When the bloodlust of Patrick Bateman, protagonist of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1991 novel American Psycho, comes to Broadway in 2010, Sweeney Todd won’t have anything on him.
And neither would Christian Bale, who fleshed out the character of Bateman — cold blood, sweat, and tears — for the book’s major film adaptation in 2000. Of course, musicals have witnessed acts of murder before, but none as Upper West Side gory as what is portrayed in the book and, in due time and grime, what’ll appear onstage under the consultative shadow of Ellis himself. Packed with the coarse ground meat of sex, drugs and cold-blooded murder, Ellis’ Psycho translated into song (and possibly, dance) will be like stabbing the very nature of the musical and, with a butcher’s knife, turning its guts inside out.
Fall Street
Perhaps the most grandiose display of status anxiety, American Psycho is set in late-‘80s New York City, where consumerist madness and intentional ignorance shoulder-padded everyone’s brisk urban stride. As a Wall Street sovereign who is vice president of the investment banking company his father practically owns, 26-year-old Pat Bateman is both prince and beast of the times, never missing his appointments with excess and, a little later in the novel, execution.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” Bateman asks his doting secretary Jean, who schedules more restaurant reservations than business meetings for him. “I mean, for wanting a tanning bed?”
Initially, eye-rolling amusement falls upon how deliberate Bateman and his money-grabbing (they’re all part of the wailing Wall Street) group of aristo-cretins are with their decadence. In Gotham’s yuppie utopia, names don’t matter and you are only as good as your commodities, the ass-ets you tap (which “hardbody” you’ve screwed), and your lived luxury experience. Tanning bed ownership or tanning club membership? Can argyle socks be suitably worn with a suit? Which brand of bottled water best fulfills your nutritional — and aesthetic — needs? Conversations fueled by Cristal, in the potent haze of cigar smoke, usually fall upon each man’s material triumph and the tackiness of others.
Besides, when you’re nestled cozily in the ostrich leather armchair of a gentlemen’s club, riding the chemical melt of a couple Xanax you’ve popped from your Gucci pillbox, the cocaine residue on your Platinum Amex is more of a concern than social justice or genocide in Sri Lanka. Even the sodium levels in the soy sauce you’re dipping your sushi in carry more credence than a then-mythic AIDS virus that can’t possibly do anything to a man with high market value.
Violence and Vanity
It’s all a series of plush and meaningless escapes that Pat Bateman fills his days with: manicures every two days, granting meager attention to his obsessive-compulsive dinner hostess of a girlfriend as he screws around with her equally desperate friends, securing reservations in boiling-point restaurants highly rated in his Bible, the Zagat Survey. Chapters labeled like one would fill a planner with (“Facial,” “Christmas Party.” “Killing Dog”) read like an annual list of finer things in life Esquire would have come up with — each person encountered reduced to an assemblage of clothing and effects, from silk Armani ties to wood-handled Etro umbrellas. Through frigid first-person stream of consciousness, Bateman sees the world as a rundown of brands and routines: the nail of soullessness further driven down upon its coffin by the absurdity of topics tackled on The Patty Winters Show, a fictional daily TV tabloid he religiously follows.
Yet as much as he identifies with the dirt dug up by such a show (“Home abortion kits,” “Teenage girls who trade sex for crack”), his inner rotting only spurs his dedication to keeping up appearances, polishing the sheen of his external being like it was a porcelain bowl filled with maggots. It could be an upwardly mobile sort of panic that manifests in Bateman’s flossing his teeth hard enough to relish the taste of blood from his wounded gums — and as his stability begins to unravel, in the way he gets a literal hard-on from each murder he commits.
As Bateman binds one of his paid-for escorts to a chair (with six pairs of designer suspenders, mind you) in order to watch another prostitute get skinned alive with a steak knife, Ellis keeps your eyelids stretched open to all the graphic sex and violence that unfolds. More often than not, the standard killing procedure involves sex before mutilation; the torture that follows titillation shifting a reader’s arousal into nausea, especially in one gruesome instance where he uses the severed head of a hooker as a semen receptacle, documenting all this with his Minox LX ultra-miniature camera.
Sure, he can slit the throat of some little kid at the zoo and gut both homosexual and homeless persons on the street, but his creative slaughtering of whores, vapid rich girls, and the Wall Street colleague he’s envious of (he of the better business card, girlfriend, and overall lifestyle), reveals Ellis’ probable intention to render the times’ greed and relentless aspiration as abominable; the insatiable desires of the flesh resulting in the death of the soul. “You’re a dead man,” Bateman threatens a cabbie ordering him to hand over his cash, Rolex and Ray-Bans at gunpoint. “You’re a yuppie scumbag,” the taxi driver counters. “Which is worse?”
American Psycho, World Delusion
Even if, nearing the novel’s end, you realize that Bateman’s massacres may be figments of his own psychosis, his villainy stems from his being a victim of a society drowned in its excesses. The book itself became a sort of scandal in the ‘90s when the death threats Ellis received meant that his depiction of a world drained of its morals was lost in all its gore and whores. The forthcoming musical adaptation, however, comes at a time when Wall Street is a bloody mess and when people need to stop chasing the American dream, wake up, and act on a world future.
The music’s changed — Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis & The News, Genesis, and all the yuppie sound stalwarts that drift from Bateman’s Walkman (which’ll undoubtedly be spliced into the musical) — but the hyper-consumer capitalism and lifestyle mongering stay the same. With the sound of music in Patrick Bateman’s New York step, American Psycho: The Musical might just give all those wounded Wall Street brokers and all those lost souls simply set on monetary acquisition a little hum-worthy enlightenment to live by: that all of these things we live for don’t matter in the end, anyway. ‘Cause, hey, World’s End isn’t just a hot, new nightclub Bateman mentions towards the end of the novel. For us, it now seems like a fast-approaching reality.