crimeculture

Great Pretenders: The Performance and Commoditisation of Masculine Identity in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

Kerry Baker, Lancaster University

Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho are separated historically by nearly forty years, but both novels engage with the contemporary concerns about commodity culture and the postmodern fixation with dualistic identity. The protagonists of these novels, respectively Tomas Ripley and Patrick Bateman, complicate traditional understandings of masculinity, culture and morality through the role of the civilised killer. As Lee Horsley has asserted, the notion of the ‘killer as aesthete’ paradoxically combines the ‘highest degree of civilisation with the most extreme imaginable forms of violence [...] generating a series of challenges to our taken-for-granted assumptions about the nature of civilised behaviour’. (Horsley, 144) Both Highsmith and Ellis deconstruct the notion of civilisation in this manner, by confronting us with nominally cultured and civilised men, who are also depraved psychopaths. It is widely acknowledged that the reader becomes complicit in the desire for Ripley’s escape, and scholars who esteem American Psycho are overwhelmingly insistent on the imaginary nature of Bateman’s crimes. (Young, 106) While I would argue that Ellis is careful to leave the reality status of Bateman’s activity completely unresolved, the reader’s desire to see these criminals as innocent reveals our inability and unwillingness to reconcile the two halves of the civilised psychopath

In deconstructing the concept of civilisation, both of these authors use the motif of the corrupt urban city to show the moral decline of humanity. John Scaggs believes that the representation of urban environments in noir fiction is particularly influenced by T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land, as crime fiction writers such as Hammett and Chandler share Eliot’s vision of the city as spiritually and morally corrupt, and somewhat unreal, characterised by ‘imitation, artifice, insubstantiality, fakery, and facades’. (Scaggs, 71) Patricia Highsmith and Brett Easton Ellis conform to this convention, constructing modern New York as an artificial and impermanent stage set. For the expatriate Highsmith, the American city represents America as a whole, and in describing Tom’s final days in New York, she constructs the city as surreal and insubstantial:

The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the days went on. It was as if something had gone out of New York – the realness or the importance of it – and the city was putting on a show just for him [...] As if when his boat left the pier on Saturday, the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof like a lot of cardboard on a stage. (23-24)

Ripley’s egotistic tendency to blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy manifests itself here; just as he can make his lies and dreams ‘true’ for other people, so he can deconstruct the reality of New York, relegating the city to the realms of fiction. Highmith’s New York, corrupt and degenerate, stands in direct opposition to the cities of Europe, particularly Italy, (Horsley, 1) and she puts in place a hierarchy of cultures in order to reinforce this binary. Tom Ripley the aesthete mistrusts artifice, and his quest for authenticity leads him to pledge his loyalty to heritage, long-standing tradition and the value of high culture. Thus the American city, in all its fakery, is associated with low, popular culture, a mere ‘show’ on a ‘stage’, as opposed to the superior and authentic cultural heritage of Italy.

This cultural bias is further evidenced by Tom’s attitude to his domestic environment. Described as a ‘venetian palace’ Tom’s house is the ‘ideal of what a civilised bachelor’s home should look like’, and this ideal is characterised by the dual accolades of longevity and exclusivity:

[A] two-storey house of formal design more than two hundred years old, with a main entrance on the Grand Canal approachable only by gondola and iron doors that had to be opened by an eight-inch-long key, besides the regular doors which also took an enormous key. Tom used the less formal ‘back door’ usually.’ (183)

The status of the building is asserted through its age and heritage, but the description focuses mainly on its impenetrable entrance, demonstrating that Tom garners most pride from the fact that his house is unobtainable and exclusive. The description of the keys, ‘eight- inch-long’ and ‘enormous’ renders them undeniably phallic, and while Tom’s tendency to use the ‘back door’ may be construed as suggestive of his homosexuality, I would argue that these details actually belie Tom’s anxieties over his masculinity in general. For Tom the accusation of homosexuality is a reminder of his Aunt Dotty’s taunt that ‘He’s a sissy from the ground up. Just like his father!’. (34) As Alex Tuss has argued, Tom is one of Frankenstein’s monsters, ‘fatherless and abandoned, misshapen by the societies that reject them’. (Tuss, 5) Therefore, as a disinherited orphan of society and an illegitimate pretender to Dickie’s throne, Tom’s quest for authenticity and heritage is a truly personal one; he projects his social anxieties on to his surroundings and finds reassurance in the long-standing and established culture of Venice.

As a wealthy aesthete, Ripley can affirm his own masculinity and construct himself through his belongings:

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something? He existed.’ (214)

This materialistic attitude makes an interesting comparison to Patrick Bateman’s sinister fetishism and apathetic consumerism. As Elizabeth Young has noted, ‘[Patrick] is every yuppie, indifferent to art, originality or even pleasure except in so far as his possessions are the newest, brightest, best, most expensive and most fashionable’. (Young, 103) While Ripley and Bateman both have an overwhelmingly materialistic outlook, it seems that Bateman’s incessant need for the new, the man made and modern condemns him in the eyes of his author. Ripley is allowed to establish a surer sense of identity by aligning himself with the authentic culture of Italy, but Bateman, also looking to establish a more concrete and authentic identity, immerses himself in fashion rather than culture, and thus will only ever achieve a sense of self that is transient, vacant and artificial.

In American Psycho, as in The Talented Mr Ripley, the protagonist’s need to pin down an authentic masculinity is articulated through a preoccupation with his domestic environment. The description of Patrick Bateman’s apartment, like all of the descriptive prose of American Psycho, is a stylised and emotionless catalogue of brand names and status symbols: ‘A glass-top coffee table with oak legs by Turchin sits in front of the sofa, with Steuben glass animals placed strategically around expensive crystal ashtrays from Fortunoff, though I don’t smoke. Next to the Wurlitzer jukebox is a black ebony Baldwin concert grand piano.’ (24). The relentless listing emphasizes the material worth and commodity value of each item and positions everything precisely within the room. This precise delineation of Patrick’s environment seems so rehearsed and impersonal that his living room appears to be constructed according to the prescribed order of a style guide or designer showroom, suggesting that the Patrick’s domestic space and, by extension, his entire lifestyle, comes pre-packaged. As in all aspects of his life, Patrick Bateman emulates the advert, and the stage directions that portray his apartment inevitably extend to include the man himself, as he is written into his own commercial with the phrase ‘In bed I’m wearing Ralph Lauren silk pyjamas’ (24). As Brian Baker has noted, Bateman’s apartment ‘expresses his personality: consumerist, aspirational, yet devoid of the marks of comfort or homeliness [...] it is literally and figuratively empty.’ (Baker, 74) The true irony of Ellis’s description lies in his ability to endow this superficial and empty space with a sense of depth and concealment, as the floor is ‘cover[ed]’ and the wall is ‘hidden’ (24). Just like Patrick himself, his apartment is a stage set, an artificial facade that cannot be trusted, but actually conceals nothing. Subverting the idea of depth completely, Bateman believes that ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in’ (360), and claims that beneath the performative illusion ‘There is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, [...] I simply am not there’ (362).

The fact that Bateman and Ripley are concerned not just with possessions, but specifically with the trappings of their domestic environment, demonstrates the paradox whereby modern masculinity is articulated and asserted through avenues of expression traditionally associated with the feminine, a deconstruction of gender boundaries that is, according to Brian Baker, symptomatic of consumer culture. The commercialised masculine ideal of the 1990’s is for Baker a somewhat androgynous figure that represents a ‘return to the issues of the 1950’s, where the consumerist male was a feminized male. ’ (Baker 67) As narratives that were published, respectively, in 1955 and 1991, The Talented Mr Ripley and American Psycho are located within these consumer driven eras, and can be seen to be engaging with these paradoxical demands on masculinity. It is hardly surprising then, that Ripley and Bateman, as examples of the androgynous male consumer, are largely preoccupied with food and fashion as status symbols and modes of expression.

The motif of food as a status symbol is demonstrated in both these novels through the discourse of restaurant culture, which allows the characters to turn a traditionally domestic, feminine activity into an arena of masculine one-upmanship. Bateman and his friends play a perpetual game of catch-up with each other, aiming to secure reservations at the most fashionable and elitist restaurants, while Ripley’s knowledge of Italian coffee drinking habits allows him to assert himself over others, including Marge, Mr. Greenleaf, and most notably, the American detective. Towards the end of the novel, Tom finally comes face to face with the detective figure, in the character of McCarron, and realising McCarron’s disorientation, Tom quickly asserts himself; faced with Tom’s question ‘Would you like a cappuccino or an espresso?’, McCarron yields to Tom’s superior knowledge and allows Tom to give the order. Although the exchange is brief, it allows a significant but subtle shift in the power balance between the two, as the detective’s submission allows Tom to dominate the entire conversation and divert the detective’s suspicion away from himself.

This scene can be compared to a similar incident in American Psycho, when Bateman encounters the detective who is investigating the disappearance of Paul Owen, whom Bateman has just killed. Bizarrely, when Detective Kimball enters his office, Patrick pretends to be occupied on the phone, but rather than staging a business conversation, he embarks on a lengthy monologue on the ‘dos and don’ts’ of fashion (256). While the speech seems incongruous and could be seen as unprofessional, it works, as Bateman’s display of fashion knowledge prompts a sheepish apology from the detective, and establishes a power relation to Bateman’s advantage. Lee Horsley has argued that through Ripley’s feminized aesthetic sensibilities, Patricia Highsmith subverts ‘the masculine ethos of more traditional detective narratives. The intellectual endeavour and rational investigative structure of detection have little success [...] whereas dressing well, shopping discerningly and cooking with style are all satisfyingly rewarded.’ (Horsley, 5) The discourses of fashion and restaurant culture can therefore be seen as deconstructive techniques, allowing Ellis and Highsmith to destabilise the authority of the traditional detective figure, who is encountered directly by both protagonists, but who can be charmed into compliance simply by an impressive demonstration of consumerism.

Furthermore, in The Talented Mr Ripley, food is used metaphorically to demonstrate Tom’s control over the narrative; the way the detective follows Tom’s advice as to what coffee he should drink parallels the way in which Tom can lead him towards certain narrative conclusions. In the same way, hunger metaphors are applied to other characters: Mr Greenleaf is ‘pitifully hungry for the little crumbs Tom gave him about Dickie’ (197), while Marge is said to have ‘swallowed’ Tom’s explanation of Dickie’s death as suicide (232). This suggests that through his creative authority, Tom can reduce others to the role of consumer, dependent on him to lead them through the narrative. In contrast, Tom himself has an oddly ascetic attitude to food, as revealed by statements such as ‘Tom felt a little hungry, though he rather liked the idea of going to bed hungry tonight’ and ‘The milk was almost tasteless, pure and chastening, as Tom imagined a wafer tasted in church’ (111). Tom’s reluctance to eat and his association of hunger with purity imply his refusal to be a mindless consumer; he consumes only to empower himself over others, to assert his status and to indulge his highly discerning aesthetic tastes.

As the ultimate in consumer goods, food is fetishized in American Psycho to such an extent that, as Elizabeth Young has observed, it is ‘tortured into iconic artefacts. Food functions as art in the book, paintings themselves being no more than an investment.’ (Young, 106) In his study on Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Mike Featherstone determines that consumer satisfaction can be attained symbolically as well as actually, using the example of bottle of vintage port that may never be opened and drunk, but still maintains a high commodity value through being ‘gazed at, dreamt about, talked about, photographed and handled.’ (Featherstone, 16) These two statements are highly appropriate to the character of Patrick Bateman. For him food is just another status symbol, but for Ellis it is a satiric motif, as the fetishism of food in the novel is dependent on consuming food visually or symbolically, but not actually; despite all their appraisals and judgements of various restaurants and cuisines, none of the characters appear to enjoy eating. Bateman eats, but he does not taste, as revealed by his ability to consume microwaved jellyfish alongside his ‘grilled polenta and peppered salmon’ (170). Later in the novel, Bateman attempts to initiate his fiancé Evelyn into his less savoury eating habits, when he offers her urinal cake, covered in chocolate sauce and disguised in luxury Godiva packaging. Bateman is fascinated by her physical struggle to eat the cake, and encourages her to persevere despite her clear revulsion, but his sadistic pleasure is spoiled by Evelyn’s inability to finish: ‘she can’t eat any more and with two bites taken, pretending to be full, she pushes the tainted plate away, and at that moment I start feeling strange. Even though I marvelled at her eating that thing, it also makes me sad’ (324). Therefore Patrick’s sadness is not caused by any sense of remorse, but by his own inability to share in Evelyn’s disgust.

Clearly then, Tom Ripley and Patrick Bateman demonstrate a version of masculinity as created through narcissistic consumption. They are compulsive consumers to the extent that they can only construct a sense of identity through the commodities that they surround themselves with, and identity itself becomes a commodity, distanced and objectified in order to be consumed. Most notably, Highsmith and Ellis both utilise the motif of the mirror, typically a symbol of duplicity, to denote the fractured psychosis of their characters, but the mirror also demonstrates how these characters commoditise their own sense of self. In the mirror, Tom can visualise himself as Dickie, and begin to perform and construct a new identity (68-69). Dressing himself in Dickie’s clothes distances him from his own appearance, and the mirror becomes an imaginary space through which Tom can create and visually consume his fantasy. This scene is triggered by Tom’s jealousy of Marge, and her sexual relationship with Dickie, and in the mirror he acts out his revenge, ‘killing’ Marge’ and declaring the mirror ‘Dickie’s’ affinity with Tom. However Tom’s fantasy is interrupted by Dickie, not Marge, and at this point it becomes clear that Tom does not want to be with Dickie, but to be Dickie; it is Dickie himself who prevents Tom from becoming the fantasy other that he has created in the mirror, and Dickie who must be killed in order for Tom to be liberated.

However, this is not the first suggestion of Dickie as a commodity; significantly, he is talked about in the novel long before Tom or the reader meets him, and he is first encountered through Mrs Greenleaf’s photograph album (18-19). Therefore he is primarily an object not a subject, a visually consumable image. From the moment of meeting Dickie’s father, Tom begins to narrate Dickie’s life, inventing a past to which Mr Greenleaf heartily colludes ‘I remember! [...] I think he told me’. Thus, killing Dickie and appropriating his identity seems to be a natural progression of Tom’s ability to define his friend, as confirmed by Marge, who shortly after Dickie’s death, compares him to an artefact, ‘something in a museum [...] or something preserved in amber, a little unreal’ (156).

In both books the murder scenes involving rival men reveal the parasitic nature of aspirational masculinity. The murder of Paul Owen in American Psycho is particularly interesting because it provides a contrast to the murders that Bateman commits. Robert Coppin has noted that the Patrick’s brutality is ruled by his prejudice, as ‘[t]he consumer society he personifies has restrained him in his yuppie mould so effectively that anyone that falls outside his myopic vision of reality becomes a target, a threat to his consumer utopia.’ (Coppin, 10) However, the death of Paul Owen falls outside this rule; being one of Patrick’s work colleagues, Owen is one of the clones, so much within Patrick’s vision of reality that the two are frequently mistaken for each other. Owen dies because his possession of the renowned ‘Fisher account’ inspires Patrick’s jealousy, and in this way he can be compared to Dickie, as Patrick’s murder of him is an attempt to assimilate his rival’s superior masculinity. In destroying Paul Owen, Bateman can eradicate and take control over this threat to his masculinity, just as Ripley takes possession of Dickie through removing his subjectivity.

The murders of Paul Owen and Dickie are also stylistically comparable. Highsmith has been singled out from other crime writers for her ‘distinctive, measured, emotionless style, which maintains the same pace and detatched perspective no matter what she is describing.’ (Nicol, 4) According to Bran Nicol, this air of detachment adds to the realism of her portrayal, giving the reader ‘an appalling sense of how messy and complicated real murder must be’. (Nicol, 4) Ellis similarly applies Bateman’s characteristic affectless monotone to the murder scenes of American Psycho, but rather than evoking a sense of realism, this tone is combined with Ellis’s highly subjective and unreliable narrative, so that the violence actually seems surreal, scripted and performed. However, in testing the boundary between objective realism and subjectivity, Ellis and Highsmith provide accounts that are notably similar in their description and objectification of the victim. Tom has to hit Dickie ‘in the side of the neck, three times, chopping strokes with the edge of the oar, as if the oar were an axe and Dickie’s neck a tree’ (91), while Bateman wields his axe ‘as if it were a baseball bat and I’m about to swing at an oncoming ball, which happens to be Owen’s head’ (208). Furthermore, both authors provide an element of suspense through a narrative pause at the moment of killing: after slicing through Owen’s head with his axe, Bateman notices that ‘there’s no blood at first, no sound either’, before ‘[b]lood starts to slowly pour out of the sides of his mouth’ (208) and Ripley similarly witnesses the slow spread of blood from a wound on Dickie’s head (91). By delaying the appearance of blood, the narrative hesitation is truly defamiliarizing, as it allows the author to capture the moment of transition between life and death and prolong the image of the victim as an abject source of horror.

Writing about The Talented Mr Ripley, Edward Shannon has noted Ripley’s love of objects over people, and asserts that ‘Highsmith’s Ripley is no spurned lover [...] Her Ripley is a coldly calculating social climber who kills his friend once he is done with him.’ (Shannon, 21) I would agree that Ripley is parasitic, using Dickie for his own social elevation, but far from killing Dickie ‘once he is done with him’, Tom kills Dickie in order to begin using him as Dickie is only good once dead. In killing their rivals, Bateman and Dickie can take control of their physical possessions but in a more abstract sense they can also steal their narrative potential, as for these men the search for identity is also a search for coherent narrative. Both murderers effectively create an afterlife for their victim, as Ripley becomes Dickie, and Bateman revels in his power over the dead Owen, deciding to ‘send the bastard to England’ (209). This moment of narrative assertion is one of Bateman’s most potentially empowering acts, as like Ripley’s lies about Dickie, Bateman’s pretence that Owen has gone to London apparently comes true, with various characters claiming to have met Owen since his death. However, while Ripley asserts himself over the narrative, Bateman’s inability to tell reality from fiction renders him powerless, as both he and the reader start to doubt that Paul’s murder ever took place.

Bateman’s inability to discern life from fiction is due to the fact that his experience is mediated, alienating him from himself and from reality:

‘I am so used to imagining everything the way it occurs in movies, visualising things falling somehow into the shape of events on a screen, that I almost hear the swelling of an orchestra, can almost hallucinate the camera panning low around us, fireworks bursting in slow motion overhead’ (254-155).

This incongruous, romantic interlude is thus described through filmic production techniques, a technique that Ellis frequently uses to demonstrate the artificiality and alienation of his protagonists’ lives. Instead of taking authorial control in the manner of Ripley, Bateman’s consciousness is invaded by the stories he consumes, and as he says elsewhere, his life remains ‘a blank canvas, a cliché, a soap opera’ (268). Both protagonists therefore have an inability to distinguish between life and fiction, but while Bateman’s life is a postmodern descent into mediated and artificial existence, Ripley actually finds meaning in fiction, and his ability to construct and reconstruct life through art is affirmative rather than alienating. As Horsley has noted, Tom ‘acts metaphorically as an embodiment of cultural freedom and as a celebration of the transgressive imagination. Tom is clearly endowed with a writer’s inventive skills. His narrative art, nourished by his travels in Europe, produces manifold versions of his life, an open-ended process of self-creation’. (Horsley, 21) Both protagonists are ultimately trying to assert themselves, to have narrative consequence within their own lives and reclaim a kind of heroic masculinity, even one defined by evil misdeeds. Just as the self-as-image can be visually consumed, so the self-as-fiction can be controlled and authored. Thus Bateman’s constant need to film his exploits are an attempt to record and realise himself, and the penultimate chapter of The Talented Mr Ripley sees Tom ‘standing in the wind at the prow of a ship, crossing the wine-dark sea like Jason or Ulysses returning’ (239). Shannon believes that Ripley is the embodiment of American materialism and greed, ‘an American killer [...] typical of success-obsessed Americans.’ (Shannon, 21) I would argue that while Highsmith’s Ripley can be read in this way, as a critique of American social ideologies and consumerism, the novel itself upholds him as a deviant hero; we are not encouraged to deplore his murders, but to sympathise with his redeeming aestheticism.

Referencing Steven Cohan, Brian Baker notes that the mask of performative male identity is illusory, that ‘there is no ‘authentic’ or unitary identity presupposed by this metaphor; there is nothing underlying the mask. The masquerade is subjectivity, constantly performed.’ (Baker, 70) This statement is clearly true of Bateman, who claims to be all illusion and surface, but Highsmith seems to subvert this idea, as for Ripley the lack of authentic identity means he can perpetually redefine himself. Realising that identity is always performative rather than natural, he ultimately finds that by exaggerating his own personality, ‘the old Tom Ripley reticence with strangers, the inferiority in every duck of his head and wistful, sidelong glance’(165), he can construct himself as an innocent character, and as with everything in Tom’s world, to act innocent is to be innocent; art is ultimately redemptive. At the novel’s conclusion the reader is left in no doubt of Tom Ripley’s self-discovery, as despite his insistence upon role-play, costume and performance, he is finally most comfortable and liberated in the ‘rather safe and happy’ role of ‘Tom Ripley’. The Talented Mr Ripley concludes in a taxi, representative of Tom’s personal freedom, wealth and status, and when the taxi driver asks where Tom would like to go, he insists on ‘il Meglio Albergo [the best hotel]’. The measure of Tom’s success has always been his ability to travel and experience ‘the best’ and this ending leaves him open to construct his life as he chooses. In contrast to this, the concluding line of American Psycho declares ‘this is not an exit’, refusing to let Patrick Bateman escape from his own fiction.

Ripley’s childlike optimism stands in stark contrast to Bateman’s extreme alienation and despair. For example the statement ‘Each morning Tom was optimistic again [...] Every morning he watched the sun’ seems to express an affirmative innocence that is completely denied by Bateman’s nihilistic assertion that ‘Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted’ (360). Directly contradicting Tom’s epiphany is Patrick Bateman’s grim outlook, that only allows ‘one single bleak truth: no one is safe, nothing is redeemed’ (362). While he claims that meaning is only found in the superficial (360), in actuality even the surface is meaningless, as there is no redemption in art, only mediation and estrangement from reality. The only way that optimism is allowed to intrude into Patrick Batman’s narrative is through three surreal chapters that discuss the musical achievements of, respectively, Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis. These artists communicate various profound, sublime, and uplifting sentiments and Bateman’s analyses of their music is always highly ironic. For example, Houston apparently ‘instills one with the hope that it’s not too late for us to better ourselves, to act kinder’ (244), while Huey Lewis and the News speak out for ‘social awareness’ (342), hardly feelings that Bateman shares. Commenting upon these ‘rock-critic’ sections, Elizabeth Young has focused on Ellis’s recurring preoccupation with the theme of absence:

[e]ach of the chapters, but particularly the one on Huey Lewis, concerns the maturation of a creative artist, and in this there might be a clue as to what comprises the “absence” in American Psycho [...] what is now absent is maturity, growth, successful relationships, marriage and parenthood [...] Some part of [Bateman’s] personality is striving towards maturity.’ (Young, 112-113)

It would be hard to disagree with Young’s diagnosis, as Bateman clearly feels the lack of personal growth and maturity in his life, and just like the Genesis song that Ellis ironically invokes in one of these musical commentaries, the tragedy of American Psycho is that it ‘ends with its narrator never finding out anything at all’ (129). However, Young also touches upon the figure of ‘the creative artist’, and while she does not pursue this idea, it is creativity as well as maturity that is absent from the Bateman’s life. While Ripley is redeemed through his creative imagination, Bateman cannot create anything himself, having only the ability to consume and destroy.

The rise of popular culture is often associated with a shift from the values of production to those of consumption, and modern celebrities have been termed ‘idols of consumption’, famous purely for being visible to the public eye rather than because of any productive contributions to society. (Lowenthal, cited in Schmid, 20) In his book Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, David Schmid asserts that the figure of the modern serial killer adds another layer to this spectrum, becoming an ‘idol of destruction’, who ‘both outrages and thrills us by his seeming ability to stand outside the law, to make his own law, in a gesture whose ambivalent destructiveness and creativity mirror our ambivalent response to the killer, composed of both fear and attraction’ (Schmid, 24). It is ironic then, that despite the controversy that American Psycho engendered, its message is actually a lot more conservative than that of The Talented Mr Ripley, as ultimately Bateman cannot live up to the role of the serial killer as transgressive outlaw. While Ripley can ‘make his own law’, finding truth in his own aesthetic principles and artistic abilities, Bateman consumes but cannot produce and is therefore denied the redemptive affirmation that Ripley achieves.

Copyright © 2009 Kerry Baker

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