I look around the crowded dining room, then back at Luis's quivering, yearning face. 'I've gotta return some videotapes,' I say, jabbing at the elevator button, then, my patience shot, I start to walk away and head back toward my table." (160)

Killing another gay man who has shown interest in him is Patrick's chance to take back the upper hand, to regain the power and feeling of superiority he had over Luis when he slept with Courtney, Luis' girlfriend, before he found out about Luis' feelings for him.

Even with the delivery boy, Patrick doesn't speak to him, but as the attack takes place after a discussion about how the Japanese are taking over the city, Patrick may be trying to take back what he feels belongs to him and his white, rich male counterparts, for they are interchangeable. He speaks for all of them. When he discovers the boy is Chinese though he loses that power. He feels foolish, believes the death was pointless, he did not regain power over the Japanese as he hoped. He tries to salvage the murder with a halfhearted threat against the Jewish customer, but he apologises to the dying boy as he walks away. The boy did not have what Patrick wanted.

This is why the young boy at the zoo was so unsatisfying for Patrick to kill. "I'm suddenly jolted with a mournful despair at how useless, how extraordinarily painless, it is to take a child's life. This thing before me, small and twisted and bloody, has no real history, no worthwhile past, nothing is really lost." (299)

With the female victims the priorities shift. Patrick needs something else from them, but because of the shallowness of his narrative we never get to know exactly what. We don't know if his hostility stems from his relationship with his mother, with past girlfriends, or from a general fear of women. Without giving us any knowledge of his past, Ellis instead makes Patrick's current feelings obvious when Patrick picks up his first prostitute in the meat packing district under a sign that simply labels her "MEAT". Women are hereby designated as both objects and food.

Patrick bathes the meat, feeds the meat, gives the meat alcohol and a fancy robe, but once the knives and other weapons come out, meat is all she is. Along with the other women he slaughters she becomes nothing but flesh and blood and body parts to him. They are all robbed of their identity, made as faceless and unrecognizable as he is. When two women are involved at once, Patrick describes one dead body he says belonged to Tiffany, but then says "I think it's her even though I'm having a hard time telling the two apart." (306) The issue of mistaken identity comes up throughout the book, when Patrick is socialising at bars or clubs: the urban meat markets. Patrick and his male acquaintances are often called by the wrong names. They are all the same, just pieces of meat dressed in the same designer clothes with the same horn-rimmed glasses and slicked-back hairstyles.

Once this is all that's left, once Patrick has taken their dignity, their social status and their identities, all that is left to consume is the meat itself, and this he does like a warrior celebrating the triumph of a terrible enemy with a victory meal.

Sagawa described his prey as food as well, "As fat oozed out of one stab wounds, it had the consistency and appearance of yellow corn. He smelled it and found that it had no odour. Cutting deeper to find the flesh, he placed a chunk into his mouth. "[It] melted in my mouth like raw tuna in a sushi restaurant." (Martingale, 1993)

Much of Psycho revolves around food, and death and food are continually linked. Patrick kills the first bum, says he is ravenous, and goes to McDonald's. After killing the gay man and his dog he goes grocery shopping. After killing the child at the zoo he eats a Dove ice cream bar. After the first night with the two prostitutes Patrick says next to his bed there are bloody tissues "and an empty carton of Italian seasoning salt I picked up at Dean & Deluca," (176) bringing the elements of cooking and the kitchen into the bedroom and scenes of violence. The women become the meal. Patrick goes on to have brunch with one of the corpses, feeds brie to the rat he uses to torture one victim, and stores some body parts in his refrigerator, as though saving leftovers.

And yet even when Patrick is at the best restaurants, spending hundreds of dollars on a meal, he never talks about eating anything. He gives details of the food, how it is prepared, what it cost, but never how it tastes. He must have reservations at the top eateries, must be seen in these places, but he never eats just for the sake of nourishment or hunger. He starves himself during these social gatherings, never eating in public and never seeming to really enjoy himself. The only meal we do know he eats is breakfast, which he eats alone, at home.

Psycho is such a parody of 80's greed, shallowness and consumerism, it makes sense that Ellis ties in another symbol of the era, the anorexic supermodel and the eating disorders they inspired in those who desired to emulate them. It was during this period that Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista went from runway extras to household names. Their faces and bodies became their own commodities, more valuable assets than the fashions and products they helped to advertise. Their profession became their identity, and it's one that Patrick wouldn't mind having.

Encouraged by the compliments he receives, and by being mistaken for a model or actor, Patrick's body is a source of pride for him, a status symbol, and an obsession.

Like some models, Patrick doesn't maintain his looks with a balanced healthy diet, but by avoiding food, popping pills, chugging alcohol and exercising in excess, even if it means missing work. When his secretary, Jean, assures him that he's fit already and doesn't need to lose weight, Patrick tells her he's still on a diet because, "You can always be thinner. Look... better." (372)

Jean offers to skip dinner so as not to ruin his willpower and he says, "It's all right. I'm not... very good at controlling it anyway." (372)

These can all be read as signs of an eating disorder. Of course Patrick can't have anything that ordinary though, so when he does binge (with food and in his actions), in the few scenes where he talks about eating, and the only scene where he cooks, he resorts to killing and cannibalism, which could be looked at as an extreme, and rare, eating disorder.

He may not qualify by medical terms as anorexic and his physical health is not in danger (although mentally unstable there is no reason to think that he is too thin or that his weight loss has affected his mental state). Yet the patterns of an anorexic are there, as well as some signs of bulimia. The two almost never occur at the same time in one person, but if Patrick can be both a serial killer and mass murderer, then he can be anorexic and bulimic.

According to the book Assessment of Eating Disorders, the "classic" binge is "rapid consumption of a large amount of food in a discrete period of time. However, all binges do not involve eating large amounts of food. For example, in some cases eating small amounts of "forbidden foods" will be treated as a binge." (12) Human flesh would certainly qualify as a forbidden food, and for Patrick, who restricts himself to fruit and bran for breakfast, his post-murder snacks of McDonald's milkshakes and Dove bars would be forbidden as well.

Symptomatic of bulimia, this binging is sometimes followed by purging. In one scene Patrick steals a ham, tears into it with his bare hands, the same way he tears at a victim's stomach with his bare hands, then throws it up.

During his summer in the Hamptons, after trying to restrain his behaviour with Evelyn, Patrick eventually cracks, microwaving and eating a jellyfish. Later, "I would vomit - just to do it - into the terra-cotta jars that lined the patio in front." (281) It's an act of transgression, a way to defile Tim Price's house, but hiding evidence of a disorder where others might find it can be seen as a cry for help, and is another common sign of an eating disorder.

Another sign is Patrick's distorted self image: He looks into a mirror to check his hair but within seconds of walking away feels that it has changed somehow, that it can no longer look as good as moments earlier. This is the way he sees the rest of his life as well. He believes he's a horrible monster, capable of terrible crimes. But even when he tries to confess this no one hears him, no one believes him.

"Bateman's such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody... He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone... what was it you said he did to her?" his lawyer tells him, unaware that he is speaking to Bateman. "I killed him. I did it, Carnes. I chopped Owen's fucking head off. I tortured dozens of girls," Patrick again tells him, but it's no use. Rather than confirming his self-image, Patrick's lawyer dismisses the whole thing as a joke. (387) No one in the book sees Patrick the way he sees himself.

In Patrick Bateman, Ellis has created a disgusting, selfish, delusional madman. Patrick is a character who is easy to hate, and it is easy to condemn Ellis for putting him on paper. But once he started, there was no way around it. Truth is stranger, and often more horrifying, than fiction, and Ellis will not allow us to gloss over the realities of Patrick's life. Even if the violence is only imagined, it is real to him, and if he's stuck in this hell, then so are we. This is how we should feel when we watch the news or read the paper and hear about the madness and torture and death of people we don't know. This is the result of the society we have created, one that wants to look the other way. There is no looking the other way in American Psycho.

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Helyer, Ruth. (2000). "Parodied to Death: The Postmodern Gothic of American Psycho." Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 46, number 3. (pp. 725-746)

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